We live in a cut and thrust, super dynamic, super connected culture where entrepreneurs with a clear vision can chase their dreams. The big difference in the new world is that these dreams are just as likely to be socially motivated as they are profit motivated. A new breed of socially aware challenger brands are taking on the goliaths of the automotive, energy and financial services industries by developing products and services that “give back” to the community rather than line the pockets of the shareholders.

In one of our earlier blogs we talked about the rise of CHALLENGERISM - a new form of consumerism where people would be motivated to spend their money with ethically driven companies whose core purpose was to do something new/different and original and not just be out to make a quick buck. We salute these socially motivated Challengers and  invite you to tell us of similar companies you have come across that fit this description.

1)      Animal Friends Insurance

Animal Friends Pet Insurance is your ethical choice; whether you require a policy for a dog, cat or bunny rabbit you can get a rapid online quote or simply pick up the phone. They are the only UK pet insurance company to donate 100% of their net profits to help animal charities worldwide.  We think that makes them pretty special.

2)      Bee Automobiles

Bee believes that the future of the automotive industry is electric, lithium batteries and direct sales. Bee electric cars look and perform like existing cars, the batteries provide adequate range and can be recharged quickly. The cars are competitively priced, and the sales, service and after-market support matches the way you live your life today.  A great  example of a home grown UK entrepreneur who is genuinly trying to make a difference.

3)      Ecotricity

Ecotricity is an electricity company with a difference – they are dedicated to changing the way electricity is made. They take the money their  customers spend on electricity and invest it in clean forms of power like wind energy. What’s more, they are the only green electricity company actually building these new renewable energy sources. In 2007 alone they invested £25 million in wind energy.

4)      Ammado

Ammado is a fascinating company dedicated to creating heroes by empowering people to make a difference. Ammado connects non-profits, socially responsible companies and engaged individuals in a unique environment of shared interests and supplies the tools necessary to support online campaigning, fundraising, engagement and communication.

5)      The Wholeaf Company

100% biodegradable, 100% Natural, 100% Chemical free. The WholeafCompany supply eco-friendly plates, bowls and various environmental packaging material made from nothing but naturally shed palm leaves.  Eco-friendly weddings and picnics are perfect occasions for their  tableware and they also make great Eco-friendly gifts. Also, their Environmental packaging products are great for packaging anything from fruit to golf balls in a more sustainable way.

We’re not your typical advertising agency for two reasons:

Firstly, because some of the ideas we create are not always “advertising” in the conventional sense of the word. In fact, we believe we have already entered a world where many of the best ideas are not recognisable as advertising at all. It’s what we refer to as Magic Notions – a magic notion being an idea that changes everything and has a life of its own beyond the moment of its conception. That’s a long way from the one-way street of traditional advertising.

Secondly, any kind of agency – by definition – makes its money by connecting people who need something with people who have something and charging a fee. We don’t do that. Yes, we work with a lot of different people who make things for us – and we make it our business to know which ones can make them best – but we don’t charge a mark-up.

We make money by discovering and articulating the magic notions that can transform businesses and markets, from the magic notions in our own thinking, in the ideas that flow from that thinking and in the ever-changing ways we choose to bring those ideas to life.

Another thing we aren’t is “media-neutral” or whatever it’s being called this month. “Media-neutral” pisses us off. To us, “media-neutral” means “media-indifferent” – as in “media indifferent (because however you want it sliced, we still get a cut)”. The ability to cookie-cut an idea into every conceivable format is not a test of its rightness. In fact, it dilutes when it should be trying to concentrate, and encourages lowest common-denominator thinking. Magic notions travel, without a doubt. It’s one of their defining characteristics. However, we recognise that they don’t travel down every road. In fact, they usually go off-road, build their own bridges, blaze their own trails and mix metaphors even more wildly than this sentence just did.

There is a big difference between creating the best ideas that works in any medium and searching for the best ideas and best mediums for those ideas. We are driven by a search for the latter.

We grew out of a company with deep expertise in technology, an expertise that we draw on to this day. Technology is a fundamental driver of society, and many of the worlds’ most successful and influential companies started as and continue to be technological innovators. There are lessons to be learned from these companies that can be applied in the wider world. Their effects are already being felt by us all.

At a certain point, however, we realised that the clients we could do the best work for could not be defined by “product” or “category” or “audience”. In fact, we began to question whether those terms even meant anything. No, we realised that our best clients are united by attitude – an attitude of ceaseless innovation and relentless challenging of convention. Not because they want to provoke and rebel (although most of them do), but because they want to survive and prosper.

Our company is a work in progress, as you will discover very quickly when you explore this website. It changes all the time – as do we, because our culture demands constant learning and a constant flow of new ideas and new conversations. In fact, that’s exactly what this website is – not a window into our world, but a conversation – a conversation we invite you to join, and look forward to sharing with you.

If you’re still trying to create marketing campaigns that are built on solid logic, sound value propositions and robust customer testimonials, then you are missing the point!

The rules have changed.

You have to be interesting first and then relevant!

Being interesting starts conversations, content get shared around the web and your marketing campaign becomes something that lives and breathes.

Think about it. If a direct mail piece lands on your desk with a solid and logical headline; “Save millions with our new business software”, “listen to what our customers have to say”, “download our amazing white paper”. What do you do?

I will tell you: unless it is truly unique you forget it, you bin it, you move on to something more important.

Why, because we have all become hardened and fatigued to old world sales messages and old school ways of delivering marketing ideas. They are dull, disengaging and frankly boring.

And that’s the killer point. Most of the stuff we receive is boring, especially in a B2B context.

The online world has opened our eyes to what is possible in terms of exciting and memorable content and much of this has been driven by consumer marketing. Our expectations of what is fun, interesting and compelling is being shaped by our experiences as consumers, which means the “expectation gap” between B2B and B2C is getting wider by the nanosecond.

We live in a super connected world. Our online identities, profiles and connections are growing exponentially. Marketing campaigns that fail to exploit the viral looping capacity of the connected world are a total waste of money.

You need to be creating exciting content that sparks conversations. You need to be at the heart of these conversations, directing potential customers to online destinations where you have a compelling story to tell. You need to be hitting them with personalised sales offers and making them feel special. And in the very best examples of online marketing, this customer journey that you have carefully crafted, feels invisible and unmanufactured to your potential customer. It’s a journey of discovery, where they have the illusion of being in control, therefore, they don’t feel like they are being sold to.

So while many clients struggle with breaking away from the same old, same old campaigns that have served them well in the past, the digitally savvy are making waves and stealing vital ground.

Nobody has all the answers, but one thing is for sure, if you start by creating marketing campaigns that are interesting, exciting and memorable and that leverage the power of the super connected planet then you will be ahead of the pack.

For more information you can read our related articles on social CRM and lead generation by clicking the links.

We were commissioned by Betfair to develop a fresh, alternative and innovative strategy to activate these prospects and create a valuable new revenue stream. Previous attempts using a conventional email marketing approach had yielded a 0.4% conversion rate.

The Solution
We analysed the existing data and did some research within the gambling community which alerted us to several critical insights. These insights formed the basis of an eCRM 12 week pilot programme that rolled out to a full blown eCRM strategy with multiple, preference based, self-learning emails.

The Results

• Conversion rates increased from 0.4% to 8.9% over a 12 month period.
• Incremental revenues increased to $5m within the first 12 months.
• Betfair have predicted a lifetime value in excess of $10m.
• ROI in the first year was 4167%
• We operated a risk/reward model with Betfair to prove the value of our approach.
• We’ve been commissioned to work across their entire portfolio.

The Detail

The traditional approach most companies take to email marketing is a quick and dirty fix, something we call “spray & pray”. This form of email marketing is rife within all business sectors and response rates are in massive decline.

It wasn’t rocket science to work out that the most common failings of email marketing is often to do with the fact that it is quick and dirty i.e. it’s success is it’s Achilles heel.

Within Betfair email marketing needed to evolve. More time, care, attention and investment had to be made in order to create more robust and intelligent campaigns that would generate real customer value and revenues.

The problem with doing anything different is that often there is an investment required to kick start the process. Betfair is a savvy commercial organisation and they didn’t want to throw more money at an idea that was unproven.

In order to show our commitment to the process we undertook a 12 week pilot and invested our own time and resources into proving our approach would yield significant results and agreed a payment by results contract with Betfair.

The pilot was a huge success.

How it Worked

We took all the existing Betfair RNF data and ran it through our proprietary data analytics platform which incorporates an intelligent tool we call the recommendation engine.

The process started by sending out:

1: A weekly email with a prominent and enticing “FREE BET” offer.
2: An incentivised questionnaire to gather information about their affinity towards sports.

All data was captured in a scorecard that linked directly to the recommendation engine.

Every subsequent weekly communication would reference the scorecard and any interaction (phone, web, sms) would automatically be recorded to enhance the data profile of each customer.

This iterative and ongoing process enables us to fine tune and automate every subsequent communication based on known preferences. For example, if a customer showed a preference for betting on Premier League Football matches we would tailor our communications accordingly as well as push them towards other types of gambling products that we know people who bet on Premier league football find exciting.

At the heart of this solution is a technology platform that we have built which analyses over 2million combinations of Betfair customer data every 24 hours. The recommendation engine (built on rules and logic) creates automated campaigns that are then dispatched by Betfair’s preferred email marketing broadcast provider.

The success of the entire project is testimony to breaking away from convention, having a business partner prepared to share the risk and the hard work and intellectual rigour that was injected into the campaign set up.

Hurricane is a strategy driven, COMMUNICATIONS AGENCY for the digital age.

We help clients by:

(1) Transforming and positioning brands for the online world.

(2) Delivering high performance lead generation programmes.

(3) Building web based solutions for improved customer relations.

The frenetic pace of change across the marketing industry has left many seasoned professionals scratching their heads about how to embrace all the changes on the digital landscape. Questions about transforming and positioning your brand, getting to grips with online lead generation and improving customer relationships are hot topics that we seek to offer clear advice and guidance on.

Here is the dreaded list of services:

•    Brand strategy, research, identity, content and activation

•    Digital & Communications strategy

•    Online media planning and buying

•    Data planning, analytics, list buying, cleaning and management

•    Online customer relationship management / eCRM

•    Intelligent Email marketing

•    Interactive and Online marketing

•    Web business solutions (applications and portals)

•    Search and Social influence marketing

•    Viral marketing

•    Web design, build and hosting

1: THE BRAND BIT:

We help create and develop digitally driven brand strategies and identities for companies seeking to take an alternative position within their chosen market or category in order to accelerate growth. Our proven methodology is ONLY relevant for companies who want to shake things up and have the appetite and the balls to make innovation and disruption their sword and shield. Our holistic approach integrates both on and offline, making sense of web 2.0 and cloud computing developments in order to develop something relevant, memorable and unique.

Within the remit of BRAND activation, we include brand driven advertising, development of your web site, key customer, partner and internal communications as well as any innovative and experiential ways to bring your brand to life.

2: THE RESPONSE BIT:
We provide fresh, innovative and disruptive ways to engage with your customers and prospects in order to create a meaningful dialog, generate  conversations and drive  sustainable revenues. For many clients this is increasingly taking the form of online or interactive communications, where engaging content is a must, not a nice to have. We start each campaign using our 3 step planning metholology which involves:

(1) Creating “Persuasion pathways”

(2) Seeding “Activation candy”

(3) Managing “Retention happiness”

We provide a number of services to bring this to life: digital strategy, traffic and search optimisation, on and offline response media, email/sms and eCRM, social media, direct marketing, response advertising, customer and channel portals and all forms of interactive content creation and development; from micro sites to flash demos, ebooks and Google gadgets as well as the latest trends in augmented reality and surface technology.

3: THE CUSTOMER RELATIONS BIT:

Finding cost effective ways to automate the engagement process with your customers is a hot topic in boardrooms across the planet. Technology capabilities have improved dramatically in recent years allowing companies to consider the option of opening the walls of their business in order for their customers and partners to self manage their relationship.  We have a proven web business solutions platform and methodolology that we use to help clients determine the right type of application and a team of dedicated project managers and developers to help build and manage the process. Examples include; customer interfaces, channel partner portals and employee gateways.     

We all know the marketing landscape is changing at a rapid pace. We can see it first hand in the way we are consuming social media in our work and private lives; the odd blog, the Facebook update, the occasional tweet, the increasing usage of Linked In.

Wherever you are right now on the social media curve, one thing is for sure; its trajectory is heading for the stars. So my question is a simple one: “What are you doing differently to embrace social CRM in your marketing campaigns?”

Can your current agency cut it?

This is as much a question for you (Mr/Mrs client) as it is for your agency. You see, the symbiotic relationship between clients and their agencies is coming under increasing scrutiny.  The impact of social influence media and social CRM affects everybody. If your existing agencies don’t get it, what chance have you got of embracing it?

The big difference is this; old world agencies still work in silo’s; some are experts in advertising, others in direct marketing or PR, but we all know that the way we consume information, interact with brands and ultimately spend our money (B2B or B2C) is shaped heavily by a multitude of inter connected and often invisible relationships.

Can a single discipline agency really cut it in the new world?

Some agencies would have you believe that being “media neutral” is therefore the best place to start. But to be honest, “media-neutral” pisses us off. To us, “media-neutral” means “media-indifferent” – as in “media indifferent (because however you want it sliced, we still get a cut)”. The ability to cookie-cut an idea into every conceivable format is not a test of its rightness. In fact, it dilutes when it should be trying to concentrate, and encourages lowest common-denominator thinking.

We believe there is a big difference between creating the best ideas that works in any medium and searching for the best ideas and best mediums for those ideas. We are driven by a search for the latter, it’s something we call “media positive”.

Clients need agencies that don’t just churn out marketing messages and campaigns but that help nurture customer connections. Agencies that don’t just push out ideas and content but that pull in real live buying opportunities. Agencies that don’t just orchestrate campaigns but that facilitate conversations.

So what’s the Social CRM thing all about?

Old world CRM helps companies by pulling together sales and customer data from disparate parts of the organisation and giving a bird’s eye view of an individual customer or company to help sales and marketing drive incremental revenue opportunities.

Social CRM is your existing CRM plus the ability to leverage the social web and kick start, manage and ultimately automate the conversation process. Its power lies in the ability for all parts of the organisation but mostly customer services and sales/marketing teams to listen in on conversations (social voyeurism), craft compelling messages, join in on customer conversations (Twitter is being increasingly used in this context) and offer people added value information in real time.

Key benefits:

1) Social CRM gives your company a “friendly face”. It’s great to know that behind the big company facade there are real people you can talk to. This means push based content turns into pull based conversations. Your company appears more human and the customer take out from all of this is a positive one. Hopefully, they will talk about you to their colleagues, friends and peers and so the social looping phenomenon gathers momentum.

2) Social CRM lets you listen and watch from the sidelines. It’s an invaluable insight and research tool to gauge the mood of your customers, enhance new product development, utilise co-creation marketing techniques and to create “On the fly” campaigns and promotions that hit the right nerve at the right time.

3) Social CRM puts your customers at the heart of your business i.e. transform conversations into collaborative experiences that drive sales opportunities. And ultimately transform these experiences into meaningful relationships based upon real customer engagement.

4)Social CRM is in real time. Forget spending weeks devising marketing campaigns and doing endless focus groups. Everything you need to know about your customers, their behaviours, their likes and dislikes is LIVE on the web right now. Social CRM give you the power to become a real time, sales and marketing organisation.

Getting your head around it all

The first place to start is by mapping out the key social networks (Linked In, Plaxo, Viadeo, FaceBook etc) that your customers belong to. Invariably there will be more information on their profile pages than you have currently in your existing CRM system. The challenge is then to think of creative ways to merge and integrate this rich information.

The second thing to do is to identify your best customer advocates or champions. If you don’t have a formalised customer advocate group, now is a good time to start one. Involve them in shaping your product development and customer communications. This type of co-creation is ideally suited to the connected world we live in.

The final point is that we are still at the exciting part of the Social CRM curve, it’s not too late to start embracing social influence media in your campaigns and learning as you go. No doubt over the next few months and years, software companies will be developing killer cloud applications to help us manage and measure this powerful new form of marketing.

Check out:

www.appirio.com

www.tweetdeck.com

http://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/?p=829t

http://events.linkedin.com/Social-CRM-Virtual-Summit-Expo/pub/128815

They helped us shape our future, from creating a challenger position in the market, bringing our new brand to life through a vibrant and fresh creative look and feel through to our 5 stage manifesto which our entire management team have signed up to in order for us to deliver on our promise to our customers.

They have proven time and again their ability to deliver on any type of brief.  However I think what stands them apart, is their ability to find the right solution to any problem or issue that I and we as a business have faced.  They bring energy and excitement combined with that X factor difference which makes them a rare find. And this is exactly what is needed, especially in these challenging times”.

Click here to go to the case study or visit www.thus.net

Steve Willmore, Head of Marketing, THUS a Cable & Wireless business

Hurricane have effectively helped us re-imagine the Mindstorm business by developing a unifying brand that both the management and employees have now bought into. Hurricane provided fresh thinking, creative and imaginative ideas, and above all challenged our thinking. We are now at the point where our brand DNA is established and we look forward to rolling out a new brand identity, including new logo and visual identity, tone of voice and campaign themes.

Click here to go to the case study or visit www.mindstorm.com

Chris Adlard, Head of Marketing, Mindstorm

We wanted to work with a partner who clearly understand the technology market and would be able to support our objectives in becoming the number 1 printing vendor in Europe by 2013. The team are inspiring, energetic and have produced some excellent thinking and creative work in the past 18 months.”

Click here to go to the case study.s

Neil Sawyer, Head of Marketing, Samsung European Print Organisation.