Communications strategist Caroline Kealey has, over the past 10 years, marched to her own drum as the founder and chief executive of Ingenium Communications.

Her consultancy has carved a niche for itself in the nation’s capital and across the country in the “art and science of communications and marketing strategy” providing, in addition to its strategic communications and marketing services, facilitation, training and organizational development.

As with so many other consultancies, regardless of their discipline, this meant that Ingenium’s intellectual property resided almost entirely within the grey matter of its people, and especially of its leader, Kealey herself.

Six years ago, Kealey decided to change that. Despite being a busy single mother with a full-time business, she set out to lever the insight and expertise developed over a 20-year career into an educational resource for professional development and training. The Ingenium team, with a substantial amount of goodwill and in-kind support from friends and allies, set to work. The outcome is the Results Map, deemed by its creators to be the most comprehensive online tool for strategic communications planning available in the world.

Kealey took the time to share her thoughts on the tenacity required to launch her new venture, the challenges of bootstrapping, and the strategic marketing that has turned a largely local consultancy into a global play within a matter of weeks.

Q: Where did you get the idea for Results Map?

A: I think the idea came from my experience in having written now close to 400 communications strategies across a wide range of sectors and clients. I realized that much of the process is quite repeatable and that we had quite a lot of expertise in this specialized area. I also realized that, while seemingly a bit odd coming from someone who makes her living as an external consultant, optimally this process is most beneficial if it’s done in-house. So, I came up with the idea to package what we’ve learned from experience and create a methodology that communicators can easily apply within their organizations, tapping into their unique knowledge and experience with their subject matter and audiences.

Q: How did you go about validating the idea?

A: This whole project has been bootstrapped on the back of our traditional consulting practice and therefore integrates hundreds of conversations as part of regular client engagements and workshops. We carried out extensive market research to establish if there is anything like this … we looked at comparable solutions for other disciplines and went through an extensive process of one-and-one interviews in 2008 with people in different facets of the industry – academia, public, private, para-public sectors. We used all this to map out a business plan and worked with a focus group of 30 people to validate the concept from both a business and marketing point of view.

Q: What key challenges did you face turning this into a commercially available product?

A: This was far and away the most significant and complex project I have ever managed. The process has been ongoing over a six-year period and has been self-financed. The sheer tenacity and the focus required was a major challenge since the project had to run alongside our regular work and business development. Stitching this together into something coherent with an end goal in mind was a very significant challenge. This is not for the faint of heart.

Q: Where did you turn for sources of funding and other support to develop and launch Results Map?

A: One of the most extraordinary experiences throughout this process has been the generosity of the community in providing expertise (and) resources and offering to make valuable connections. I was really moved to the extent to which people are willing to support an entrepreneur who has a dream. That was a big part of our success - tapping into a lot of local in-kind support, and connections. We wanted to self-finance as much as possible, but did call upon the BDC and a private investor, both of whom have been extremely supportive.

Q: How do you characterize your experience, as an entrepreneur, in trying to secure funding and other key pieces of the puzzle?

A: As is often the case, it’s hard to appreciate the sheer volume of work and energy that this has required. In terms of lessons learned, you can’t underestimate the time and effort that isn’t immediately visible when you set out - the complexity of translation to another language, finding an online payment solution that works, developing a marketing plan, and addressing innumerable technological challenges. It all takes deep consideration, analysis and quality decision-making to position the company for success, and adjust in real-time to dependencies and changes in the development plan.

Q: What key entrepreneurial lessons did you learn through this? What would you do different next time?

A: If you roll back the clock, this could have gone in many different directions. Early on I became concerned by time-to-market and that other people would come in and scoop us. But that was fairly short-lived because I had trouble imagining that there would be too many others who would have the passion to drive through such a difficult task … call it stubbornness or stick-to-it-ness, it was clear that it was the road less travelled.

Most of the development work I did on this was between 5 and 7 a.m. before I got my kids up to get ready for school; that’s obviously not everyone’s cup of tea.

The technical development of the product took place over six months. This was very aggressive and in hindsight could have been done more comfortably over a year or 18 months. However, we had committed to complete and present by June 2010 at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference in Toronto. As a result, we licensed our training platform from Telesto, a local development firm. Again, my whole orientation was on niche expertise, not on developing a tool in-house, from the ground up. This proved to be a good decision because the time and cost required to create a platform from scratch would have been prohibitive.

Q: What has been the market response to Results Map?

A: A few weeks ago I was running a local consulting company. Now our technology is on four continents and we are writing proposals for Fortune 500 companies … We have reached into some spheres that would not have been possible two weeks ago. We even have the government of Tanzania interested in our methodology.

This is precisely what we wanted to do with this product, have a global impact, and so far it’s off to the races.

Q: How did you take advantage of your attendance at the International Association of Business Communicators World Conference to launch of Results Map?

A: We had a whole strategy to make a splash at that event to capitalize on the fact that there were 1,500 communicators there from around the world. We ran a Twitter contest, a guerilla marketing campaign, exhibited with a booth, and I was a speaker. We very much took our own advice on having a plan and executing against that plan on a shoestring budget. People told us we were one of the highlights of the event, and that is entirely the result of our careful planning in terms of marketing, planning and positioning.

Now the challenge is chasing down all of our leads. The scope of our business has exploded in the space of a couple of weeks so while I’d thought the product development was the end of a goal, it really is just the beginning.

Technorati Tags: marketing, startup, entrepreneur, Results Map, Ingenium, Telesto, online tool, Fortune 500, strategic communications, communications strategy, bootstrap, BDC

It’s clear that we’re bad summertime bloggers. Sorry about that.

Occasionally there have been topics that have crossed my path in the last month and a bit that I thought could be ruminated on in a blog post, but when the spirit struck, it was usually when I was unplugged completely for a week-plus (No phone, no internet, no email, no television … heavenly!) or too swamped with client commitments to dedicate the time required to write it up. As I recently Tweeted, I haven’t blogged in so long that I suffered a brief case of performance anxiety about picking up the virtual pen once again.

I’m over it now.

I’ve been doing significant outreach in the UK for one of our clients and I’m noticing that journalists over there are far more eager to have a phone conversation with me than many of their North American counterparts. At outlets big and small, I’ve been greeted with enthusiasm, courtesy and appreciation for the information I’m providing, rather than being avoiding altogether, relegated to voicemail hell or, at worst, berated or abused because I deigned to call. All this latter negative experience has been all-too-common with some North American journalists I’ve dealt with in my decade plus as a PR practitioner. This has been a lovely experience and has resulted in some tangible and impactful coverage for my client.

Many of these same editors and reporters weren’t at all responsive to my emails, a distinct change from my experience in North America where calls and voicemails predominantly go unanswered and unresponded to, but emails fare far better. It was refreshing to have so many productive phone calls that resulted in good things for my clients.

I’d posit that the phone calls themselves went so well because we pride ourselves on building out a media list of pertinent, relevant and interested media targets so that we know all of the angles and all of the data points that are likely to result in coverage of our client. Or perhaps I just seemed exotic with my North American accent and that’s why they were so nice to me, eh?

Having had such a good string of calls, I was particularly interested about the articles I read this week about the death of the phone call. At least that’s the snazzy spin that’s put on the article, but the content rather suggests a more integrated communications approach - using the multiple channels available to us to best communicate with one another. The latter resonates strongly with my daily experience, while the former is hyperbolic and not at all what’s truly going on.

In my recent UK experience, I had indeed sent emails to the folks I later spoke with on the phone. For some, they’d read my email and highlighted as something to follow up at some nebulous point in the future, while others fully admitted that they hadn’t read it. That they had it in their mail and could call it up as we were speaking was very useful as they were provided with more information than I could succinctly deliver on the phone.

The rumours of the telephone call’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Telephone calls still play an important role in the PR practitioner’s day-to-day practice; I will agree that their ranking in the grand scheme of all of the tools available may have slipped, but make no mistake - there’s nothing quite like speaking to someone to get your point across. Whether it’s through Skype or an old rotary dial or anything in between, don’t count the phone call out just yet.

As an aside, there’s an interesting corollary to this phenomenon in the world of popular music. When I was growing up, there were scads of popular songs that highlighted the importance of the phone call - from Blondie’s “Call Me”, Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number”, and Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309.” The only popular song of late that references the telephone (at least the only one that’s coming to mind at the moment) is Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” with the repeated chorus of “stop calling, stop calling, I don’t want to talk anymore.” Pop music’s just reflecting our shared experience and indicating that the honeymoon’s over when it comes to our love affair with the telephone.

Technorati Tags: Telephone, phone calls, voicemail, email, media relations

Well, yesterday was interesting. Ottawa was the major city nearest to the epicenter of a 5.0 (heavily disputed) magnitude earthquake.

A friend who has traveled extensively was rolling his eyes at us meek Canucks, saying he felt quakes like this in Japan all the time. Suffice to say, I’d be a shaky mess if that was a regular occurrence.

Not used to seismic events of any magnitude happening in this area, at first, like so many, I thought there must be a big truck outside making all that noise, but as the shaking intensified, I began to think it might in fact be an earthquake and ran outside. When the quake subsided, I immediately picked up the phone to call the daycare just around the bend to see if either a) I was crazy, or b) did they feel it there too? (I’m not crazy.)

Then, purveyor of media that I am, I instantly began visiting media websites to see if there were any details on what had happened. I went to CFRA’s website, CBC.ca, Google News, Ottawa Citizen - nothing. I checked Twitter and bingo - there was instantaneous, regularly updated information available in real-time, people sharing experiences, jokes, links, statistics…

I was lucky to have spoken with both my daycare provider and my husband, because immediately afterwards, the phone lines were down - both cell and landline - as everyone else in the affected area called their spouses and daycare providers.

Traditional media were not quick enough to provide the information needed, traditional forms of communication were unreliable, but social media saved the day. Within minutes of the quake, thanks to Twitter, I knew where the epicenter was, the magnitude, the affected areas, and more. Twitter really proved its mettle to me beyond a shadow of a doubt as an important, relevant and succinct communications channel. While I’ve been using Twitter as part of my outreach for clients and networking for myself for two years now, I had recently grown tired of the endless witticisms, location updates and general narcissistic tone of some of its users but when push came to shove, Twitter was the most important communications channel where others lagged or failed entirely.

–

Before the earth moved yesterday, the power of the media made a technicolour display when Stanley McChrystal, the top general in charge of the U.S. military in Afghanistan had his feet held to the flames for outrageous, disrespectful and unpatriotic comments made in a disastrous forthcoming Rolling Stone article. He had a decidedly uncomfortable meeting with President Obama wherein he tendered his resignation, certainly milliseconds before he was fired.

The article is truly scandalous and worth a read.

As a PR professional, my first thought was HOW did this happen? Are there no communications professionals involved with the highest strata of the U.S. military that would have overseen the opportunity and decided what could be gained by profiling a top general in a rock and roll magazine? If they then decided to move forward, would they not have been along every step of the way, providing both strategic and tactical counsel to the general about what he’s to say and what not to say, key messages, likely lines of questioning, etc.? Surely with an organization so reliant on security and secrecy, the PR team would have also had the opportunity to review the copy for approval prior to publication? Anyone? Bueller?

The most egregious of the comments were off the cuff, said not during any formal interview but when perhaps the general and his team thought comments would be off the record. As we’ve discussed previously, the interview is never over. The journalist was interviewed in the aftermath, also worth a watch.

I’m flabbergasted not only at the comments of the general and his staff but also at the incredible failing of the communications function of the U.S. military in this instance. By contrast, there was a brilliant article on McChrystal’s successor David Petraeus in a recent Vanity Fair. Whether it was better journalism, a better communications team that managed the process more carefully, or just a better man as the subject, we’ll never know.

Technorati Tags: Rolling Stone, earthquake, Ottawa, Petraeus, McChrystal, pr

Oh dear.

The standards editor at the New York Times (@nytimes) has banned usage of the word Tweet, insisting that its use flies in the face of the paper’s general avoidance of “colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon.” His reasoning is that Twitter might be next year’s proverbial bird-cage liner and the Times will have egg on its face for adopting this word before its usage was properly established and therefore considered “ordinary.”

Just today, the Oxford English Dictionary added a number of words to its tome - data center among them. Until now, was that just jargon? When I consider the OED more closely, however, maybe it’s not the best arbiter of what’s ridiculous and what’s not, as evidenced by this meant to be comical but rather frighting piece. I’d be very interested in the standards editor’s position on muggle and gaydar. Perhaps the paper could devote an On Language feature to Frankenfood or bouncebackability… Here’s an interesting article where the columnist behind On Language reports on the fact that Tweet was 2009’s WORD OF THE YEAR. That would indicate that the word is in common usage, would it not?

If it’s familiarity with terms that the editor is worried about he can rest easy in the knowledge that fully 87% of Americans know what Twitter is; you can be assured that fewer people than that know what paleolithic means, Mr. Standards Editor. And paleolithic is exactly how you seem to the 105 million registered users of the platform.

What truly strikes me as comical, however, is that this comes despite of the great extent to which the NY Times itself Tweets, er, writes on Twitter. The paper as a whole, various sections and, according to @nytimes, 96 staffers all have distinct Twitter accounts. I hate to tell you, Phil, but this thing’s catching on.

What I fear is that this indicates a larger problem - how out of touch the media can be with, well, how to be successful in the modern media marketplace. Heaven knows Rupert Murdoch’s plans to rip the Wall Street Journal content from search engines as they erect a paywall is doomed to failure. Should be interesting to watch. The Times itself is planning on employing a metered pay system itself next January. Too late. People have been enjoying your content for free for far too long to want to pay for it now.

This does remind me of a time in 1999 when I was privy to a tour of one of the major record label HQs and the president, when asked what their online strategy was, said “we’ve got a couple of guys working on it. Nobody really knows what they do, but I’m sure this ‘Internet’ thing will be short-lived anyway and we’ve got it well in hand.” We know how that worked out. It would be a shame if the New York Times suffered the same sad fate, but this obtuse move doesn’t bode well for its future.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, New York Times, Tweet

Last night, I had the honour of attending the Canadian launch of the C100 in downtown Ottawa at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada.

What is the C100? It’s a group of those ex-pat Canadians who we refer to when we lament the “brain drain.” They have stepped up to put their time, money and Rolodexes into helping our strongest early-stage companies acquire the mentoring, business contacts and exposure to potential investors they need in North America’s hottest technology nexus — Silicon Valley.

Or to say it another way:

C100 is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment, comprised of a select group of Canadians based primarily in Silicon Valley, including executives of leading technology companies, experienced start-up entrepreneurs and venture capital investors.

There are Canadians that fit that bill all over the Valley said Chris Albinson, one of the founders of the C100 and co-founder and managing director of life sciences and technology investment firm Panorama Capital.

Last fall, overwhelmed by stories from disheartened Canadian entrepreneurs who were struggling to stay afloat as investment dollars dried up due to the economic downturn, as well as the demise of Nortel Networks and the impact this would have on the entire Canadian innovation ecosystem, the founders of C100 decided to do something. They looked to the examples set by other ex-pat communities in the Valley, notably the Israelis, and the networks they had set up to help start-up companies from back home make a name for themselves in the Valley.

At a dinner where 65 guests showed up despite only 50 invitations having been sent out, the audience was challenged to step up and commit to doing something. By the end of the night, 64 guests had endorsed the idea that would become the C100 and each had committed $800 to its creation.

Five months later, the C100 has earned the support and sponsorship of government, economic development agencies and technology incubators across Canada, from EDC and DFAIT, to OCRI, MaRS and Communitech in Ontario.  Seventy Canadian companies have been introduced in the Valley and provided with crucial mentoring and exposure from those who have been there and done it first.

After only five months, five of those 70 companies have secured venture capital investment — a total of US$45 million. And this is just the start.

Incidentally, one of the companies that has benefited from C100’s help is cloud data governance specialist PerspecSys of Waterloo, a new inmedia client. Only last week, PerspecSys was one of 20 Canadian companies that were part of 48hrs in the Valley, a C100 initiative carried out in partnership with the Consulate General of Canada. 48hrs is a fun and intense two-day mentoring and business development program designed to help Canadian entrepreneurs connect with the advice, resources and networks they need to grow their businesses.

While on the junket, PerspecSys competed in the elevator pitch sessions before a judging panel of hard-nosed Valley investors and other tech sector players at the Plug and Play Spring EXPO. It beat out about 40 other U.S. and Canadian companies to take top honours due to the strength of its go-to-market strategy and an innovative solution that lies at the confluence of two key growth markets – cloud computing and securing sensitive corporate data to meet compliancy requirements.

So, hat’s off to the C100 — yet another example of how adversity breeds creative leadership and opportunity. It is this kind of grassroots community effort that will drive a bright future for Canadian entrepreneurship and innovation.

Technorati Tags: C100, DFAIT, Foreign Affairs, PerspecSys, entrepreneur, Silicon Valley, Plug and Play Expo, venture capital, brain drain, cloud computing, OCRI, MaRS, Communitech, Chris Albinson, EDC

Many moons ago, we wrote a post that gave a general overview of how awards fit into an integrated PR program. All of this information still rings true. Awards can be a worthwhile part of your communications program, but make sure that the ROI is worth it if it’s something you have to pay steep fees to enter. The best kind of award is the one where entry isn’t even necessary, where you’re singled out by experts in your field for being the best at what you do. You can’t buy that kind of third-party validation from reputable sources and it may cause prospects and competitors to both sit up and take notice of you.

Since many of our clients have had the good fortune lately of winning some prestigious awards and being singled out as some of the best at what they do, and since I’m working on a report for a new client that maps out appropriate awards opportunities for the year ahead, safe to say that I’ve got awards on the brain.

I’d like to publicly congratulate several of our clients for recent distinctions bestowed upon them:

UNIT4 Business Software, a top-six provider of ERP software worldwide, was named Employer of the Year at last week’s VIATeC Awards, which honour Vancouver Island technology companies. We like working for them; they must also be a pretty good place at which to work.

PerspecSys, whose hybrid cloud platform that mitigates the data privacy, residency and security concerns inherent to using SaaS applications in the public cloud, was both feted as one of Gartner Group’s “Cool Vendor in Cloud Security Services 2010” and named as finalist in the Global Cloud Security Challenge 2010. We’ll be telling the world a lot more about PerspecSys starting tomorrow.

Touch Bionics, the company behind cutting edge bionic technology like the i-LIMB Hand and ProDigits, was recently awarded the Queen’s Award for innovation, the most prestigious award in the UK for business performance. It’s another nice nod for a client that, it is safe to say, is the most decorated of any we’ve ever worked with.

Keep up the great work!

Technorati Tags: awards, UNIT4 Business Software, PerspecSys, Touch Bionics

There’s a witty little joke that’s been running on Twitter for some time now. I don’t remember when I first saw it, but every so often it pops into my Twitter stream and I click through to the punchline again. The otherwise redoubtable @missrougue, Montreal-based Tara Hunt, hooked me this morning.

The setup line is usually something like, “How to use Twitter for Marketing and PR” and a short link. Clicking on the link brings you to a one-page website that has the word “Don’t” in block black letters in the middle of the screen.

Ha ha.

But I could not more profoundly disagree with the sentiment.

Let me leave aside what I believe is the immense potential Twitter represents to engage with customers, stakeholders and others, what I would think is the very definition of marketing, and let me briefly cover how we at inmedia routinely use Twitter in our technology media relations practice.

1. We follow journalists who cover our clients and their space. Journos have been enthusiastic adopters of Twitter, using it to source ideas and contacts and to spread the word about what they’re working on. This brings us opportunities we can pitch our clients into and helps us understand even better what these reporters are interested in.

2. We actively pitch reporters through Twitter. Along with email and the telephone, Twitter has become a useful tool to reach out and touch a reporter. With a mere 140 characters at our disposal, you’ve got to believe we need to get the story down pat! And we do. Some reporters welcome this approach, and we embrace the channel where they do; others would prefer we not do so, and we respect their choice. Our front-line media relations practitioners can now count several instances of successful story pitches that were at least initiated, if not fully consummated, through Twitter.

3. We monitor Twitter for mentions of our clients, their competitors and their issues. While most of those mentions do not emanate from journalistic sources, tracking them helps our clients understand who is talking about them and what’s being said. If our clients are active on Twitter, they can engage across this channel. And even if they’re not, Twitter can be an early warning of an emerging event that could bode well or ill. Twitter has become just one more default source in our integrated monitoring efforts for clients.

4. We tweet major announcements by our clients. We count interested journalists, a broad range of technology executives, industry watchers and other influencers among our own lists of followers. So tweeting our clients’ news releases is just one more channel we can deploy on behalf of our dissemination efforts for our clients.

5. And, last but not least, we tweet major hits we get for our clients. I could tell you we do this for much the same reason as item number 4, and I would not be lying. Tweeting major stories attracts attention to them and so expands their reach and improves their impact. But to be thoroughly honest, we also do it to toot our own horns a bit. We like being able to announce that we just got coverage for a client on CNN, or in the New York Times or CIO or some other big-name outlet.

So I’m utterly persuaded, all joking aside, that Twitter is an effective new tool in the media relations tool box, one we’re happy to use extensively.

Technorati Tags: missrogue, Twitter, PR, marketing, public relations, media relations

In this round-up, I’d like to highlight where to find examples of good PR campaigns, as well as cautionary tales on what not to do.

The Good

Bulldog Reporter has a feature called Winning PR Campaigns that highlights recent successful campaigns.

PRWeek highlights successful campaigns every week, like this recent Seventh Generation feature (subscription required).

Sadly, it seems an attempt to launch a Good Pitch Blog was unsuccessful. The “cobbler’s kids who have no shoes” anecdote rings true - we’re too busy getting good publicity for our clients to promote the good work we’re doing, to highlight our own successes.

The Bad

As any savvy PR person knows, the BadPitchBlog is one place where you don’t want your work to show up. It’s entertaining, to be sure, but also terrifying that these practitioners are sullying our industry’s reputation in this fashion.

PRdisasters.com operates under a similar mandate.

Another PR firm has been collecting what it sees as the biggest 15 corporate PR mistakes of the last decade. There are some doozies.

And here’s some advice on what to do if a PR disaster strikes.

Technorati Tags: public relations, bad PR, good PR

The news last week that major international news agencies, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse, were going to boycott the news conference launching this year’s Cannes film festival in a dispute over restricted access to the festival’s fabled red carpet is an uncomfortable but not wholly unexpected consequence of both the blurring lines between the editorial and commercial departments of large media conglomerates and of the recognition that there is still a lot of money to be made from news content — at least, from certain kinds of news content.

Here’s the back story. The fabled film festival, which is the world’s largest and this year runs from May 12 to 23, signed a sponsorship deal with French broadcaster Canal Plus and with European pay-TV company Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The deal, part of a growing trend by media properties to extract more than just exposure from their sponsorship of events, gives the two sponsors a level of exclusivity over video footage from the red carpet, where the world’s stars and starlets preen for the attention of paparazzi as they arrive for screenings, and from news conferences, where the stars and directors of the movies meet the world’s journalists covering the festival. The festival has said that other news organizations would have restricted access to these venues for video-shooting purposes. The world’s largest wire services, which are well paid to serve up this video to their clients around the globe, have cried foul.

I’m not sure they should be.

I realise that media outlets, especially reputable media outlets, have always maintained opaque Chinese walls between their editorial and advertising departments but many of them in this modern era have been tearing down those walls themselves. The trend is most advanced in broadcast, where, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars are paid every two years for exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. An unchallenged outcome of this is that while non-sponsoring broadcasting companies can certainly cover the games, they accept that they will face restrictions on camera placement and access to athletes, and quite severe limits on how much they can actually broadcast.

Not all that much different from what the Cannes festival has imposed.

I suspect the news agencies are crying foul less out of wounded journalistic ethic and more out of a hit to their bottom lines. You see, event organizers like the Olympics and, now, Cannes have figured out that the pictures media companies acquire at such events are worth a lot of money. And they want a piece of this action. I believe we will increasingly see event organizers charge the media for access to this valuable content.

In a way, this has long been established practice on election campaigns, where journalists who want to travel on the leader’s plane or bus must cough up substantial amounts of money to cover the costs. While nobody would ever suggest this is any sort of cheque-book journalism, it does lock out the less-wealthy media organisations and, thereby, make more valuable the stories and pictures that those with access publish and broadcast.

As I said, I’m not sure I object to this trend. While the purist in me is concerned about a world where media have to pay for access to events and the implications that holds for media freedom and other vaunted values, the realist (cynic?) in me is obliged to concede that most media today are indistinguishable from any other commercial enterprise, producing and packaging the product they know will sell while leaving aside the stuff they know won’t.

Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the raw material?

[tags] Cannes, Olympics, journalism, cheque-book journalism, media ethics [\tags]

Last night, I happened upon a special on CNBC about Coca-Cola called The Real Story Behind the Real Thing. It was a fascinating look at the soft-drink company whose grasp and usage of marketing is legendary. Legendary also is the grave misstep it made in the 1980s when it launched New Coke.

Pepsi came on the scene and was holding blind taste tests called the Pepsi Challenge. When asked, the majority of participants noted that they liked the taste of Pepsi better than Coke. This caused Coca-Cola to conduct its own tests, the results of which mirrored the Pepsi Challenge. Despite the fact that the recipe for Coke hadn’t changed considerably in the previous hundred years (the initial recipe contained cocaine, but just for the first few years on the market), the powers that be at the company panicked and ordered the recipe to change so that the flavour more closely mirrored that of Pepsi. Big mistake.

New Coke failed spectacularly and within months, the original Coke was brought back to market, branded as Coca-Cola Classic. Funnily enough, Coke gained significant market share when all was said and done, though the company’s mistake had the potential to sink the entire operation.

When one executive was asked whether it was all a stunt, whether Coke had planned it, he said that they weren’t that smart, and they weren’t that dumb.

While it all worked out in the company’s favour in the end, it could have easily gone the other way. Many lessons can be learned from this and I’m sure many an MBA student has written their thesis on the New Coke experiment.

Here, I’ll try to distill a few lessons that we as marketers can take from it:

1. Don’t panic. What Coke did was react hastily to competition that was offering a similar product at a lower price and that was using an innovative marketing message. Rather than assess its own branding and marketing issues, it immediately destroyed whatever brand loyalty existed for its products. Consumer products such as soft drinks have a more personal meaning than what the companies often give them credit for. Know your product, know your market, know your customers and act based on what’s best for those three, rather than solely based on what your competitors are doing.

2.  Be willing to admit mistakes and correct course. The fact that Coke recognized the error of its ways and quickly corrected itself saved the company and the brand. If you make a misstep, it just proves that a) you’re human and b) you’ve got work to do.

3. Competition can drive innovation. Cola is cola, when it comes down to it. Pepsi and Coke don’t actually compete so much on taste or price as they do on marketing. The curvy Coca-Cola bottle is so iconic and distinct that in 1993, when the company changed its plastic bottles to mirror the shape of its glass bottles, sales were boosted by more than 40%.

4. Be authentic. When Coke tried to be something it wasn’t, as is so often the case, it didn’t work. Know who your company is, what your brand is and stick to your knitting. Especially in challenging economic times, companies tend to deviate from their branding. So often it seems as though diversification is the solution and so often the offering becomes too watered down or too off message and fails. If you don’t know who you are and what you have to offer the market, neither will your customers or prospects.

Technorati Tags: Coca-Cola, Coke, Pepsi, innovation, competition, branding, marketing