SOCIAL MEDIA: One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself

One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself Add to ...

JAMES BRADSHAW - MEDIA REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Jun. 04 2014, 3:37 PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 7:31 AM EDT

It has been a year of growth, hiring, and thousands upon thousands of tweets at Twitter Inc.’s Canadian outpost, but Kirstine Stewart still struggles to find the right yardstick to measure its progress.

As head of Twitter Canada, Ms. Stewart’s main job is convincing broadcasters and brands that her company’s network is a place where they can engage with more people, whether they’re on their sofa or on the move. Even after many milestones, there is much more to do to convince companies to pour their marketing budgets into 140-character promotions.

One year after it set up shop in Toronto, the company’s Canadian arm still holds to its startup ethos. There is no clear five-year plan, which makes it harder to explain what Twitter is, and will be. For now, Ms. Stewart has been extending a hand to nervous former colleagues in the broadcast world – her last job was heading up CBC’s English services – and promising to help them find “new life” and new audiences in a fast-changing digital landscape.

“We have a great opportunity to help transition traditional media into a newer space,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “Did video kill the radio star? No. Things move and change. That’s just the world of media.”

Among the success stories so far is the fact that all of Canada’s major broadcasters signed on to Twitter Amplify, a program that lets them embed videos and other content into tweets targeted at users with particular interests. Thanks to the power of algorithms, the corporate account for Hockey Night in Canada can now blast out clips of goals scored in the NHL playoffs within moments, reaching targeted hockey aficionados who are not yet among its 248,000 followers.

The key is Twitter’s ability to mine data on hundreds of millions of users – some of whom have come to view the network as an indispensable tool – that is more specific than the broad age and gender categories that have shaped decision-making in conventional television. “I’m a 40-something woman with a couple of kids at home. I don’t watch Oprah,” Ms. Stewart says, to illustrate that “no one is ever typical.”

Initiatives like Amplify have driven Twitter’s rapid growth. Its first-quarter revenue more than doubled to $250-million worldwide, and its global recruiting has nearly kept pace, rising from 1,500 employees when Ms. Stewart became the first Canadian-based hire in April, 2013, to nearly 3,000 today.

The Canadian office has swelled to more than 20 people and expects to surpass 30 by summer’s end, which will soon force a move from its King Street West location to make room for new arrivals. Here, seniority is measured in months, or even weeks. Revenue has also “multiplied,” Ms. Stewart said, though the company doesn’t release country-specific figures.

Yet investors are still wary. Growth in the number of users has been slowing, and the first quarter saw just a 5.8-per-cent increase in the number of users, to 255 million. Some have questioned whether Twitter can secure the mass appeal needed to make it profitable. The company publishes select metrics such as ad revenue per 1,000 timeline views, and has 360 ways to profile its users, from location to gender or the device they use.

Even so, it can be tricky making those numbers tell a simple story that shows how Twitter measures up to Facebook Inc. or Google Inc. “People try to fit you in a box,” Ms. Stewart says.

She still hears from naysayers who think Twitter is filled mostly with people commenting on their lunch, but less often. More broadcasters, brands such as Visa Inc. and organizations such as the Canadian Olympic Committee have been experimenting with Twitter’s ever-expanding suite of promotional products.

But marketers often carve up their budgets between conventional and digital media, which can hamstring investments in Twitter. The solution, Ms. Stewart says, is education. She has brought on board new managers to work closely with particular industries, such as head of sports Christopher Doyle, who joined recently from CBC Sports. Their message is that businesses “have to think more in real time” about reaching users, and that Twitter can be the connector.

“It’s hard to define that success and explain it in a simple way,” she says. “But it’s pretty clear what it is when you’re on the platform.”

BRANDING: The art – and science – of creating a brand name

The art – and science – of creating a brand name

SUSAN KRASHINSKY - MARKETING REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, May. 29 2014, 4:23 PM EDT

Last updated Friday, May. 30 2014, 8:06 AM EDT

Anyone who has spent time poring over a book of baby names or wrestling with the legacy of great-grandma Bertha knows that coming up with a name is no trivial matter. And when it comes to the multimillion-dollar baby that is a major brand, the pressure is on.

That is why nervous corporate parents come to David Placek’s door. Over the past 30 years, the founder of Sausalito, Calif.-based Lexicon Branding Inc. has focused solely on giving brands their names.

“Just how important is a name? My simple answer to this is, nothing will be used for a longer period of time or more often than a company’s name,” Mr. Placek said. “It’s not just a creative exercise. It’s a strategic one.”For Lexicon, those creations have included such household names as Swiffer, Dasani, and here in Canada, BlackBerry. More recently, Mr. Placek was on Canadian soil – and bearing fruit – once again: Lexicon helped with rebranding ING Direct to Tangerine.

Because brand identity is the core of any marketer’s plans, companies are willing to shell out to make sure they get it right. Lexicon’s services start at $45,000 (U.S.), but for bigger corporate projects that require multiple interviews with management – as Tangerine’s did – the cost is typically doubled, closer to roughly $90,000 depending on the project.

The average thinking person might well balk at the price tag, especially since coming up with a name does not seem, frankly, all that hard to do.

But companies such as Toyota Motor Corp., Coca-Cola Co. and Apple Inc. have decided that it’s worth every penny. So how does it actually work?

First, there’s the research. ING spoke to roughly 10,000 people, inside and outside the company, to figure out how people feel about the brand, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and to test the names it was working with, among other factors. (Lexicon contributed by surveying about 5,000 employees and more than 1,500 customers.)

For ING, that was important because it highlighted the fact that customers do not have the same skepticism toward banks in Canada as in the U.S. There was no need to rebuild lost trust. And secondly, customers tended to see ING as different.

“So we wanted to make sure we didn’t create a name that was more traditional, more stodgy, or more like other banks,” Mr. Placek said. “We had to keep our freshness.”

After research is done, two-person teams of linguists at Lexicon come up with a long list of names. Each team is given a different briefing: One team knows everything that management wants, the current name, and the research results. Other teams are given less information, to free them up to think more broadly.

The long list for Tangerine was about 3,000 names, which is astounding. (Try to think of 3,000 words.) But Mr. Placek explains that many of these are accounted for by different variations on a single idea: Adding a prefix for example, or listing different tree names if there is one idea based on a tree.

“To be successful here, you have to not worry about being very efficient,” he said.

That long list is quickly cut in half. Then a longer process cuts it down to a meaningful long list of 300 or 400 that management will consider. When the list got down to roughly 40, Lexicon’s legal team stepped in. They tossed out names that might violate other trademarks, but also those that are legally passable but too similar to others to be effective amid all the marketing clutter.

Finally, linguists comb through the names to ensure they are pronounceable and have positive connotations in a number of different languages. (For Tangerine, they looked at about 12.) Then they go back to market research to test their options.

“Then we argue,” Mr. Placek said.

Sometimes, Lexicon will create new words for a name. This can be useful to communicate that a company is innovative – as was the case for Pentium – or in a category where competitors are using very descriptive words. When Procter & Gamble Co. created Swiffer, for example, its biggest competitor was Clorox Co.’s ReadyMop. P&G considered names such as EasyMop and MegaMop before coming to Lexicon.

The team helped P&G figure out that consumers’ associations with the word “mop” – a floppy, messy tool pushing water and dirt around the floor – were not good. Since pretty much everyone hates mopping, Lexicon also proposed that the product sound just a bit more fun, almost like a toy.

Lexicon played with the sounds from words for cleaning – wiping, brushing, sweeping, swiping. Their first idea was to take the word “swipe” and transform it into Swif, with one F. Then they added another F, but the word just came to a stop. It was not active enough. They finally landed on Swiffer, which has been a huge success.

“I’ve been told ReadyMop is about a $200-million brand. Swiffer is almost a $4-billion brand,” Mr. Placek said. It’s also expanded to other products such as the Duster and the WetJet.

For Sonos, a brand of high-end audio equipment, Lexicon took the Latin root for sound, “son.” It then structured the name as a palindrome to communicate the idea that it is seamless. It was also a plus that the word ends in OS, since the company wants people to think of its equipment as more than just speakers. They are an operating system.

Lexicon is not the only player in this space. Many ad agencies will come up with brand names for clients. (In the case of Tangerine, its Toronto agency John St. was deeply involved in the process with Lexicon.) And there are other competitors who specialize in naming, such as San Francisco-based Landor Associates and the Omnicom Group Inc.-owned firm Interbrand.

For all the projects he has done, there are plenty of brand names Mr. Placek wishes he’d created. DreamWorks, for example, perfectly sums up a team of people whose work is all about imagination – they dream by day. He admires Lexus for coining a name at a time when most cars were named after people, such as Ford, or after animals like Mustang. The name sounds like luxury. And it is perfectly constructed to be pleasing to say, he explains, rhapsodizing about the order of vowels and consonants in a way only a person obsessed with words can.

“It’s very crisp,” he says. “I love the X in the middle. It’s just an extraordinary name.”

ING’S SHORTLIST

When ING Direct rebranded itself as Tangerine this year, it was the result of a process that started with a list of roughly 3,000 possible names. That was eventually whittled down to the following shortlist:

Forward Bank

Thrive Bank

Veva Bank

Orange Bank

Tangerine Bank

LEXICON’S GREATEST HITS

In the 30 years since Lexicon was founded in a San Francisco apartment, David Placek has worked on more than 3,500 brand naming projects. Here are some of the most recognizable brands he and his team have helped to create:

Swiffer

Febreze

BlackBerry

Forester and Outback for Subaru

Scion for Toyota

PowerBook for Apple

OnStar

Pentium

Dasani

E-marketing: Painless profit for endless gain

Step 3: Advertise across Multi-Media.  How is New Media changing the Marketing Landscape?  .   Social media enables targeted marketing responses at individual touch points along the consumer decision journey.  

Out-of-Home Channels (OOH)

• Billboards and transit ads, followed by ads in shopping malls and restaurants, have the greatest reach among OOH channels.

• Ads within medical clinics, health clubs, bars, and on campus can be effective in reaching specific demographic and lifestyle targets.

• Each month 7 in 10 visit a mall, 6 in 10 a restaurant, 1 in 4 a gym, 1 in 5 a medical clinic, and 1 in 6 a campus.

• On-the-go consumers can use their mobile phone to interact with OOH posters to download coupons, view product demos, enter contests, obtain samples, compare product information and make a purchase.

Mobile

“Canadians are embracing mobile technology and using their Smartphones more in store aisles,”

• There’s a huge increase in Smartphone penetration among Canadian consumers with 37% of Canadian shoppers owning a Smartphone, up rapidly from 24% reported last year; however still below the 50% penetration among American shoppers in a more competitive mobile market.

• A third of shoppers own an iPhone or a Blackberry device, while 21% have a phone running Android OS.

• Over 50% of planned purchases are for iPhones, while Blackberry and Android phones each account for 20% of planned purchases.

• On the tablet front, 14% of shoppers own an internet-enabled tablet, but an additional 20% say they plan to purchase within the year.

• The role of Smartphones in retail is growing with 60% of shoppers interested in using their phone to download or scan coupons and over 50% using them to store their shopping lists. 40% are willing to make instant purchases using their phone.

• 88% of Smartphone owners are aware of quick response (QR) codes while 40% use it and new technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC) are gaining popularity.