Paddy Power’s on to a winner with charity shirt offer

The importance of having a brand attitude.

In categories where the offering is essentially the same, a brand’s positioning and the way it behaves become all the more important as means of differentiating them from the competition.

One such category is online gambling.

In essence, all of the companies offer punters the chance to stake some of their hard earned cash on all manner of sporting and cultural events. The market is extremely crowded and with sites like oddschecker.com enabling gamblers to find the best odds on a given bet, building loyalty can be difficult.

All of which means that acquiring new customers is essential and online bookmakers must stay front of mind in order to be considered. For brands with large budgets, oft-pursued routes include high profile sponsorship, advertisements and idents.

One brand with a smaller budget that manages to maintain a high profile is Paddy Power.

Their novelty bets, early payouts, refunds and risky communications have helped them carve a niche position amongst their rivals. Ranging from the Last Supper reworked as a casino table to a poster seemingly offering odds on which old lady would be hit by a car to sponsoring Tongan rugby player Epi Taion to change his name to Paddy Power by deed poll for the duration of the the 2007 World Cup, their activities are marked by a rebellious streak and a desire to generate as much free publicity as possible.

Their ability to respond quickly to current events helps keep them in the public eye, the poster at the top of the article greeted visitors to Ireland immediately after they’d been knocked out of the World Cup Play-off by France and Thierry Henry’s imfamous handball. The stategy of capitalising on current affairs is as strong as ever has as evidenced by a couple of recent viral activities.

The first was an opportunist game, turned around in under 24 hours, which invited users to ‘slap’ former SkySports pair Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Capitalising on the furore caused by their sexist comments the game was passed around by football fans and feminists alike.

The second is a great piece of activation.

Following the high profile deadline day transfers of Fernando Torres from Liverpool to Chelsea and Andy Carroll from Newcastle to Liverpool, the bookmaker offered distraught fans the chance to trade their old hero’s shirt for a £50 bet.

Better still, the unwanted shirts will then be given to Oxfam and sent to Africa.

That's £50 you're setting fire to there sunshine!

Both activities will have been relatively cheap to implement, but their relevance both to current events and their target audience ensured that they were shared virally, thus saving a fortune in media costs.

Paddy Power’s long history of courting controversy and clearly defined brand personality distinguishes them from their myriad competitors and allows them to continue to engage their audience in such a distinctive style. Each stunt serves to raise their profile in the short term while further reinforcing their brand identity in the long term.

Their behaviour might not appeal to everyone and their stunts often cost them financially, however so long as no one used their £50 wager to bet on a draw after Arsenal went 4-0 up at St. James Park on Saturday, the Irish bookmaker will look back at a couple of weeks of good work courting publicity and living up to expectations.

Sports journalist scores own goal with Twitter let down

Too much hype can be a bad thing if you fail to deliver.

You will no doubt already be familiar with the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

In it, the title protagonist is a third century BC Greek shepherd boy with a 21st century attention span.

Sadly, born in a time long before iPods, Playstations and Kindles the only way he was able to amuse himself on cold nights was to shout that an imaginary wolf was attacking his flock and so summon all the villagers from their warm beds to chase it off.

So amused was the shepherd boy by this early attempt at trolling that he repeated it, each time winding up the locals more with his false alarms.

How Aesop may have communicated his fable in 2011

Inevitably, as we all know a hungry wolf did turn up shortly afterwards and the villagers ignored the boys pleas for help, refusing to fall for what they assumed was another trick.

The tale has been told many times to warn children of the dangers of telling fibs and seeking undue attention.

It would appear from a modern interpretation of the story that the Guardian Sports Desk could urgently do with a copy of Aesop’s Fables (available for as little as £3.99 on Amazon).

At around 15:30 yesterday afternoon, respected Sports Editor of the Guardian Newsdesk Ian Prior tweeted that there would be a

Two hours was more than enough time for football messageboards to go into overdrive as fans hypothesised as to what the scoop could be.

Perhaps an announcement on the Olympic Stadium? Was Ferguson going to retire and Mourinho replace him? Could another Arab billionaire buying out a major club? Would Barcelona finally get round to offering a record breaking fee for Lloyd Doyley?

Or maybe as the other half of Zeitgeist prayed, Roger Federer’s defeat in the Australian Open had been misreported and he’d actually beaten Novak Djokovic – into a pulp.

As the deadline drew closer, F5 buttons were being smashed around the world and the Guardian homepage finally refreshed with the scoop.

It turns out that Inter Milan might make a bid for Tottenham’s Gareth Bale. For £40m. In the summer. No sources at either club quoted.

There didn’t need to be. Within minutes both clubs had denied the story.

A scoop. But not anywhere near as major as people were hoping.

The let down and collective fury at such a mundane story getting such a build up lead to a mass venting against Prior and many rivals taking the opportunity to put the boot in.

The Daily Mirror back page references Prior’s imfamous tweet

Theories began circulating that Prior may have sacrificed himself in order to then compose an article on the power of social media or that the whole exercise was a critique of the hyperbole that surrounds football, particularly during the transfer windows,  but it seems unlikely that a Sports Editor would embarass himself for such reasons.

To his credit, Prior has taken the stick with good grace admitting that he was

retweeting a campaign to get people to stop following him

before accepting defeat

and announcing the end to a long day with

Indeed his positive attitude and willingness to take it on the chin has helped deflate much of the ire and avoided prolonging the situation. Prior isn’t the first person to mess up on Twitter, he can add his name to an ever-growing list that contains the likes of Habitat, Stephanie Rice and Courtney Love.

Though his faux pas was not as bad as the others mentioned, the lesson however is clear. Social media is a powerful medium to reach people with an interest in what you have to say.

But let them down and they’ll leave you to the wolves just like a bunch of tired Greek villagers.

Here Come The Boys!

Retailers and brands in dire need of some Sexual Equality

Thanks to an increasing number of ill-advised comments by Andy Gray and Richard Keys and declarations by MP Dominic Raab that men get a raw deal from ‘obnoxious feminist bigots’, sexual equality has suddenly become such a hot topic across the UK that the economy-ruining snow has melted away.

However, before we start preaching about how middle-aged sports presenters need to brush up with what is and isn’t an acceptable way to behave in 2011, we may want to look closely at our own industry and address the outdated way many brands and retailers still deal with the reality of the modern male shopper.

The conclusions of a recent study by Saatchi & Saatchi X suggest that just as women are fully entitled to get offside decisions as wrong as their male colleagues regularly do, so men are encroaching onto the traditionally female territory of ‘shopping’.

The study further implies that the failure to create retail experiences that appeal to men’s needs limits their engagement and that we need a much better understanding of the whole male purchase journey. Their Director of Strategy Simon Goodall notes,

“Men love doing things they can do well. They like opportunities to demonstrate mastery, which means they like to go into a shopping environment knowing the answers to questions they might want to ask.”

Goodall also believes that retailers ought to do more to help men find the information that they need to make decisions before they reach the check out.

This view supports the findings of OgilvyAction’s 2008 global study examining the decisions that shoppers made in store. Managed and analysed across EMEA by yours truly, this research suggested that across a range of categories, UK males were generally less likely than females to know which brand they are going to buy before entering the store.

Anything that helps with that decision making process should be considered.

Craig Inglis, Marketing Director at John Lewis states that men dwell less than women when shopping and are more rational and pragmatic in their shopping habits. Thus, male-oriented areas of the store should be clean and modernist with obvious signposting to help men navigate their way around the store.

However, brands and retailers can begin to engage men long before they reach the store. Goodall cites Best Buy’s ‘Twelpforce’,  which offers advice on Twitter as an effective example of a retailer engaging with men and empowering them with the information they crave.

Twelpforce: A good example of engaging men

What’s more, cracking the male shopper is something that will only grow in importance.

A recent study of 2,400 men in the US by online giant Yahoo! revealed that 51% of respondents believed that they took a primary role in buying groceries.

Yahoo’s Director of Research and Insights, Lauren Weinberg, commented that while panellists may have inflated their involvement in purchase decisions, male customers’ perceptions of, and interest in, shopping are changing fast.

Regardless of whether some respondents exaggerated their role or not, the results indicate that gender boundaries are disappearing and modern households no longer see grocery shopping as a ‘womans job’.

Within the set that is ‘Male Shoppers’, we also need to understand the different mindsets men have across different categories, retail environments and lifestages. For example,  the Yahoo! study found that fatherhood was influential with 60% of dads claiming to be the decision maker across a range of categories including pet care, clothing and packaged goods.

All of this means that brands need to think not only about who they target, but also how they represent men in their adverts.

John Badalament, a writer and founder of website ModernDads.net believes that “Men need to be something other than invisible or buffoons in advertising”.

Domino’s Pizza: Not such a good way to get men onside

Not only do such depictions alienate men, but a 2010 multinational study by EuroRSCG found that there was a “pining for chivalry” from women in the developed world and that “young people want to see demonstrations of male strength and responsibility.”

Chivas attempt to celebrate chivalry

Dove celebrate ‘being a man’

Even a seemingly harmless campaign like P&G’s “Behind Every Olympic Athlete is an Olympic Mom“ Winter Olympics ads resulted in grumbling from underappreciated dads, who still make up the vast majority of volunteer coaches for youth sports.

There is clearly still plenty to learn about engaging male shoppers effectively, though with the Yahoo! research finding that men are more brand-loyal and less focused on promotions than female shoppers the rewards for those who are successful are huge.

Either way, just as it has become clear that old dressing room banter is no longer appropriate in a TV studio, so it is equally apparent that failing to engage such an influential and  lucrative proportion of shoppers is just as unacceptable.