P&G’s buzz-building networks
thrive in age of social media
Launched before Facebook, Twitter, digital communities stay relevant in
part by leveraging the same media that could also be seen as competition
■ BY JACK NEFF jneff@adage.com
IN 2001, before Facebook, Twitter
and YouTube existed, Procter &
Gamble Co. was launching its own
online Tremor network of teens to
build buzz, and BzzAgent had its
own take on a digital community
of brand advocates. For 10 years,
both have sold brands access to
their buzz networks for a fee (and
P&G’s, of course, has worked for
its own).
In the meantime, the rise of
social media has spawned hundreds of buzz-building alternatives
ranging from networks of mom
bloggers to Twitter. Brands can
access their own Facebook fan
bases for free, and by last count,
dbm/Scan’s Facebook fan tracker
showed 140 brands with as many
followers as the 800,000 BzzAgent
counts as its advocates, and 170
brands with as many fans as P&G
has in its remaining buzz network—the 650,000-woman-
strong Vocalpoint.
So how are these networks,
which BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter
said have been deemed “
primordial” word-of-mouth by some, still
relevant?
In part, they’re leveraging some
of the very media that could also be
seen as competition—e.g.
Facebook—while stressing the
superior buzz-building capabilities
of their screened advocates vs.
brands’ often poorly understood
Facebook fans. BzzAgent is selling
services to help brands analyze and
mobilize their Facebook followings.
And both it and P&G are emphasizing that their networks operate
heavily offline—both in the past
year have become part of organizations that link them closely with
shopper marketing.
BzzAgent was acquired in May
for $60 million by Dunnhumby,
which has been a major force in
loyalty programs for such retailers
as Tesco, Macy’s and Kroger Co.,
the latter being a 50% owner of
the database firm’s USA unit. P&G
late last year shifted its Tremor
buzz-marketing unit from the corporate marketing group headed by
Global Brand-Building Officer
Marc Pritchard to the North
American Market Development
Organization, which also includes
the company’s sales force and
multi-brand marketing programs,
headed by Group President
Melanie Healey.
As Vocalpoint aligns more with
P&G’s shopper-marketing organization, BzzAgent’s acquisition by
Dunnhumby also aims to “connect
the dots between social and shopper,” Mr. Balter said. “Shopper is
the fastest-growing channel, even
ahead of social. You put those two
FOLLOWTHELEADERS:
Dave Balter, above, is CEO of BzzAgent,
and Chris Laird is CEO at Tremor. Both
buzz-building companies have remained
relevant despite the rise of social media.
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At P&G, Tremor retains its
name, which came from the origi-
nal teen program, though that was
disbanded in 2007 to focus on
Tremor’s bigger network of
Vocalpoint moms, launched in
2006. While the teen program
worked, teens were only key con-
sumers for five or six P&G brands,
said Steve Knox, former CEO of
the Tremor unit and now a consult-
ant working with Boston
Consulting Group. Teens also age
out of the community, requiring
constant recruitment.
Vocalpoint gets half its business
from outside P&G, including
Kellogg Co.’s Kashi and Frosted
Mini-Wheats, Sears’ Craftsman
C3 brand and the MasterCard-backed “Bill My Parents” prepaid
teen debit card among others.
Under new CEO Chris Laird, a
longtime P&G marketer from
Canada, Tremor looks to expand
Vocalpoint further, having doubled
the number of women participating during the past six months. It’s
also branching from its original
focus on “brand advocacy” to
research and co-creation of new
products via a partnership with
Ipsos to create Vocalpoint Voice.
That’s a community of 5,000 “
creative moms” to help brands come
up with and evaluate new ideas and
the marketing behind them.
It’s also focusing more on driving purchases into e-commerce,
another priority for P&G, Mr. Laird
said. And Vocalpoint has been using
the network to host in-home parties
along the lines of House Party.
In perhaps a classic description
of a frenemy, Mr. Laird at first
referred to Facebook as a competitor, then as a collaborator.
“We sat with Facebook last
week talking about how we should
position ourselves vs. what brands
can do with their own unique communities on Facebook,” Mr. Laird
said in a Sept. 12 interview.
One difference is that Facebook
fan communities are generally representative of the entire population
rather than screened as “
connectors,” the 10% of most connected,
socially active people, he said. “We
also have a broader activity system
for word-of-mouth than just
Facebook,” he said, including sampling, ratings and reviews by
Vocalpoint members distributed
throughout the web via
Bazaarvoice.
WHY THE U.S. MARKETPLACE IS
PRIME FOR CHINESE PRODUCTS
Monogram Group’s Scott Markman breaks
down the results of his company’s latest study
BY AD AGE STAFF
adageeditor@adage.com
AMERICANS ARE increasingly
open to buying Chinese products,
according to a survey by The
Monogram Group, so President
Scott Markman is advising
Chinese marketers to make the
jump into the U.S. market now.
Based in Chicago, Mr.
Markman has been helping
Chinese brands grow internationally since 2007. He hired
China experts and started visiting
the country, where he tried to
explain the importance of
American marketing concepts to
technocratic Chinese executives.
Mr. Markman spoke with Ad
Age about his company’s latest
survey of Americans’ perceptions
of Chinese brands.
Your survey this year showed
that 24% of Americans
believe goods made in China
are high quality, up from 16%
in 2008. And there was a drop
in the percentage of
Americans who believe
Chinese goods are low quality,
down to 39% from 55%.
What’s behind the shift?
In the last two or three years
there’s not been any sort of poisoning stories in the national
press about products coming from
China, so it’s a little bit of that.
People tend to have short memo-ries…. But we all make perceptions on a handful of data points
and fill in the dots. The problem
with China is a lot of the dots out
there are about shoddy quality.
China’s price times quality
equals value ratio is on the ascent.
They’re going in the right direc-
tion. Gradually China—in the
collective sense—needs to contin-
ue going up that curve; it needs
some bellwether brands to lift the
whole perception.
One finding from the study is
that more Americans are
open to purchasing Chinese
products in categories such as
computers and cars. But
interestingly, the trend also
includes categories such as
toys, herbal products and
soaps and shampoos. Were
you surprised?
Those were the biggest shockers
to us. Categories we queried
were purposefully all over the
place. Some of the news stories
about dangerous products being
recalled were about toys. And
products like soaps and sham-
poos are personal things.
With soaps and shampoos, we
took that as a powerful signal
that American consumers are
open to considering excellent
Chinese products and brands
that do their work correctly and
follow global branding standards.
The real missing piece for
Chinese companies is the mar-
keting piece, it’s what they don’t
value and don’t understand.
There’s often the perception that
“I make a very good product, get
it on the shelf and it’s going to
sell.”
What needs to be done to
change this perception?
Chinese don’t tell their stories in
an American way. I can guarantee you the first image on the
homepage of 90% of Chinese
companies’ websites is a bird’s-eye view of their factory,
because it’s important to them
to say to the world, “We’re
legitimate, we’ve very big,” and
the best way to show that is the
roof of their gazillion-square-foot factory.
