Two Cents

2009 was a tough year on the career front for many Australians. Redundancies were widespread as companies endeavoured to cope with an uncertain economic climate.
 
The employer marketing and recruitment advertising sectors were highly sensitive to the economic slowdown, with reduced marketing budgets calling for smarter thinking, greater ROI and diversification across the board. The job market had taken a big hit, shifting the dynamic for HR professionals who had previously been dealing with skills shortages and a candidate short market. Inevitably, print media suffered a free-fall in advertising revenue.

From our own agency experiences with employer marketing, the job market appeared to be in recovery late last year – hopefully a barometer of an improving economy – even prompting expert comments of forthcoming skills shortages in some sectors. The credible medium of print, still preferable for sourcing the elusive ‘passive’ candidates, should continue to perform when targeting the baby boomer and senior executive markets but for the rest, the migration to online looks set to continue.

Companies and recruiters alike are continuing to use popular job boards such as SEEK, CareerOne and MyCareer to advertise vacancies, as well as many other niche and industry specific boards.

Mirroring a shift in B2B and B2C communications, we are also seeing social media assist recruiters in candidate vetting and appraisal (so watch those privacy settings on Facebook!). Equally, job seekers are using networks such as LinkedIn – where it really is in their interests to publish (rather than hide) as much relevant information as possible – all to improve employment prospects.

A recent innovation, Brazen Careerist, allows the modern professional to not only showcase their CV but also share ideas and engage with peers in their field, giving them control in a social network that they are happy to share information with.

Another interesting site is KODA, the imaginatively titled “opportunity community”, where employers can take a closer look at young professionals with talents beyond posting a CV in Word format.

This brings me to the latest example: Hire me, HeadBlade (which unsurprisingly led to the sequel, HeadBlade Hired Me!).

This recent success story in how to score your dream job in the new economy is further proof that people can create their own cut-through in competitive fields if they treat job seeking like an industry project or campaign. The bottom line: identify what it is you want to do and where you belong, and go the extra mile.

With innovation and increased usage of social media channels by job seekers, so too increases the need for businesses (as employers) to understand and be actively using these channels to their benefit to source the best available candidates. As the economy improves and, if as predicted, skills shortages make their presence felt, so the spotlight will turn back on employers as they strive to position themselves ahead of the competition. We might then see increased traffic to employer review sites such as JobVent, Glassdoor.com or Vault – and a return to larger budget employer marketing websites and campaign microsites as employers work harder to attract the right candidates.

As every employer would be aware, their human capital is the most important asset they have.

Steve Jennings is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

I get very excited the first time I see one of ‘our’ commercials on TV.

The countless hours that go into creating a new campaign – the market research, competitive analysis, talent selection, soundtracks and supers – all dissolve in those first few seconds of victorious recognition: when finally it appears on my humble home TV. Hooray!

And it’s not unusual for clients, who have been just as much a part of the campaign journey from conception to birth, to be as excited as I am when their ad hits the market for the very first time.

We’d be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the world shares this enthusiasm, and that all that’s needed is to upload our new ads to our company websites to generate a flurry of tweets and posts about our new campaign.

But analytics data tells us that this approach rarely generates any real consumer interest. Why?

Well, as much as we’d like the case to be different, the lives of our consumers don’t actually revolve around our brand, and that they may not be quite as enamored when our new commercial hits the airwaves as we are.

The challenge is nothing new and the rules are still fairly simple: Speak to your audience with a message suitable to the environment you find them in.

For QUT… a university for the real world, it was about delivering a unique brand promise in a way that went beyond simply making their TVCs available online. Let me explain.

Every day hundreds of videos are uploaded to you tube, showing tricks, hoaxes and questions about authenticity.

Enter Real Not Real. An entertaining online challenge that invites you to make a call on the authenticity of a series of (potentially fake) videos.

Your skill at picking a real from a hoax is scored against the scores of others who’ve done the test before you, and your ‘Realness Percentage’ calculated.

Just before you spread the word to your friends and family, you’re challenged once more – to get a real dose of reality: QUT’s three commercials.

A university for the real world has certainly been a powerful differentiation for QUT. And creating a channel to deliver this in a brand new way, taps into a truth about a web-savvy, interactive-literate audience.

Check out Real Not Real and see how you fare. And if you like, pass it on.

Rebecca Tame is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

Is it just me, or is the ‘pay what you like’ concept becoming increasingly common? A few high-profile examples in the news over the last week or so have led me to believe we might be seeing more of it in the future.

At the moment, it’s hard to tell whether some brands are offering their consumers the chance to pay the price they see fit as a genuine pricing strategy, or whether it’s just a PR stunt, or both. The most famous example, going back to 2007, was Radiohead’s offer to fans to pay whatever they saw fit for their most recent album, In Rainbows.

In London, a high-end restaurant by the name of Little Bay is serving customers and insisting they pay what they like. He readily admits that he’s doing it as a means of alleviating some stress from the recession, but it’s proved to generate incredible PR. The owner said:

“Even if people don’t pay anything I have told my staff to treat them the same as if they pay £50 or £60-a-head.

“It’s entirely up to each customer whether they give £100 or a penny. All I’m asking is they pay me what they think the food and service is worth.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, Accor Hotels is running a promotion doing much the same thing, but with an online twist:

Through March 15, the pay-what-you-want competition runs during a designated portion of each day, as announced on the hotel’s site. Interested consumers need only sign up as members and make a bid for the price they’d like to pay during one of the announced promotion times. If they’re one of the first to bid, they can win a night at the hotel at exactly the price they offered. Bids have gone as high as SGD100, and the first promotional rooms sold out within minutes of the contest’s launch last Wednesday.

So… is this the start of a genuine change in attracting consumers? A blatant PR stunt? Or a little bit of both?

And what’s next… pay-what-you-want advertising perhaps?

Ask anyone over the age of 25 if they remember a range of hair care products by the name of Salon Selectives, and chances are they will. They might even be able to recite a few bars of the uber-catchy jingle that was omnipresent in the products heyday in the late 1990’s.

But have you seen Salon Selectives around lately? I doubt it. Salon Selectives has been dormant ever since it was bought out by Unilever in 1996 and gradually pushed to the back of their product range – and then off the shelves forever.

Well, not quite forever. River West, a company based in Chicago, makes a living out of reviving dormant brands – and having some success. Along with Salon Selectives, they’re also in the process of reviving long-dormant brands with wide familiarity in the USA, like Nuprin, Underalls and the coffee brand Brim (which retains 90% aided brand recall despite being off the shelves since 1995).

In a recent article in the New York Times, River West explained how they are taking brands that are memorable, that “evoke a past that never was – that was morally superior or simpler, an era of better craftsmanship”. But in doing so, they’re also attempting to attract younger customers who have no familiarity with these beloved brands. Their challenge, they claim, is to “balance that familiarity with something that makes the product seem fresh and novel”.

Quite the challenge – and it does make you wonder if there’s any Australian brands out there waiting for our own River West to revive them.

If reviving dead brands seems adventurous, how about creating a real brand out of a fictional one?

Brawndo was a completely fictional sports energy drink from the cult 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy – but it’s now a very real product sporting the same attributes (bright green colour, abundant electrolytes) as the fictional version. Omni Consumer Products, under license from 20^th Century Fox, has already sold 10,000 cases and counting of Brawndo.

A little closer to home, some might remember the South Australian Brewing Company’s cheeky attempt in 1996 to market Homer Simpson’s favourite brew, Duff Beer – which was put to a quick halt by 20^th Century Fox’s lawyers. Cases now sell for thousands of dollars per six-pack.

And finally, whether they’re dead, semi-fictional, successful or otherwise, an online experiment called Brand Tags is aiming to uncover mass perceptions of some of the world’s most recognised brands. The idea is this – you’re presented with a brand, like Google, and you’re asked to type in the words you most associate with that brand. They’re then added to the tag cloud. Similarly, you can be presented with an unbranded tag cloud, and asked to guess the brand. It’s a fascinating insight into consumer perceptions – check it out.