Issue: Marketing silos can hurt the brand
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

Last week, Disney closed the door on one of the most successful promotions in its history. Virtual Magic Kingdom was opened in 2005 as an online role-playing game set in a virtual version of the Anaheim Disney theme park. The game allowed players to create characters (commonly called ‘avatars’) who would roam the park, interacting with other players, participating in promotions and playing games in the virtual world. Some of these yielded virtual prizes like hats, pins or furniture for the game. Others could be used to get real world prizes or promotions in the (real) theme park.

Virtual Magic Kingdom was intended to last only for the duration of the 2005 celebration of DisneyLand’s 50th anniversary. Because of the tremendous popularity of the promotion, however, it was kept running and only in April of 2008 did Disney announce that it would close forever on May 21st.
Which raises the question: why? Disney’s stated reasons sound like political talking points:

As many of you know, Virtual Magic Kingdom was created and launched back in 2005 as part of the Disneyland 50th Anniversary Celebration. VMK exceeded expectations in terms of performance, and as a result we extended the promotion (that is, VMK, the game) well beyond the 50th Celebration.

Eventually though, all promotions must come to an end, so I’m announcing today that on May 21, 2008, VMK will open our virtual gates for the last time. You read that right: VMK was never intended to last forever – we’ll close the game for good at the end of day on May 21st, 2008.

On its face, this would be a terrible reason to close a world which has drawn such a dedicated user community. The cost of maintaining this virtual world is minimal compared to attracting the same users with new promotions. Simple ROI analysis on the existing users of this type of virtual community would almost certainly show that their increased interaction with the (real world) Disneyland more than paid for the cost of maintaining the promotion.

The real answer is disarmingly simple:

Disney says it never intended the 50th-anniversary promotion to run this long, but money is also a factor: Virtual Magic Kingdom is free, and full access to Disney’s other online game sites — like Club Penguin and Toontown — costs as much as $9.95 a month in the case of Toontown. – Peter Sanders, The Wall Street Journal

Viewed from the narrow lens of a Disney division responsible solely for online promotions, Virtual Magic Kingdom is a loser. Even if most of the users never return, and think horrible thoughts about the Disney brand, the small percentage who will migrate to paid content make this look like a sensible economic decision.

And this is where typical corporate organization fails the brand. In fact, closing Virtual Magic Kingdom is a mistake for the Disney brand and certainly a dis-economic decision for the franchise overall. Disney like most consumer marketers spends millions of dollars in advertising hoping to engage consumers for a minute or less and get them to think about the Disney theme parks. Virtual Magic Kingdom got consumers to engage with a faithful representation of Disneyland for hundreds of hours, even tying in actual on-park activities, for a fraction of the cost. These consumers became brand evangelists – the type who get others to engage with the brand.

Disney should not fool itself that its paid games are a substitute. Those are pure branded entertainment, and will be judged by a different yardstick. Many consumers who interacted with the free promotion will never pay $120 a year to play the online game.

When I was researching Accidental Branding, I discovered that successful entrepreneurs understand that everything affects the brand. They are loathe to turn every corner of their business into a profit center, understanding that generosity often builds brand equity. Disney’s move to shutter Virtual Magic Kingdom will certainly spruce up the balance sheet this year. But it’s a bad brand move and one that could have been avoided by tearing down marketing silos.

Issue: Dove Accused of Retouching ‘Real Beauty’ Ads
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

In Accidental Branding I write that brands need to ‘sweat the details’ – meaning that paying attention to even small, innocuous details of the business that might not obviously affect the brand pays important dividends. A brewing scandal this week at Unilever with the Dove brand illustrates this. Dove has gotten into a mess because a profile of a professional photo retoucher in The New Yorker mentioned that he had worked on the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign – in which Dove explicitly argues against retouching reality. The details are complex, but Dove appears to have neglected to instruct a freelance photographer on the second iteration of the campaign in 2007 – the revered Annie Liebovitz – to avoid making any digital corrections to her photos.

The Dove Campaign for real beauty includes the following:

Original Print Campaign

Dove Pro-Age Print Campaign

Dove Evolution Video

Dove Onslaught Video

The campaign has been acclaimed for bringing body image issues to the fore. It has been criticized because Dove still sells products intended to beautify and because Unilever sells products like Axe that use the exact techniques that the Dove campaign criticizes.

Here are the facts in the unwinding mess:

Writing for the May 12th issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins profiled digital photo retouch artist Pascal Dangin. In her profile, Lauren writes:

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

This paragraph was noted last week by BusinessWeek blogger Burt Helm on May 7th in his Brand New Day blog. Then Jack Neff from AdAge picked up the BusinessWeek story.

Unilever responded quickly, denying the accusations. Unilever’s PR department issued the following statement from the photo retoucher Pascal Dangin who was profiled in the article:

The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the [2005] Dove ‘real women’ ad. I only worked on the [2007 Dove Pro-Age] campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction — both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.

Unilever also released the following statement from Annie Liebovitz:

Let’s be perfectly clear — Pascal does all kinds of work — but he is primarily a printer — and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching, and there was not.

The New Yorker responded by standing by its story – only noting that the word “undergarments” was misplaced – meaning that they agreed Dangin might not have worked on the first campaign.

From this muddle, it is not clear whether Dangin made substantial alterations to the Liebowitz photographs. What is clear however, is that he did touch them and at a minimum made the “color corrections” that he claims in the statement delivered through Unilever. So it seems clear that Unilever and the Dove brand did not explicitly ensure that the Liebovitz photos were completely unaltered. It seems possible that the photos met the standard set for the brand – not altering the appearance of the women – but any retouching of the photos leaves the whiff of impropriety. For the brand, this is a disaster which could have been avoided with more attention to detail.

Branding Bottom Line:
Dove gets mascara all over the brand

Brand: Personality Not Included
Execution: Viral, Social Networking
Target: Business book readers
Rating: *****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
Personality Not Included: Why Companies Lose their Authenticity and How Great Brands Get it Back is a new business book published last month by Rohit Bhargava, Senior VP of Digital Strategy and Marketing at Ogilvy PR. Bhargava is a first-time author, but confronts the publishing world with the experience of a new media expert. His Influential Marketing Blog is listed in the AdAge Power 150.

To market Personality Not Included, Bhargava drew from his blogging and new media PR experience to create a variety of attention-getting stunts, the largest of which was a simultaneous interview with 50 bloggers for the launch of the book (here’s one) which amplified the viral nature of his book launch. He also created a facebook add-on to a book signing event to increase turnout and a group blog called The Personality Project to complement the book’s website. Bhargava has a twelve month plan of activities to launch the site. Rohit is speaking in New York on Wednesday, May 14th.

What Works:
Marketing a business book can be a daunting task for a first-time author who is not a celebrity. Most publishers view new authors the same way that venture capitalists view start-up companies. They make a good number of small bets and then see which author manages to make their own work successful. So authors are left to their own devices to market their ideas.

Bhargava has done an excellent job of mining his expertise in new media, particularly social networking, to build a base for his book. He recognizes that a campaign of this nature is by definition a slow build, and that his chances of hitting a bestseller list are most likely a year or more down the road. He has cleverly co-opted the interest of bloggers and colleagues by creating event-driven online properties. The 50-blog simultaneous interview which he used to launch his book was particularly inventive, as it provided real sales momentum but a better artifact (in the form of a variety of interesting author interviews permanently archived by Google and a competition among bloggers to see who came up with the best questions) than the “social media bum rush” done for The Age of Conversation.

Bhargava has also strategically done a good job of positioning Personality Not Included against the anticipated book “Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester. While that book handily outsells his at the moment, by positioning Personality Not Included as a new-media-aware branding book rather than the chronicle of a fundamental change in consumer behavior he has given his work a longer shelf life.

What Doesn’t:
This is a significant book and Bhargava may have lost an opportunity by not engaging professionals to help him get mainstream media reviews. This would have been tricky however, as he is a senior executive in a PR firm himself. However his expertise is in digital media and he does not have the same relationships with traditional print media as he does in the digital sphere. While there have been some very good examples of books launched entirely in the blogsphere, notably The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, a gentle push from BusinessWeek or The New York Times can be invaluable for a new business book.

Branding Bottom Line:
Bhargava finds new ways to turn the web on its head. We would hire him.

BONUS: Interview with Rohit Bhargava

How did you come up with the idea for your 50-blog interview?
The nice thing about having your own book is that if you have an idea that you think works, you can do it. The idea for the blog interviews came out of my desire to do a promotion that bloggers would be interested in because they get something in return. For me, I wanted them to write about the concept of a book that they hadn’t read. For all the 55 bloggers that decided to ask me 5 questions about the book, they were getting good customized content for their blogs and the chance to win a prize (and fame) for having the best interview. I had the idea on a Sunday and launched it on a Tuesday, so sometimes when the right idea comes along, it just works.

What are the biggest challenges for a first time author marketing his own book?
The biggest challenge is to realize that all the marketing and publicity will fall on your own shoulders. I knew this going in because I had some great advice from other authors that I talked to, but you’re never quite ready for how much you actually have to do yourself. The other challenge for someone like me is that I still have my full time day job, which means much of my book efforts are in the after hours or not full time.

You talk about a slow build and a 12-month calendar. What are some of the things you have planned for the rest of the year?
Well, I have an overall strategy that I’m working towards which has lots of different elements but I can’t really say what is exactly going to happen over the next 12 months because some of the efforts I have not come up with yet. Right now I’m spending a lot of time talking about a new site I launched for the book that I am really excited about called The Personality Project (www.thepersonalityproject.com). I can tell you there are quite a few more activities that I have planned over the next few months that will likely duplicate the amount of buzz of the launch and hopefully eclipse it!

With thousands of business books published each year, what do you think the key to differentiation is?
I spent a lot of time on this – researching other books that could be considered “competitive” to my book. I think the answer is twofold. Part of the theory of the book is that personality sets companies apart, and to a degree the personality of my book sets it apart from others in the same space. In addition, I focused very much on writing a book that was fun and engaging to read, and ultimately useful. It was this focus on being actually useful that sets PNI apart as well, because so many books are written in a theoretical way instead of a practical way.

In your first few weeks what have the biggest surprises of new authorship been for you?
The single biggest surprise has got to be just how much weight people who organize events and conferences put on authorship. I always suspected that if the book became successful, I would start to get better speaking invitations for more prominent slots or keynotes instead of panels. I expected this would take some time, but it was almost overnight that this started to happen. That was surprising, as I don’t quite feel that the book has earned that for me yet … but I plan to try and make the most of the chances I’m given!

What has been your best use of social networking to promote your book?
So far, I’d have to say the launch interview idea was the biggest success because of the buzz it generated. There are a few other ideas that I will be launching (which I mentioned above) that should equal or better that buzz as I roll them out.

You launched at nearly the same time as an anticipated book in a similar area: GroundSwell. How do you compete with that marketing machine?
I am actually a great admirer of both Charlene and Josh, so when I made it to their launch party for the book a few weeks ago, we talked about this. I actually think it’s a great thing because our books are very complimentary. PNI is not a book about social media, but it does incorporate social media into it – so I could see many people getting very different things from both. What I realized after launching my book is that the real competition is other books that my publisher (McGraw-Hill) launched in the same timeframe because I am competing with marketing resources with those books. If I have competition to fight against, that’s where it really comes from.

Which did you enjoy more ˆ researching, writing or publicizing your book?
I love marketing and am really passionate about actually putting theory into ACTION, so I’d have to say the best time I’m having is right now with all the promotion for the book. The writing and researching, for me, is the hard work that got me to this point. When you’re actually marketing, that’s the fun part!

You have focused your launch efforts in San Francisco although you live in D.C. Why?
Focusing on SF was a deliberate choice because I have a lot of contacts through the Web2.0 crowd on the west coast and wanted to make the most of this community. In addition, during the weeks of the launch of the book, most of my speaking engagements were on the west coast, so it made logical sense to do the launch party there. I have lots planned for DC too, though, and will be in several other markets over the next few months before I start heading international as well.

What one piece of advice would you give to a first-time branding book author?
I would say, take an honest look at what your goals are and publish your book with that goal in mind. For me, PNI is a chance for me to make my reputation and share something useful with people who need to market something. The international component of the book and distribution was most important to me, so I went with the publisher that I did because they have a really strong distribution arm. That has turned out to be a great decision so far.