Brand marketing plugs the public service gap
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A growing number of consumer businesses are seeking to embody what they stand for through the provision of public service-style brand extensions rather than their marketing campaigns.
- For a case study on O2’s Learn service, click here
- For a case study on Wickes’ Trade Builder service, click here
- Find out about The Co-operative Group’s advice and training service in our viewpoint, here
- Read a Q&A with Ginsters head of personnel, here
- For Unilever, Diageo and Mars’ Responsibility Deal pledges, click here
Imagine a world where a pie maker offers people health checks, a telecoms company provides teaching materials and a builders’ merchant offers business advice. For Ginsters, O2 and Wickes, delivering these services is already just part of the day job.
With an economic environment necessitating large and, in some cases, debilitating central and local government cuts, prime minister David Cameron has asked companies to get involved in a Big Society where they help deliver public services. They are filling a hole left by last year’s spending review, which cut £83bn from public spending over the course of four years.
Brands now have a route into the areas traditionally served by the government and are making them lucrative. Gav Thompson, head of brand innovation at O2, suggests this could be “the future of brand marketing” for many businesses in the UK.
Some sectors, such as health, already have a large amount of private sector involvement. O2 Health, for example, provides technology that allows doctors to have long distance consultations with patients via a screen. Meanwhile, Virgin has bought a stake in Assura Medical, which provides NHS services.
But instead of launching new business divisions, a growing number of brands are seeing that they have something to offer communities and the wider population for their own benefit as well as plugging a public service gap.
Under the Department of Health’s Responsibility Deal, brands such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo and JD Wetherspoon have made individual and collective pledges to improve public health. Others, however, have not waited for political persuasion and have acted themselves.
The Co-operative Group has helped set up community projects in regions designated by the government as Big Society “vanguard areas”, deprived areas that Cameron says are “the training grounds of change”.
And DIY retailer Wickes has responded to a long-term increase in the number of construction companies entering administration with a website called Trade Builder, which provides advice to tradespeople and SMEs in the industry.
Free information
The information on the site - on topics such as tax assessments and hiring an apprentice - is provided free in conjunction with Business Link, the government’s online business resource, but the idea came from Wickes’ awareness of conditions in its own market (see Case Study, below).
Wickes brand director Tony Holdway points out: “In any collaboration, both sides need to derive some benefit.” Although it might be difficult for the brand to quantify an immediate return on the investment, the site communicates direct with Wickes’ target audience and there is a clear incentive for the retailer to help its trade customers stay in business.
“It is in our interests to make sure the construction industry is well assisted and as strong as it can be. It has also helped us learn more about our customers, which is vital,” according to Holdway.
But he is quick to deny that Wickes’ motivations for setting up the Trade Builder site are entirely self-interested. “There are ultimately commercial benefits to this, but that is not the primary reason.”
At the Co-operative Group, head of community and co-operative investment Michael Fairclough admits the brand is providing training services to community schemes partly to further its own ends, as well as for the positive publicity that comes out of it. “We do it for selfish reasons,” he says.
The Co-op’s “selfishness” is driven more by ideology than by profit, however. Through its Co-operative Enterprise Hub, the brand has helped set up about 700 co-operative businesses in the UK, providing free consultation services. Its ultimate aim is to promote the role of co-operatives in rebalancing the British economy. Among the projects supported are a hydroelectric energy scheme in Yorkshire and the Butchers Arms pub in Cumbria’s Eden Valley, one of the Big Society vanguard areas (see Viewpoint, below).
Fairclough says: “Unlike the government’s Business Link, the Co-operative Enterprise Hub involves real people speaking to real people, giving them quality time and helping them understand the difference between a co-operative business and a normal plc.”
The Co-op Enterprise Hub allows prospective co-operative businesses to gain advice from a non-governmental source, recognising that, while collaborations between public and private bodies can lead to productive results, they can also create roadblocks.
For example, in 2009 a panel of local companies and public organisations in Cumbria identified renewable energy opportunities in the region, and although new SMEs have been set up in the sector as a result, panel member Simon Sjenitzer says many opportunities have also been missed. The structure of local government makes the processes of awarding funding and planning permission ponderously slow, complains Sjenitzer, now director of renewables firm Westlakes Energy.
He adds that Cumbria County Council has since repeated virtually the same research, spending £60,000 on a study this year, only to reach similar results as the renewables panel’s report. Furthermore, as Sjenitzer discovered when discussing ways that the Co-operative Bank could help fund schemes, there is not a simple way for local government to facilitate this.
“The Co-operative Bank has a huge concern in renewables. Senior business development manager Chris Matthews told me the bank wants to do stuff in Cumbria. He said: ’Who do we speak to? Where do we go? How do we get to these communities and these opportunities?’ There is no one body.”
Sjenitzer suggests that, even with politicians encouraging businesses to get involved in services for local communities, there remains some scepticism and resistance from various quarters about the commercial motivations for doing so.
JD Wetherspoon head of legal affairs Nigel Connor says “the jury is still out” for many health organisations on whether the government’s Responsibility Deal is a suitable substitute for legislation and whether pledges made by private companies will deliver the health outcomes that are promised.
Such cynicism is one reason why JD Wetherspoon has not taken further steps to provide education resources on responsible drinking beyond the collective commitments of the alcohol industry, he adds.
“We and other drinks retailers have always had a slight guardedness about what we can do in the education field, especially with regard to children and their drinking habits, because we were not sure what response would come from schools or colleges to alcohol brands preaching this particular message,” says Connor.
Though many public bodies may have some reticence towards allowing commercial influences to infiltrate their activities, they could also look to the example of charities that have been partnering with businesses for many years. Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) head of public affairs John Ludlow says the organisation was “in some ways the original Big Society organisation”, looking for ways of linking with businesses to do its core work long before the current government came to power.
Most recently, this has included an ad campaign run with Google about the importance of keeping personal data safe online. According to Ludlow, the campaign was Google’s idea and the issue, while significant, was not one being raised regularly by the public.
“We are always keen to do joint work with organisations from the commercial sector. But it has to be meaningful and it has to chime with our clients’ concerns. You have to be careful and make sure that the people you are dealing with are legitimate and have the right motives,” says Ludlow.
For Google, the campaign gains an air of legitimacy because of the CAB’s endorsement. Clearly this is a business benefit to the company, given that it was Google that wanted to run the campaign in the first place.
However, the CAB also gains access to advertising creative and media buying power that it would not otherwise have the budget to procure, so the relationship is symbiotic.
The fact that relatively few public-private partnerships have so far achieved the same level of mutual gain is probably due in part to unfamiliarity. From the public sector’s point of view, there could be a lingering distrust of brands’ intentions when getting into the delivery of services.
Businesses, meanwhile, are not necessarily used to engaging with the public sector for any reason other than a sense of corporate social responsibility. As Connor at JD Wetherspoon comments: “Big Society has not had much of an impact on us or anyone really, in any sphere.”
Yet a selection of brands, such as Wickes, the Co-op and Google, are showing that when the circumstances are right, enlightened self-interest can create a marketing proposition that suits both sides - public and private.
Responsibility Deal pledges
Unilever
FMCG manufacturer Unilever has been sharing information with companies near its UK and Ireland headquarters in Leatherhead, Surrey, and alerting them to relevant public resources, such asNational Diabetes Day, reduced-price gym memberships, smoking cessation and healthy eating. As relative newcomers to the area, the initiative has been aimed at forming bonds with the community.
Vice-president of human resources Alan Walters says: “The biggest challenges facing most SMEs when trying to embark on healthy workplace initiatives - or any initiative outside their core business focus - are a lack of time and dedicated resource.
“Unilever has been able to support local companies by providing access to resources where useful, publicly available information can be found and shared.”
Diageo
Since February, alcoholic drinks company Diageo has funded a training programme for midwives, run by the National Organisation for Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, to help educate mothers-to-be about the risks of alcohol to their unborn child.
Diageo has provided funding for films, face-to-face training sessions, an online training package, surveys and distance learning packages. It wants these to reach at least 1 million pregnant women over three years, via 10,000 midwives.
A Diageo spokesperson says: “There is a strong business case for responsible drinking. It is not in our interests if the bad behaviour of a few alienates the majority of our brands’ loyal consumers. The scheme also helps contribute to the sustainability of our business by strengthening our relationship with consumers, governments and other stakeholders.”
Mars
Like Unilever, Mars is running health and wellbeing partnerships with 11 SMEs near its Slough headquarters, which gives those using the pilot scheme access to health checks and on-site activities branded under the government’s Change4Life public health campaign. Mars also supplies information on diet, smoking, weight loss and the financial benefits of a healthy workforce.
Mars director of corporate affairs Lee Andrews comments: “We are working with the Department of Health and local businesses to assess the impact of the pilot scheme.”
Case study: O2 Learn
Before moving into the world of marketing, O2 head of brand innovation Gav Thompson was a teacher. His experience in the education sector was formative, particularly so for the telecoms company’s latest diversification - O2 Learn.
“All teachers have at least one amazing lesson inside of them,” says Thompson. “The best teachers have hundreds or thousands.”
Thompson’s brainwave was to bring the best of these lessons to the masses online, most importantly for those students who lack access to quality teaching by more conventional means.
Teachers are encouraged to upload short videos of themselves teaching a particular topic. The lessons can be searched for by subject, education level or keyword and then students rate them. The idea is that the best lessons come to the top and the not-so-good ones sink to the bottom. Thompson’s ambition is eventually to have the whole of the national curriculum on the site.
Though the principal audience is intended to be secondary school students, O2 Learn’s marketing is also targeting teachers, as the site provides a repository of ideas for lesson plans. Much of the communications work done by O2 has been through the National Union of Teachers and the brand has also distributed £300,000 in fortnightly prizes to the teachers and schools submitting the best lessons, as an incentive to upload content.
Since launching in November 2010, more than 1,000 lessons have been submitted to the O2 Learn site, which Thompson says has had about 1 million views from 250,000 unique users. He adds that market research found that the project engendered a more positive impression of the company for 96% of people.
Spurred by the feedback, he believes that projects of this kind could represent “the future of brand marketing”, as companies seek to embody what they stand for through their actions rather than by asking consumers to trust their advertising messages.
Although O2 Learn is free, it gives the company an early foothold in the education sector. Thompson confirms that the brand will one day move into the growing market for supplying elearning products, although he points out that O2 Learn is not currently intended as a vehicle for this and would not be used as one unless there was demand from teachers to access other products or services through the portal.
Similarly, the portal is not designed as a “Trojan horse to get into the classroom”, Thompson adds. “We are not going to use the O2 Learn database of teachers to ask if they want to buy a tablet computer or elearning pen. That would be very cynical and is not why we are doing it.”
Case study: Wickes Trade Builder
In the first quarter of 2011, there was a 23% increase in the number of construction companies entering administration compared with the previous three months. For Wickes, this was a problem, as a large portion of the DIY retailer’s business comes from tradespeople and small businesses.
According to brand director Tony Holdway, tradespeople need management advice rather than any help with technical skills. “We have a responsibility to help them in their business beyond the products and services we sell.
“The problems tradespeople face are not about how to do a job or what tools to use, they are about how to run their business, and where to get advice on administration and keeping up cashflow.”
Wickes’ own research discovered that nearly 40% of British tradespeople do not seek any form of business advice, Holdway says, while more than a third say it is difficult to find the information they need. As a result, Wickes set about creating a resource that it hopes will change this, designing an online service called Trade Builder.
Its aim was to ensure all the advice would be accessible and relevant to trade professionals. But rather than compile its own information, Wickes approached Business Link, the government-funded business advice portal, to work with it in distributing its resources.
“The information exists, it just has not been pulled together all in one place before, and put in easy-to-use language,” says Holdway.
For Wickes, Trade Builder was a business initiative before it was a public service, conceived on the basis of customer feedback and market research. And while Holdway says the company could not have done what it did without Business Link’s expertise, he adds that any collaboration is likely to be more successful when there are clear mutual incentives.
As well as helping to keep Wickes’ customers in business, the site represents an added communications channel to an important target market.
About 10,000 people have visited the site since its launch in September, which Holdway says is ahead of expectations, but Wickes is continuing to develop the site. With further market research carried out and more focus groups planned, the brand is asking the site’s audience what it should add in the new year.
Holdway says: “It started as a small idea, but we hope it will grow on the back of users’ feedback. We want to make it bigger, but only with what tradespeople want.”
Viewpoint
Michael Fairclough, head of community and co-operative investment, The Co-operative Group
We think co-operatives offer a fundamental say in how the economy is run and are keen to help businesses set up as co-operatives, which are run by their members. The main difference between a co-operative business model and any other is that it brings a sense of democracy and ownership.
Until three years ago, most of the support we gave to other co-operative businesses was in grants. But over the past three years we have established an advice and training service delivered across the UK by seven consortia of development professionals.
Someone who is thinking of setting up a business can fill in a simple online application through the Co-operative Enterprise Hub and the least they will get is half a day’s advice from a development professional as to whether a co-operative model will work.
The development professional can then offer up to four days’ advice and training in marketing, business planning and legal areas. We have offered support to about 700 co-ops so far and are now finding that demand is outstripping capacity. We have not asked for any payment or shares from the businesses asking for advice, but what we might do in future is focus on the businesses that have the strongest chance of becoming co-ops.
If we pay for advice and training and get a new co-op off the ground, we might ask them to commit to being part of a support network. Before we give advice and training, we will suggest they go and talk to a successful co-op, such as the Butchers Arms pub in Lyvennet, Cumbria, and if they are still interested come back to us. That means we will put better investment into advice and training.
Q&A
Steve Jones, head of personnel, Ginsters
Marketing Week (MW): How is Ginsters getting involved with public services?
Steve Jones (SJ): Through the Department of Health’s Responsibility Deal and in partnership with Cornwall Council, we offer our suppliers health assessments for their staff. It is a health MOT, checking blood pressure, lung function, cholesterol and so on.
For example, an engineering supplier across the road from us employs about 10 people. It does not have the facilities to provide bicycles or a gym, so we have opened up our cycle loan scheme to it and have also allowed it use of our gym, as we do for some local clubs.
MW: How is Ginsters fulfilling its Responsibility Deal pledges relating to workplace wellbeing?
SJ: We run a course on positive psychology, which we offer to any staff member who wants to take it up. The local school and college have also sent a number of students to the sessions. We get good interaction with people from a variety of backgrounds. We get shopfloor guys mingling with lecturers at the local college or managers from the dairy.
We also send out regular health bulletins. For National Stress Awareness Day, we would send out information about mental health. At the moment, there is a lot going on in association with prostate cancer for ’Movember’, where men are sponsored to grow a moustache. We are continually drip-feeding health messages to our staff, but also to our corporate partners.
MW: Are these services offered free, or as a business enterprise for Ginsters?
SJ: It is mostly pro bono. We have charged for a couple of events - we cannot open up everything because of the demand, the volume and the insurance.
I would not see it as a business and I do not see us expanding it. There has been a lot of talk about setting up what the local council calls ’wellbeing hubs’ in Cornwall, so we might see such a scheme in Callington, where we are, that other local companies would use. It could have occupational health facilities funded by the local council in combination with us.
MW: How does it benefit the brand to deliver these local schemes?
SJ: We do not really do it as a consumer brand, we do it more as a local community employee brand. We find it helps in the engagement of our staff with our mission and gives us good local press. It has PR spin-offs, no doubt, but it is not done with that intent. From a marketing perspective, it is nice to have but I would not call it part of our brand marketing strategy.
