Tim's re-names its coffee cup sizes: PR or not PR?

I love Tim Hortons coffee, and since there's a Tim's here at The Roblin Centre, I buy at least 5 cups a week.

Until last week, the cups I bought were usually "large;" now, the very same cup is "medium." To make room for a new 24 oz size (bigger than what was formerly called "extra large"), the company has re-named all its existing coffee cup sizes and added a new "extra small."

Source: www.timhortons.com

A news release on the Tim Hortons website says the company tested the names of its new cup sizes, "and the response has been overwhelmingly positive." It added that "[b]y shifting the sizes, we're able to provide coffee lovers with a full range of five size options: from extra small, all the way up to the new extra large."


Testing, testing


In Creative Communications first-year PR, we look at how organizations use research to help them make business decisions -- and we examine how carefully questions need to be worded to yield an accurate view of public opinion. 


We also look at examples of the different ways one set of research results can be interpreted, depending on how questions are worded.


In this case, I'd love to know whether the "overwhelmingly positive" response in the research was to the idea of actually re-naming all the familiar cup sizes with the names of other equally familiar cup sizes (except one)... or whether it was to the names themselves. 


I would expect overwhelming support for names like extra-small, small, medium, large, extra-large from customers who were already used to ordering small, medium, large and extra large. I might expect the response to be a bit less enthusiastic if the question was about using all those same names to denote new sizes... but I could be wrong. That's why we do research!


Is this a PR issue?


No, it isn't -- it's a marketing issue.


But it could become a PR issue if it caused a customer backlash (of which I haven't seen any evidence, in this case). If you don't think a change in marketing can cause customer backlash, though, go back and check out what happened when The Gap tried to update its logo in 2010. 


Could this be a publicity stunt?


A friend of mine suggested it might be, in the interests of getting everyone blogging and tweeting about the new sizes. (If that's the case, you're welcome, Tim's!)


I'd question whether Tim Hortons would take that risk unnecessarily, since there was the possibility customers would find the whole thing confusing and annoying until they got the hang of it. 


I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I wouldn't have recommended potentially confusing and annoying customers intentionally, in the hopes that their reactions would generate "buzz." That might generate publicity, but I don't think it would help the company's PR. 


The bottom line


Even if people find the re-naming annoying, I can't see it being a reason for anyone to stop buying coffee at Tim Hortons if that's the coffee they like. The company has a great reputation and brand -- this is at most a blip.


And even if Tim's has turned my old large into a medium, it still beats calling it a "venti."

When a newsman sounds like a PR guy

I caught a great interview marketing 2.0 expert Brian Solis did with Dan Farber, Editor-in-Chief of CBSNews.com, about how news organizations have to evolve their approach to their business given the rise of social media.

Here it is, from Solis' (R)evolution series which, in Solis' own words, "connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, marketing, and media."



I shared this link with my colleague, journalism instructor Duncan McMonagle, saying "this newsman sounds a lot to me like a PR guy."

Duncan's reaction: "Uh oh!"

Smart strategy is smart strategy, no matter who's doing it.

"Dark side" jokes aside, Farber makes a lot of statements about what news organizations should be doing in the face of growing competition from Web-based media, which my PR students here at Red River College will tell you are basic tenets of good public relations.

For example, he says CBS News works to ensure its content can be found "where people are congregating." This requires research to determine where your audience is, what its preferences are, and how best to reach it.

PR people have been doing this for decades: understanding the principles of persuasion, we know we need to position our messages such that they offer something our audiences will value, and in ways that make it easy for our audiences to access them.

Sounding even more like a PR guy, Farber also says his business is "all about building relationships now, and trying to engage people."

There was a time when "newsmen" created the news, put it out there, and their audiences simply consumed it. They didn't have much choice: as Farber himself points out, there weren't nearly as many sources for news back then.

But as we all know, the same isn't true today: news comes at us from all angles. It isn't all credible, and it isn't all accurate, but it's there, and it's competing for our attention. The challenge for professional news organizations like CBSNews.com is to break through the noise and protect their audiences from their hundreds of online competitors.

Selling the news isn't much different from selling anything else.

Whether you're selling dog food, a political candidate, a non-profit as a good cause, or your news organization, the best way to build support and loyalty is to build relationships.

Our audiences in 2010 live in a world of unending messages -- coming at them from all sides, at all hours, in every format.

How to break through it all?

First of all, put your messages where your audiences are (for example, Farber knows his audiences use Facebook and Twitter, so his organization maintains profiles on both, with more than a million and a half followers). Don't make them hunt around to find you - they won't. They don't have time. And there are millions of other messages out there, ready to distract them if they try.

Secondly, engage with them. "Engage" is quickly becoming one of those throwaway words that lose their meaning in marketing blather - but its fundamental message is key. (It's also the title of Solis' most recent book.) Loyalty is built on give-and-take, two-way relationships. Give your customers the opportunity to get involved in what you're doing rather than simply watching you do it, and they're far more likely to stick with you.

Mainstream media outlets have a big job ahead of them, as our attention spans grow ever shorter and the media landscape fractures further.

In the long run, I'm betting on journalists like CBSNews.com's Dan Farber.

Axe hoax: a strike against mainstream media, a PR victory for Unilever

Earlier this week, reports were circulating about an Indian man who was suing Unilever, the maker of Axe body spray (reportedly sold under the name "Lynx" in some markets), because despite his faithful use of the product over seven years, he hadn't been able to secure a date.

In an article in Scotland's Daily Record, the complainant, Vaibhav Bedi, was reported to have based his case on the fact that "The company cheated me because in its advertisements, it says women will be attracted to you if you use Axe. I used it for seven years but no girl came to me."

The story goes on to say that Unilever had refused to comment on the case.

As it turns out, the lawsuit story is a hoax. Reported to have been initiated by the Faking News website, the story spread across the Internet and, somewhere along the way, began to be reported as true. I heard it reported on Winnipeg radio Monday morning as a true story, and was ready to write a blog post about how being the target of a lawsuit can actually be good PR -- but when I began to research it, quickly found it to be false.

Quickly.

There's some work to be done on the fact-checking at some "news" outlets in the wake of this story.

In the meantime, Unilever and its Axe/Lynx brand is the big PR winner; I'd love to see the numbers on unpaid media and blog mentions over the life of this story.

And on a different note...

Another little gem I found while checking into this story was the YouTube video below, outing Unilever's arguably hypocritical position on the objectification of the female body in advertising. I hadn't realized that Unilever was behind both Axe, whose ads are rife with images of scantily-clad women throwing themselves at men, and Dove, which has run a very successful (both from the marketing and PR perspectives) campaign, called the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, encouraging women's self-esteem. The video replaces the original media-images-which-cause-low-self-esteem-in-women-and-girls from the Dove campaign with images from Unilever's own Axe commercials.

“Twitter and Facebook are both fads”

Social media: the next Rubik's Cube?

Martin Cash has a story in this morning’s Winnipeg Free Press about how businesses like Inn at the Forks are using social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) to market their products online. In the article, “Social networking = successful marketing,” Cash also quotes Kyle Romaniuk, Creative Director and Principal at Winnipeg’s Cocoon Branding and Neil Patel from Webidiotz, a Winnipeg web design and marketing firm, on the value – and necessity – of a social media component in any marketing campaign today.

I thought Cash did a great job of explaining the phenomenon for small business owners who still might not see social media's potential to help connect sellers with buyers. What I found just as interesting, though, was a comment a reader had posted at the bottom of the article on the Free Press website:

Twitter and Facebook are both fads and by the time businesses get on board there will be replacements. Ask anyone how their MySpace advertising is going. MySpace started in Aug 03, became the most popular social networking website in 06, in 08 Facebook became the most popular (and MySpace had to lay off 30% of their workforce).

This commenter echoes opinions I’ve often heard from people who don’t use social media sites. While I suspect this opinion comes from not understanding how these technologies work, it continues to surprise me – and more so as these tools become ubiquitous.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook (and yes, MySpace) allow organizations to connect with people “out there” who share interests. Their value for marketers is that they can identify potential customers or supporters in the noisy marketplace based on what they say and do online, and target messages containing information likely to be of interest to those potential "leads".

As we discussed in first-year PR this past year, if you wanted to market a new brand of knitting needles before social media, you pitched your story to “hobby” media, and there were relatively few options for targeted advertising. I mean, you could buy an ad in a knitting magazine – but what percentage of knitters buys knitting magazines? And of those who do, how many buy every issue, and are likely to see the ad you paid good money for?

Of course, there were other things you could do to market your new knitting needles, from running contests for knitters to sponsoring knitting events to putting up posters in community centres where knitting clubs meet. But these were all relatively time-intensive, expensive endeavours, especially if your tarket market was geographically dispersed.

Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter allow you to find your target markets where they like to hang out online, and just as importantly from a marketing perspective, where they like to share information with each other – for example, in Facebook groups and using Twitter hashtags (e.g. #knitting). As Cash’s article points out, it’s a relatively inexpensive endeavour, it doesn’t necessarily require a major time investment – and it delivers audiences who might never have heard your messages otherwise. Getting “on board” takes very little time or investment; all it requires is an Internet connection (or even proximity to a library offering public Internet access!) and some strategic thought.

Are Twitter and Facebook likely to be replaced by some shiny new thing down the line? Of course. Some might argue that the same thing has already happened to a degree to radio and many print newspapers. But as long as they have audiences, they continue to play a valuable role in marketing initiatives.

Marketing is about showing real, live people how your product will help them live better lives, in one way or another; social media give us the ability to zero in on the right people with the right messages.

While the platform may change as technology improves, the fundamental shift toward increasingly personalized marketing is no fad. Smart businesses will get on board before their competitors have made Facebook “friends” or Twitter “followers” of all their customers, leaving them wondering where everyone went.