Category: Uncategorized

You can’t buy your favourite brands at Shoppers any more, and you may not want to buy their replacements

If you’ve been in a Shoppers Drug Mart store lately, you may have noticed that many of your favourite brands are missing.  As I discovered this week when I traipsed up and down the aisles for 10 minutes looking in vain for a can of Planter’s nuts, there were approximately 16 feet of shelf space devoted to various nuts and trail mixes, but only one brand represented:  Life Brand. And this is happening throughout the store, as Shoppers’ brands (which, in addition to the Life Brand, include Quo and GOSH cosmetics, Balea Skincare, RAW Essentials, Simply Food and Nativa, among others) are knocking name brands off the shelves.

You don’t have to tell me about the advantages (for the retailer) in promoting store brands:  Better margin, lower marketing costs, repeat visits to the store, exclusivity, brand awareness in the home, etc.  I get it.  The problem for Shoppers, however, is that – unlike President’s Choice, Loblaws’ super-successful store brand – Shoppers’ products mostly aren’t all that great.  

The food products are substandard (I dare you to ingest a Nativa cracker or cookie and then want to eat a second) and not all that cheap; a box of the facial tissue won’t last you through 24 hours of a cold; and the Quo makeup always gives me a rash.

But don’t take my word for it.  “Oh, I never use any of the Life Brand medications,” one Shoppers staffer, who asked not to be named, told me.  “There have been way too many recalls on those products – you can’t trust them. And the food products keep going on sale because no one buys them.”

“I tried the chocolates when they first came out,” said a merchandiser for one of the big Toronto stores.  “They’re terrible! I wouldn’t buy them for myself, let alone buy them for anyone else.  I don’t understand why they keep trying to force us to promote them as gifts – I’d be too embarrassed to give them to someone.”

Store owners don’t have a choice

If the Shoppers house brand products are so bad – and the people who work in the stores know it – how come they continue to get more shelf space, while even big, established brands are getting pushed out?  Shoppers head office is forcing them to take the product.

Stores are sent batches of the products, whether they order them or not, and are required to merchandise it according to the pre-determined planogram.  Head office doesn’t really care if we sell it or not, since they get paid once it goes out to stores.  (It’s worth noting that in 2010, Shoppers owner-operators filed a class-action suit against Shoppers management, for similar heavy-handedness.)

Eventually, this has got to erode margins

I know what Shoppers is trying to do and why:  As a publicly-traded company which has lost revenue in recent years to changes in the way prescription drugs are sold, they’re looking to shore up the stock price – and brand loyalty – in other areas.  And replacing independent name brands with higher-margin, supply-chain-controlled store brands is a good way to improve ‘shareholder value’.

Except they seem to have forgotten a key factor in the retail process:  The consumer.  

Consumers are much more willing to try store brands than they were 20 years ago, and it’s not difficult to get them to try a new product, especially when you remove the element of choice.  (“I wanted Planter’s nuts, but I can’t be bothered going to another store, and Life Brand nuts can’t be that bad, can they?”)  

But once consumers have tried a handful of products and found most of them disappointing, they’ll eventually give up.  At best they’ll keep shopping in your store but avoid your house brand products; at worst they’ll switch stores entirely.  “I never go to Shoppers any more,” a friend of mine said to me recently.  “All their stuff is way more expensive than Rexall, and I can’t get what I need anyway.” Some store managers say that retail margins are already being affected because they have to put the house brands on sale all the time just to get them to move.

The problem is that it takes time for consumers’ buying habits to register with the people pushing the house brands.  After all, Shoppers has 1000 stores across Canada, so by the time the store-brand product rejection causes a real dent in the bottom line and the individual store owners manage to convince head office that the products just aren’t working no matter how much they’re forced to merchandise, it’ll probably look like the problem is coming from another direction.  

Will Shoppers survive this? Yes.  Are they risking long-term competitive advantage for short-term perceived gains?  Definitely.

So yesterday I wrote a post about how the Susan G. Komen foundation has now become inextricably linked with religion and politics, thanks to their actions regarding Planned Parenthood and Karen Handel in the past week or two.

It wasn’t a controversial post:  I didn’t take a stand on religion, politics, abortion or Planned Parenthood – only on how getting associated with controversial topics like that can have serious, long-term consequences for your brand.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this morning a couple of people let me know that the link I posted (which was automatically fed to my Facebook account from my Twitter account) was being ‘blocked’ by Facebook.  I wish I’d done a screen cap, but basically what happened was when you tried to click on the link, a notice popped up saying that Facebook had blocked the link on improper ‘terms of use’ grounds.  There was nothing wrong with the blog or my website itself, and when I posted the link to a friend’s page, it wasn’t blocked or flagged.

I don’t know what happened.  Did someone complain about the title of the post?  Did someone complain about the blog post itself?  If so, who complained?  And why?  Or did a Facebook algorithm just not like my use of ‘religion’ and ‘lethal’ in the same headline?  

Facebook offered no reason, of course, and no way to get to the bottom of it.  

A couple of people have suggested that I not write this follow-up, lest I get in bigger trouble with Facebook.  But I wrote the piece in the first place because I noticed that other people seemed reluctant to talk about it, and it gets my goat that I have to be leery of making what seemed to me an obvious – and not particularly incendiary – connection based on a topic that’s had widespread media coverage.

Anyway, go read the original blog post, and let me know:  Is it really the kind of thing that Facebook should be blocking?

So, as my Twitter feed fills up with endless tweets about the vapidity that is Pinterest, I can’t help noticing that marketing types aren’t talking a whole lot about this week’s debacle involving the Susan G. Komen foundation and their funding of Planned Parenthood.

For those of you who haven’t been following the story, here it is in a nutshell:  Susan G. Komen For the Cure, the organization which brought you the ubiquitous ‘pink ribbons’, raises something like $400 million annually for cancer-fighting-related causes.  This year, they were slated to give $700k of that to Planned Parenthood, an organization which works to “…improve women’s health and safety, prevent unintended pregnancies, and advance the right and abilities of individuals to make informed and responsible choices.”  Pro-lifers in the US interpret this to mean that Planned Parenthood ‘promotes’ abortion; pro-choicers see Planned Parenthood as a vital resource for disadvantaged women who are most in need of assistance.

Last week, Komen announced it would pull their grant to Planned Parenthood.  The religious right was thrilled, because they saw it as a victory for their agenda.  But the left-wing internet blew up, and Komen not only reversed its stance but parted ways with Senior VP Karen Handel (a former gubernatorial candidate who was outspoken in her desire to defund Planned Parenthood), who was widely believed to be the architect of Komen’s initial move to withdraw their Planned Parenthood grant.

This is really all about politics and religion

Most of the mainstream media is carefully skirting the issue, but let’s be honest here:  The whole furor about Komen, Planned Parenthood and Handel is all to do with politics and religion.  And these days, especially in the US, politics and religion are inextricably intertwined.  

And here’s where Komen has just done itself a huge amount of damage.  In a matter of days, they’ve gone from a fairly neutral, non-profit, friendly-pink-everything organization to one which has managed to antagonize both the left-leaning, less religious camp (by withdrawing their support for Planned Parenthood) and the right-wing, conservative Christian camp (by reversing their decision and getting rid of Handel).

Komen has now become both political and religious, and it’s already causing huge problems for the brand.

They’ve made it okay to boycott pink ribbons

I don’t know about you, but when I saw pink KFC buckets of chicken and pink M&Ms, I had to wonder if the whole pink ribbon campaign had gone too far – should we really be eating more fried foods while telling ourselves that we’re helping women’s health?  And I had heard rumours about how the Komen foundation was more interested in selling pink stuff than they were in actually finding a cure for cancer.

But I wasn’t about to stand up and start criticizing pink stuff, because I’d look like a misanthropic luddite who didn’t appreciate awareness or research or, even worse, was somehow ‘against’ supporting women with breast cancer.

It turns out I wasn’t alone, however, and the events of the last few days have opened the floodgates.  The blogosphere is abuzz with commentary – from the left, the right, and the alternative-living types – all of whom are not only angry with Komen’s moves this week, but who are also getting more vocal with their criticisms of Komen’s practices around inflated salaries, questionable product endorsements, and relationships with pharmaceutical companies.

 

A brand misstep of New Coke proportions.  Or at least Netflix.

Two weeks ago, I would have said that Komen was one of the most successful non-profit brands in the world, and in fact could compete with for-profit brands in terms of top-of-mind awareness and loyalty – they’ve raised something more than $1 billion in less than 10 years.

Today…I don’t think Komen is going to collapse overnight.  There are too many people with too much emotionally invested – and too many brands with too many runs and events and products invested – in Komen-related programs for the whole organization to implode in the next five minutes.  But if their bottom line hasn’t been cut in half in the next 18 months, I’ll be greatly surprised.  I only hope that that money finds its way to other cancer-fighting causes.

^{This is the control panel for a Winnebago.  But I thought it was a nice metaphor for having your social media channels managed from one central, delightfully wood-panelled, location.}

These days I find myself doing a lot of social media consulting, usually helping small businesses start using social media.  And the first question I’m always asked is:  “What social media channels should I be using?”

99% of the time, my answer is the same:  Start with the trifecta of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

“I get that I should be using Twitter and LinkedIn,” they say.  “But Facebook?  Isn’t that just for personal stuff, like friends and family?  I don’t want the world to see my family pictures.  That’s not appropriate for my business.  And Facebook can’t help build my business anyway.”

When you’re a small business, you are your personal network

The thing is, when you’re a small business owner, much of your business is going to come from your personal network.  Your sister-in-law, the guy you shared an office with 10 years ago and still keep in touch with, the neighbour you always hang out with on Friday nights when your spouses have other things to do – these are people who are often in a surprisingly good position to refer you, your business and your product to others.  And they’re likely to be surprisingly enthusiastic about you.

In fact, they’d probably recommend you to more people more often if they could remember what you do and that you’re doing it – and that’s where Facebook can help.  

For example:  The other day, a friend from grade school posted a note on Facebook about how she was having trouble with her nanny.  I don’t speak to her on a regular basis, and she lives in another country, so without Facebook I wouldn’t have known that she was having an issue.  As it happened, my cousin-in-law, who runs a babysitting business, had just posted a note about how her company can help find nannies in that area.  So all of a sudden I was able to connect my friend with my cousin-in-law’s business.  

It wouldn’t have happened on Twitter (since my Twitter feed is too busy and my grade-school friend isn’t on there anyway), and it definitely wouldn’t have happened on LinkedIn (since ‘trouble with nannies’ isn’t the kind of content that tends to find a place on LinkedIn).

If you aren’t linking Facebook to your professional profile, how will these kinds of connections happen?

Stop worrying about the invasion of your personal life

Guess what?  The convergence of your personal and professional life has already happened.  If you’re a small business owner who’s been out there doing small-business-owner things like meeting people, attending events, publishing articles and making contacts, your personal life isn’t a mystical secret.  Anyone with 30 minutes and some basic deduction skills can find out a lot about you, and can probably find a whole heap of photos, too.  

This is a good thing.  You want to be accessible; you want to turn up in Google searches.  The more findable you are, the more credibility you have.  And unless you’ve been a complete idiot, and posted a whole slew of photos of yourself doing jello shots off the naked torsos of strange men, attaching your Facebook profile to your personal brand – and associating it with the company you lead – isn’t going to be a problem.

When you’re too private, people wonder why

The other day I wrote about how authenticity and transparency in advertising isn’t as popular as the gurus would have you believe. However, where they’re right about transparency is when it comes to personal branding, and when you’re a small businessperson, personal branding is everything.  

Before you ever get into a meeting with a new client, someone in the decision-making chain is going to Google you.  If they can’t find much information about you, they’re going to assume you’re not as prolific, influential or important as you want them to think you are.  They’re simply going to wonder why someone who calls themselves an ‘expert’ only has 3 search returns.  Facebook can increase your searchable content volume while you’re building up your other channels – and that can be a big advantage.

When Kim Kardashian’s marriage dissolved after 72 days, I wrote a blog post about how it was likely to do serious damage to her brand. 

Well, it’s true that she’s not as visible in ShoeDazzle ads as she used to be, Skechers has replaced her with a bulldog for their new ad campaign, and the comments sections of gossip websites are filled to bursting with requests to stop posting about this “no talent” family, but, sadly, ‘Kim and Kourtney Take New York’ just got record ratings this past weekend. 

So perhaps the brand implosion hasn’t (yet?) happened.  But why?

Because she’s using ‘Kim and Kourtney’ as an extended self-redemption commercial, and the editing is fantastic.

The Kardashian editing team has always been hard-core:  In Season 6, Episode 12 (‘Trouble in Paradise’), they did a seamless job of editing Kim’s original comment of “When I married a black guy, my father didn’t speak to me for 3 months…” to the much less damning “When I married a guy, my father didn’t speak to me for 3 months…”  (Watch the episode here:  the comment happens about 5 minutes from the end.)

But the post-divorce editing has been inspired.  The Kris Humphries reaction shots alone – yawning, staring into space, gazing hopefully at his smartphone while string theory is being discussed around him – are doing more for Kim’s erstwhile reputation than any soft-serve halfwit Barbara Walters interview could.

And this weekend’s episode had a nice setup scene in which Kim tells her mother she’s having ‘doubts’ about the marriage.

The scene is supposed to take place in Dubai, two weeks before Kim officially announces her divorce, but it’s happening in a car with darkened windows – it could have been shot any time.  But watch closely:  When the camera cuts away from Kim, they’ve inserted additional audio in which she sounds much closer to divorce, and much more ‘conflicted’ about the situation.

I’m sure there are all kinds of other creative editing tricks being used here – I don’t watch the Kardashian shows all the time, and these are just a couple of examples which struck me as the most glaring.  But I continue to be kind of stunned that (a) no one else seems to notice this stuff and (b) no one on the Kardashian production team has had the kind of life crisis that prompts them to come forward and say, “You know what?  I don’t care if I never work on a Ryan Seacrest production again.  I just can’t be a part of this any more…” – and then spill the background details.