Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

My Starbucks order

Love the fact that the consumer  (me!) is in control:

"One tall soy milk sugar free vanilla latte no foam to go please"

What is your regular Starbucks order?

Chop'd is the new Innocent

I think that  Chop'd could be the new Innocent.

Both Chop'd and Innocent have really understood the current desire to have really good fresh food fast.  Busy urban professionals want  stuff that tastes amazing, but is also healthy. They are looking for  companies with clear ethics but one that doesn't feel too worthy.

When Innocent started back in 1999 Richard, Adam and Jon always talked about the way in which they were helping people to be a bit healthier, in a small and manageable way on a daily basis.  Chop'd is doing a similar thing - like providing free filtered water ( "refill not landfill"), tasty superfoods and a open and transparent approach to marketing.

.

I  had one question for them.  For all their good "green" words, I kept on seeing people throw all their rubbish into one bin and I wondered what their recycling strategy was, was a Chop'd person physically going thru all the rubbish?

So I emailed them and asked them.

Within 15 minutes this is the email that I got back:

Amelia,

Thanks.

What were you doing up at St Pancras? You guys work out of Westminster, no?

(I know at second hand some of the VCCP crew through their WCRS days - all positive feedback, don't worry!)

Glad you like the muesli. My mum brought me up on it. It's really good energy food: fast fruit sugars to pick you up then slow release oats to see you through to lunch.

Maybe try our porridge next time. Its equally different, and in summer is great with yoghurt and raspberries, mmmmm.

We are currently transitioning from PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) to rPET (recycled PET) packaging. All our salad bowls are now rPET. We hope our cups and bottles and cutlery soon will be too. We are also hoping that by 2009 we can 'close the recycling loop'.

Our manufacturers and suppliers are currently working on a plan to collect used bowls and other disposables (at the same time as delivering clean ones), to melt down and turn back into clean ones. In the meantime, we sort our instore waste, as you will hopefully have noticed at St Pancras, which the landlords then recycle accordingly.

It's just a real shame so many of our customers ignore the sorting signs and chuck any old waste in any old hole. We'll get them there in time, don't worry!

I don't know if you'd be interested in occasional lunch deliveries to VCCP, eg for internal meetings, but I know our Curzon Street team already enjoy cycling round St James Park and delivering to another couple of Westminster firms from time to time.

Thanks again for your feedback and enquiry. Please keep it coming.
Always nice to chat with customers, even if it is by email and not over a coffee!

Happy breakfasting (and lunching)

jasper wight
managing director

...................
It was a great email to receive. Really personal, really engaged and really informative.   Exactly the kind of honest answer that I was looking for. I guess that the challenge will be to keep up that kind of content and contact as and when they grow bigger.

Anyway, the food is incredibly tasty. Give it a go if you are close to Canary Wharf/Curzon Street/Spitalfields or St Pancras.

 

Thanks to Educated Community on Flickr for the images.

 

5 simple rules of Blogger Engagement

I wanted to share my thoughts about the new Skype phone from 3 and their blogger outreach launch program.

Last month I talked about the fact that I was in the process of writing an Christmas article for the Spectator about "gadgets for girls" and asked the blogosphere for ideas about what new gadgets I should write about. Robin at 1000 Heads emailed and asked if I would like to trial the new Skype phone.  My husband Skypes a lot with his family back home in France, so I said yes.

Let me start with a big confession upfront: We never used the phone.

We didn't end up using it for a number of reasons: firstly, we realised pretty quickly that the thing that we loved so much about Skype is the web-cam functionality. For us it wasn't really the fact that you can talk via VOIP for free (which is obviously great), but it was more to do with the fact that we could see parents and young cousins on the screen in front of us while we chatted. The Skype phone does not have video functionality.  So  suddenly a big reason for  wanting to use the mobile phone went away. Then we realised that the times that we had always Skyped folks in France were Sunday evenings as that was the best time that we knew everyone would be home, and it felt silly using a mobile in the house when we could have talked together face to face with Skype and iSight.

So I can't give you a proper review of the phone, apart from the fact  that it didn't look very pretty but I was very grateful that someone had thought of letting me have one pre-launch to play with.

But I did want to talk about the blogger outreach program itself and how I found being on the other end of an  initiative like this.

The emails that I received felt a little dull.  Although it was interesting to know that a Flickr group that had been set up, when I clicked through the photos that had been uploaded were corporate photos of executive suits holding up Skype phones.

Sometimes I wonder whether brands are starting to set up Web 2.0 things like Flickr groups because that is what expected of them, rather than it being of any real interest to the consumer.

I would have been more interested in some of the background info, some insight into the technology used, their expectations for handset uptake and also I was interested in hearing 3's reasons for why they wanted to produce a phone like this.

Anyway, I still decided to talk about the Skype phone in my article.

Then I got this email from the blogger team saying: "If you were to link to the article from your blog, mentioning the skypehone (perhaps with a picture), I might wet myself..."

Now I have never met this person before, so to get an email like this actually made me quite uncomfortable.

The same day I got this email from another member of the blogger team asking me to contact them so they could get the handsets back: "now more than ever is the time for pulling together those final thoughts before we sweep in and take back our trusty devices. I say ‘sweep in’. In reality we’ll send a jolly fellow in a delivery van to pick the phones up and return them safely to us - all fairly conventional. As such, we’ll need a daytime phone number and suitable address, with someone to return the phones to our guys."

And if I am honest, I found it a bit annoying.

When the phones were sent out, they did not say that it was a time limited trial. It's not that I wanted to keep the phone, but I do think that companies have to be really transparent upfront about what they want and what the blogger obligations and expectations are. There were huge issues around this when Microsoft Vista did their blogger launch this year (Microsoft gave away a top of the range laptop pre-loaded with Vista for bloggers to use and blog about pre-launch)

Anyway, I did receive an apology for "weirding me out" (their words, not mine) but it got me thinking a lot about blogger outreach and how best to do it:

1. Have something of genuine value to the bloggers that you are contacting (a product, a site, an idea etc)

2. Stay in communication, but not too often

3. Please don't do a "one size fits all/copy and paste" approach, it just feels odd and like a bad PR way of doing it. Think about the blogger you are communicating too, you should have a good sense of what they are like and what they are interested in - if not, spend more time on their blog!

4. Ask for feedback (not just on the product) but also on the way that the program was carried out - stuff like this should be in a constant state of Test, Learn, Refine for any future initiatives.

5. Be totally upfront about expectations and obligations.

Simple really, but funny how often it seems that brands don't follow these 5 simple rules of Blogger Engagement.

O2 Cocoon Blogger Launch

O2 have produced what I think is a fantastic new handset, it's called Cocoon, you can play around with it here. We are working the launch and I'm really excited about it.

I like my Cocoon for some quite girlie reasons, firstly I just think that it looks great and very different from other phones out on the market at the moment. When I take it out in the pub or at a dinner it always draws comments.

I also like the fact that this is what I would term a piece of "insight-led design." By that I mean, strip away the hype about mobiles and the reality is that after talking and texting, the third most used functionality is the alarm feature (in fact in today's Ofcom Report they said just that) Cocoon has a nest which it sits in at night, charging, and it becomes an LED alarm clock.

It also has a cool functionality which allows you to see in-coming texts that scroll via the blue LED lights on the outside of the phone (that has led to many hours with friends texting me rude words just to see the phone light up and effectively swear at us while we giggle like 12 year olds)

That is very...

...and quite funny.

So I believe in in the product which from a Planner's perspective is a good place to start.

We decided to launch the phone in the Blogosphere before any advertising started.  The fact that you're reading this blog probably means that you understand the power of digital advocacy, but if you need any more evidence see the chart below.

We used a proprietary tool called Web Mapping to uncover who we think that key influential UK bloggers. It made me smile that in the category of Thought Leaders, some old London Beersphere mates turned out to rank really highly. So if you see Faris, John, Russell or Henry around ask them to have a look at their Cocoon. I've also found smart bloggers who I was not aware of before, like Techno Kitten, Tom Hume and Di Overton.

You can see some of their thoughts and postings over at the Cocoon Blog. Please drop by and feel free to leave any thoughts that you have there, or on this blog.

We have had some really positive feedback to the way in which O2 is reaching out to the new blogger world in a transparent dialogue  It's quite brave for large clients to do something like this as suddenly control moves out of their hands over to consumers, but the learnings that they are getting for the future are, I think, priceless.

 

“PSFK: The O2 project seems
like a smart one and provides
a potential blueprint for
brands to engage with
bloggers beyond the
sending of press releases.”

Just Juice - why would you say this?

I am aware that this whole "why would you say this???" is starting to become a regular feature on this blog, but I seriously am interested.

Now I don't know very much about juce (Innocent Dan, maybe you can help me out here?), but if you say things like No Gunk, No Junk, and then say From Concentrate, doesn't that simply contradict yourself, or actually is concentrate ok?

Can anyone help?

What do Tesco and Miramax have in common?

I was talking to some smart folks yesterday who used to work at Dunnhumby on the enormous Tesco CRM account. We were chatting about Tesco and I asked them if Tesco stood for anything. I assumed it was would the "something"-Company and was interested what the "something" was. Apparently not. According to them the company was named after Jack Cohen's mum, Tessa.

Reminded me of a story that I heard once about the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey. They named their movie company Miramax after Miriam and Max, their mum and dad. Apparently when the company was in deep financial trouble and the rumour was that they were about to sell, the one thing that they cared about was keeping the Miramax name under their control.

The power of parents.

(BTW, Yahoo Answers disputes the fact that Tesco was named after a Tessa Cohen, but until someone tells me otherwise I am believing it -  it makes for a much nicer story)

Spike Lee meets Johnny Vukan thanks to Steve Jobs

Johnny Vulkan constantly impresses and inspires me and I am really proud to count him as a friend.

I'm sure that you've read about his iPhone experience is all over the blogosphere as well as in the mainstream media. Not only did he get to meet and shop with Spike Lee...

But he also hugely raised the profile of (and I hope money for) Keep A Child Alive thanks to the fact that he was auctioning off the iPhone on eBay.

The other thing that I found interesting was that in all the reports of Johnny's great iPhone adventure his agency, Anomaly, was always mentioned:

PR News: Johnny Vulkan, representative of Keep A Child Alive and partner at Anomaly is first in line at Apple's SoHo store - Manhattan

Valleywag The man on the right, Johnny Vulkan, is a creative type, with Anomaly, a hip web agency

I think that it's just brilliant: Johnny gets to be one of the first people in the world to own an iPhone and become a minor, temporary celebrity in the process and meet loads of interesting people; Keep a Child Alive gets enormous amounts of hugely valuable free publicity (and money) and Anomaly who were smart enough to give Johnny a week off work gets a lot of kudos as do their clients (see the logos on JV's t-shirt and his Jawbone ear-piece) It does more for the reputation of Anomaly as a smart, creative and principled agency that any advertisement that they could have developed and run.

Why would you say that.... (again!)

Like the Fairtrade sign that I blogged about, this sign mystified me.

Our local high street in East Dulwich is fantastic - full of useful local shops, a proper cheesemonger, a fishmonger, a great organic butcher, old fashioned DIY stores, fruit and veg shops. Then along comes White Stuff,  a store that no-one wants, and sets up shop. There have been huge protests against them, it's totally out of keeping with the area and no-one wants them.

The sign that they put up on the outside of their new store  says "There Goes The Neighbourhood."

I agree. So obviously do the graffiti artists. So do all the people in the East Dulwich forum.

So why would they write this up outside their store?

The "retro-ghetto" 2012 logo PR disaster rumbles on

Catch Up Lady, I'm glad you're back from holiday - this is a gem...

Wolff Olins has come out of this all really badly I feel -  their website  says nothing about the issue, apart from a Press Release written before all the controversy began. They are not talking to the press, they are not saying a word. Given that they claim to be  "the world's most influential brand business" (BTW, was there a competition that I missed which Wolff Olins won giving them the right to claim this??), why aren't they doing a better job of managing their own brand?

Maybe the best thing about all of this public anger and dislike of the 2012 logo is that it is getting people talking and thinking about design and logos, which can't really be a bad thing I guess.

Does anyone like the  logo?

Innocent McDonalds, a study in Radical Transparency

The announcement last week that Innocent were launching a trial of their kids smoothies in McDonald's seems to have provoked moral outrage. Comments on their blog are for the most part vehemently against the move: "if you jump into bed with the enemy, you're going to get screwed', "either you are stupid or you have sold out big time', "You are tarnishing what you stand for as a brand by associating yourself with a brand that stands for obesity and exploitation. Shame on you."

This is a fascinating brand story for a number of reasons.

Firstly in this era of Radical Transparency, the fact that Innocent are blogging about this and getting into a discussion with their consumers is admirable. It's interesting to see the way in which this debate is moving online - and there is a genuine sense of a debate taking place, with both sides of the argument expressing their opinions lucidly. In a post about the move, Richard one of the co-founders says that they talked to Innocent drinkers who supported the trial, however to be truly Radically Transparent maybe this debate taken place before the trial started rather than after the announcement was made.

The second reason why I think that this is such an important story is to do with environmental ethics. Richard coined the phrase Fast Moving Sustainable Goods to describe the Innocent business model, "we're not perfect but we're trying to do the right thing." Given the fact that a large proportion of the UK kid population do eat at McDonald's, is Innocent simply living up to their FMSG philosophy? If kids are there anyway, surely they should be allowed the choice between ordering a Coke or something like an Innocent Smoothie? Innocent have never said that are a charity, they are in business to make smoothies and to make money. Isn't this just another way of opening up their market and doing a bit of good to UK kids?

Finally I wonder if there is an element of Middle Class snobbery occurring? Innocent being the ultimate warm and friendly, Middle Class brand and McDonald's being the supposed antithesis. Kind of a double standard - after all it's fine for Innocent Smoothies to be stocked in Shell petrol stations, Tescos or Starbucks.

It's tricky. If I am honest I do worry that this could have a negative impact on an incredibly popular brand who have in the past said that they were against "the dubious tactics of Enron-style conglomerates."

But I admire Innocent for trying (and let's remember it is just a trial) this. It's a great example of Radical Transparency in action.

UPDATE: Email from Richard Reid, co-founder, received on Monday 7th.

Richard at innocent wrote:

       Yes, it was a bit of a tough decision, in that we knew we would get a bit of a kicking from some of our drinkers, but when a company slated for selling unhealthy food asks to sell food that is good for people it seemed more irresponsible of us to say no than yes, even though I knew to some it would come across as the antithesis of innocent.
      
        When it comes down to it, we've got to where we are today by doing what we think is right, rather than by doing what we think sounds right, if you know what I mean. And this decision was no different.
      
        I also sought the counsel of the MD of Greenpeace, who said that over the last five years mcdonalds have changed from being their number one enemy to their number one global partner in reducing deforstation in the amazonian
     rainforest, and if McD's wanted to sell healthy food we should definitely engage with them. A surprising input, and one which was important for us.

 
        Over time we'll find out whether going in was the right decision or not, but irrespective of how it turns out I'll know we made the decision for the right reasons.
      Plus we might now get some free cheeseburgers, which was the main factor for going for the trial.
      
Hope you're well and thanks for your support on the blog

Rich