The Power of Quid Pro Quo

Confucius was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived about two and a half thousand years ago. His teachings on subjects like respect, honesty, education and the importance of strong family bonds are as relevant today as they were in his day.

On one occasion, he was challenged as to whether there was ‘One word, which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ Confucius responded, ‘Reciprocity’.

His answer captures a fundamental human truth, which is not restricted to eastern philosophy. In the New Testament, Matthew reports Jesus giving similar advice during the Sermon on the Mount – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Whatever you believe, thousands of years of wisdom boils down to the fact that a bit of ‘give and take’ makes the world go round.

Reciprocity and Persuasion

At Dialogue, we ‘persuade people to buy’, and reciprocity is a key principle of persuasion. After all, people are more likely to do something if there is something in it for them too. You have to meet them halfway.

Quite how reciprocity manifests itself, very much depends on the relationship between the two parties.

You’ll happily do a favour for a friend, just for the intangible sense of being a good mate and knowledge that they’ll be there for you, should you ever need them. Whereas when the relationship is less personal, you’ll expect something back much sooner for your efforts. Just today I was asked to give a restaurant some feedback in exchange for a free coffee.

Sometimes, we don’t have time to agree what we are going to do in exchange for a product or service.  That’s where money comes in handy. Everything has a price and shoppers can choose to pay it or not.

With cold hard cash having a consistent value (between merchants, if not over time) and many branded grocery products being stocked by multiple retailers, it ought to be easy for shoppers to identify where they get the best value. However, as we know, it’s rarely that simple. Prices fluctuate and aren’t available until you go in-store. Shoppers are rewarded for their patronage in other ways too, from loyalty cards to multi-buy offers. Add in the intangible value of convenience and the comparisons go from black and white to a shade of grey.

But sometimes, brands don’t just want your money. Like the place that offered me a coffee, they want you to do something else. With disposable income shrinking, it makes sense to offer shoppers another way to get access to the things they want.

It also plays on another basic human trait; valuing something more if you’ve had to work for it.

Sampling with a difference

One way brands can encourage consumers to try their products is to give them a free sample. The trouble is, when something is free, we often take it because there is no cost to us, even if we don’t particularly want it. If you put a barrier in place, however small, you can discourage those who don’t really want your product and ensure that those who do take it value it.

For example, last year Kellogg’s set up the ‘Tweet Shop‘. They wanted exposure for their new Special K Cracker Crisps. In exchange for a tweet, visitors to the store were given a free sample. They could have picked up a packet for under £1 at Boots, so the gift didn’t have a huge monetary value. But because it wasn’t simply shoved into their hands as they walked past a train station like so many samples, they valued it more.

There’s a great case study that highlights just how much what something costs frames how much we value it. A photo-editing app called GroupShot is normally priced at 99p. However, for twenty four hours, it was free to download. As you’d expect, download rates shot up. After all, the main barrier to owning the app had been removed. However, the developers noticed that over half of the people who downloaded the app for free failed to ever open it. They’d got a free sample and that’s where their relationship with the brand ended.

We don’t know whether the Tweet Shop achieved the level of exposure that Kellogg’s hoped, but those who did interact with it would have enjoyed their Cracker Crisps all the more for having to earn them.

Another brand to innovate in their demands on shoppers is Weetabix.

They recently partnered with Boots to run the first ‘Pay with a Picture‘ campaign. In order to get their hands on a free sample, shoppers had to photograph a TV advert and then use that photo as a voucher in-store. It sounds like a lot of effort and this review suggests the experience could have been friendlier to shoppers. However, in exchange for a free product, Weetabix made people engage with them and complete one shopper journey.

Away from the ‘breakfast brand extending itself into a light snack’ category, Amex have used their Card Sync technology to integrate sales into Twitter. To participate, cardholders have to tweet a special purchase hashtag, for example ‘#BuyXbox360Bundle‘. They then receive a confirmation tweet from Amex with a discounted price. The cardholder then has to retweet that message within 15 minutes of receiving it and the item is then sent to their billing address.

This not only ensures that cardholders follow Amex on Twitter, giving them a low cost media channel, but also that their cardholders act as ambassadors, broadcasting their savings to their followers.

Identify your goals and understand your audience

Remember the restaurant that offered me a free coffee in exchange for feedback? I don’t drink coffee, so they won’t be getting a response. However, let’s imagine that they had offered me a free cup of tea while I was in there, and asked me whether I would mind spending a couple of minutes answering their questions.

Social norms would have obliged me to do so because they had already given me something, and therefore I owed them.

In reality, one reason they didn’t adopt this approach is that the offer of a free coffee wasn’t a free gift at all.

It was also a trick meant to drive me back to their establishment and buy something else to go with the coffee. It’s not a bad tactic, but in this instance, having two goals means that neither is realised.

The challenge for brands is to find something to give back to their consumers that their consumers will value. They also need to identify what they want them to do in exchange, be it act as a brand ambassador, try a new product or simply feel more affection for them.

Identifying imbalances

It’s important to understand what each party brings to the relationship. Ensuring it is fair can help strengthen the bond between them. Occasionally, one party is already unwittingly giving something away without getting anything back, which leads to a deterioration of the relationship and a lack of loyalty.

For example, every year I pay a hefty amount to London Midland and in exchange they help me get to and from work. However sometimes, trains are delayed, meaning my fellow passengers and I give up our precious time and get nothing in exchange.

Sometimes, this frustration results in the brand being badmouthed. Worse still, it can result in staff being abused. This, in turn, reduces their job satisfaction and motivation to represent the company positively, increases staff turnover and costs the company money in the long term.

But let’s imagine that those wasted minutes were converted into loyalty points that gave commuters something back – free upgrades, discounts with partner brands, etc. Then, the delays might be tolerated with better grace.

And as commuters’ time was no longer a free commodity, London Midland would come to value it more and consequently have a greater incentive to get trains to run on time.

Because as Confucius and Jesus identified all those years ago, when we appreciate each other and are fair in our actions, everyone wins.

Is Andrex’s ‘Scrunch or Fold’ campaign a watershed?

Let’s face it. No one is in charge.

We humans are social creatures and most of us tend to follow the crowd. Fashions come and go as we hustle en masse towards the latest fad or innovation, rarely pausing to look back, take stock of where we are and where we are going.

Only twenty five years ago, pretty much the only personal information we had in the public domain was our name, address and phone number in the Phone Book. And even then it was only shared with people living locally.

Now, we can not only easily broadcast personal information, but also images and opinions.

To marketers this ‘free’ media, combined with the potential of peer advocacy, seems like a godsend. But like so many powerful things, it can be very dangerous if misused.

Brands that entertain us, provide us with enabling or experience enhancing products, or help us say something about ourselves are at a distinct advantage when it comes to engaging with us online.

Old Spice entertained us and scored a hit with their ‘Man your man could smell like’ campaign. PSY gained international fame with the catchy Gangnam Style.

But it’s not a level playing field. For example, it’s far easier for a cool beer brand to start a conversation about ‘good times’ than it is for a third tier bleach brand to get people talking and sharing anecdotes about ‘epic bathroom cleaning’ moments.

Indeed, last year Femfresh found that while feminine hygiene might be an issue, it’s not one that people particularly want to talk about on Facebook.

Inspiration

Great ideas have the frustrating habit of coming to us at the most inconvenient times.  Generally they occur when we are relaxed – in a lovely warm bath, the moment just before you fall asleep or even when you are sat upon the toilet.

This phenomenon might explain the latest offering from Andrex.

Perhaps noting that Kit-Kat Chunky had enjoyed success with a voting mechanic when launching their new bars and that Marmite had challenged us to decide whether we were Lovers or Haters, they’ve launched what some have called ‘the worst advert ever’.

In short, they want to start a debate about how you wipe your arse. Do you ‘Scrunch? Or do you ‘Fold’?

The campaign has drawn a response; people are talking about it, people are tweeting about it and even people like me are blogging about it. On the whole, reactions have been a mix of horror and incredulity.

However, despite the overwhelming negativity, some would still qualify the impact as a success. After all, it shows that the campaign has raised awareness and achieved cut through.

To this I would counter, “Maybe, but it hasn’t made me more likely to buy Andrex”.

Defecation isn’t a life choice. In the 21^st century, in a developed nation, buying toilet paper is not a discretionary spend. One would have thought that Andrex’s challenge was more about convincing shoppers to buy their product rather than downtrade to cheaper, lower quality brands.

Fame or infamy?

If they were a new brand to the category, looking to make a name for themselves as an alternative choice, one might understand such a bizarre campaign.

But this is Andrex.

If Family Fortunes asked 100 people to name a toilet paper brand they would top the list. They are to toilet paper what McVities are to biscuits, what Heinz are to ketchup and what Kellogg’s are to breakfast cereals.

They have built up fantastic brand equity with their ‘Soft, strong and very, very long’ slogan, their iconic Labrador puppy and ‘Puppy Points’ loyalty scheme. It’s an enviable position, but one they risk flushing down the pan with such ill-judged campaigns.

The open nature of modern society has helped blur the boundary between fame and infamy. Having a load of insects poured over your face in order to win a meal for the camp may briefly raise the profile of a minor celebrity, but mere chatter doesn’t lead to sales, and brands ought to aspire to longevity too.

If in twenty-five years we’ve gone from having our numbers in the phone book to openly discussing how we wipe our backsides, perhaps the true purpose of ‘Scrunch or Fold’ is to act as a watershed, both for brands who seek buzz for the sake of it and those of us who shudder at what might be on the agenda in 2038 if we carry on down this path.

As seen (only) on TV

Product placement has been rampant in the US for sometime; Zeitgeist has commented on it before, as well as its close cousin, contextual advertising. Part of the Zeitgeist team thinks the show 30 Rock is consistently the funniest thing to ever grace their torrent-hungry laptop, and in the episode Generalissimo, the LatAm tendency for “branded-entertainment projects” is gloriously parodied (see a Latin Alec Baldwin, above).

While the UK continues to struggle with implications of such things and Lady Gaga’s new music video makes her a ‘product placement lady of the night’ the New York Times reported yesterday that the Spanish-language network Telemundo is “expanding” the idea, by having new products created specifically for the show that will then be available to buy.

“Telemundo already works with advertisers like… Ford, Subway, T-Mobile and Toyota… The new deals will create products that would not otherwise exist for viewers to buy. The first products will be jewelry, made by the Richline Group… which is to be worn in an episode of the telenovela “El Clon” (“The Clone”) to be broadcast on Telemundo at 8 p.m. on April 22. The jewelry is already available for sale on the Telemundo Web site (telemundo.com).” PSFK comments, “The beauty of this announcement is that it reflects the increasingly targeted capabilities available to brands via product integration, if they choose to exercise that option.”

A very interesting idea, and one that Kellogg’s and M&S have recently implemeted on a much smaller scale in the UK. This article is sponsored by the Sheinhardt Wig Corp.