Olympic flame casts little warmth for Middle East advertisers

 

Sponsors of the London Olympics are playing down their promotional activities in the Middle East, citing a regional lack of interest in the Games.
Panasonic and Coca-Cola - which each paid a reported US$100 million (Dh367.3m) for the global sponsorship of the Olympics - said there would not be a big promotions push in the UAE.
"This year we didn't do anything for the Olympics," said Antoine Tayyar, the public affairs and communications director at Coca-Cola Middle East.
"In terms of doing a direct promotion, or something directly related to the Coke brand in the UAE, we did not do any activity."
Global brands have spent a total of $2.2 billion sponsoring the Olympics, which start on Friday.
But some sponsors say Arab consumers prefer football to the Olympics, creating a hurdle to the activation of their sponsorships in this market.
Mr Tayyar said special Coke glasses were being distributed by its partner McDonald's, another Olympics sponsor, in the UAE.
But he said Coca-Cola was not engaging in direct promotions. "The sport that we are focusing on across the Gulf is football," he said. "You have to identify what are the aspirations and the overall drive of your consumers and what they like more."
Panasonic, another global sponsor of the Olympics, has followed suit. "We are not doing a mass, umbrella campaign," said Anthony Peter, the director of communications at Panasonic Marketing Middle East, adding there was less interest in the Olympics in this region than elsewhere.
"The Olympics in the Middle East - apart from certain sports - doesn't have as strong a following as in western countries or in Europe," he said.
Mr Peter said the fact that the event coincided with Ramadan was another factor in the company's decision. "
In Ramadan most of the sales are for the home appliances and Panasonic is not a home appliances sponsor," he said.
"TV sales are also good during the initial part of it but towards the end of it it's more of the home appliances, such as kitchen appliances and food processors."
In addition, Panasonic has already done a promotion around the Olympics this year, in which the prizes included trips to see the Games in London.
Although the company said it was still promoting its association with the Olympics though advertisements in UAE newspapers and on billboards as well as through its regional distributors, the wider consumer promotions have now stopped.
Other brands said they would make more use of their sponsorships in the Arabian Gulf region.
Cheil Worldwide - which handles advertising for Samsung, another Olympics sponsor - said it was planning an "engagement programme" in the Middle East around the Games.
"We have road shows, we have activation in retail shops [and] competitions where you take a picture of yourself with the Olympic mascot," said Azmi Yafi, the chief operating officer for Cheil Worldwide in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).
Mr Yafi said most local brands were not paying enough attention to the Olympics.
"The Olympics comes once every four years," he said. "If you look at how many Olympians from this region are going to participate, there's only [a few]. Because it won't necessarily get as much exposure, it doesn't present to advertisers enough opportunities.
"But is there a potential? I think there is."
Visa, another sponsor of the Olympics, said it had promoted its association in a number of ways in the Middle East. Karim Beg, Visa's head of marketing for the Mena region, said campaigns included a 3D interactive promotion held at Mall of the Emirates in Dubai.
Sponsorship of the London Olympics in general has been controversial amid accusations that the rules to protect official trademarks are too strict.
Organisers of the games have deployed about 250 so-called "brand police" on the streets of London.
Logos of non-sponsors are banned from Olympic venues and local businesses are not allowed to use Olympic logos or words such as "gold" or "silver" in their marketing material.
Offenders face fines of up to £20,000 (Dh113,826).
The regulations and anger at the ticketing process have prompted groups including the Official Protesters of the London Olympics, who sport a logo very similar to the official Games insignia, to express their displeasure on social networking sites and in irreverent posters across the capital.

5 Ways to Monitor Your Brand’s Effectiveness

Building a brand isn’t solely about numbers and figures. It’s about attracting an audience that will be an asset throughout your brand’s lifetime. Unfortunately, for a brand to be successful today, it has to distinguish itself amid the noise of thousands of others vying for attention on the same platforms

With venues like Twitter and Facebook already flooded with brand marketers, how can you ensure that any outreach you do on behalf of your brand is actually working? Here are five ways to measure and monitor your brand’s effectiveness online.

1. Are You Engaging Your Fans?

Marketing is no longer about shouting in a crowded marketplace; it is about participating with fellow consumers, building relationships, and serving those who share your passion. This is why you should use social media to build those alliances and show how active, responsive, and engaged you are.

Orange, a French telecommunications company did a nice job of this when it asked followers to tweet their summer plans with the hashtag #thissummer. The company then recorded the plans with a special radio voice-over effect that followers could find on the company’s blog. That generated traffic and allowed followers to identify with the company’s branding. It was also a smart way to engage users about a topic they enjoy.

2. Are You Adding Value to the Conversation?

Create content that other people look forward to getting and want to pass on to others. Healthy Choice engaged their follower base by implementing a .75 cent coupon on Facebook that would increase in value as the site grew its followers. In a few weeks the brand went from 60,000 to 70,000 fans and 60% of new fans decided to subscribe to the Healthy Choice newsletter. The company chose to bring value to its customers, by reinforcing its brand image and increasing engagement.

3. Are You Practicing the 20-to-1 Rule?

Give and you will receive. For example, a friend recently posted a video review of his experience using a product. He wasn’t trying to sell anyone on it. He was simply being helpful by sharing something that he believed was of value. He practices digital generosity so when he does ask for something, his followers and fans respond. This phenomenon is what I have come to call the 20-to-1 rule. It means that you have to make twenty relational deposits for every marketing withdrawal. If you want to build a social media platform — one where people can listen to you — then you have to be a giver, not a taker.

4. Are You Monitoring Feedback?

Your brand cannot be effective if you don’t know what’s working and what’s not. Feedback is easily accessible making it simple to correct problems if they arise. Your brand can be impacted in seconds. Take U-Haul for example. A blogger with more than 21,000 followers tweeted about his negative experience. The conversation snowballed and in a few hours, U-Haul lost thousands of dollars and long-term damage to their brand, all because U-Haul didn’t understand the power of today’s customer. Make sure this doesn’t happen to your brand. Create an outpost where you can monitor what people are saying. This has three benefits: One, you can address your customer’s concerns. Two, you can receive immediate market feedback. And three, it demonstrates that you are listening and are responsive.

5. Are You Engaging Through Your Blog or Website?

Uploading a website into cyberspace and expecting its mere presence to create a following is futile. You may be coerced into thinking that flashy graphics will correlate to higher traffic, but this isn’t the case. For an online strategy to work, you need to create a site that is compelling and makes people want to come back for more. Consumers aren’t particularly interested in visiting a website because it is visually appealing, they like to feel that someone is listening to what they have to say. For example, end your blogs with a question so that readers will more likely engage with you.

Marketing vs Advertising

While most business owners would like to reduce the number of hours they work or become entirely absentee, few can afford to. Reducing the number of your work hours probably involves hiring help, which means you will need to increase the amount of sales and profits before you can afford to hire help.
Alright,what are the differences between advertising and marketing. Many business owners believe that advertising and marketing are the same. If you think this way, you are dramatically limiting yourself in the amount of sales you can bring in.

Advertising and marketing are very different things. There are many ways to market your business, and advertising is only one way to do it. In fact, advertising is often the most expensive way to market your business. If you think advertising is the same thing as marketing, you have just limited yourself to only using the most expensive way to market your business. There are lots of ways to market your business that are cheaper than advertising, and often times more effective. We teach these methods in detail throughout our consulting program. In fact, try this out yourself. Talk to 3 of your customers and ask them about their overall experience. What is the most dissatisfying thing about your service? Their answers will tell you exactly what you need to do to improve.




Marketing is how customers perceive your business. This perception is influenced by the advertising materials you send out, but it’s much more than that. How customers perceive you is also influenced by how courteous your employees are, how they answer the phone, how clean or messy your store is, how quickly you respond to customers’ concerns, the quality of the work you do for your customers…Everything that affects the customers’ perception of you is marketing.

As you can see, advertising is only one component of marketing. Successful advertising brings customers to your door, but whether customers stay with you is another matter. You can make big claims in your advertising and bring lots of customers to your door, but if you cannot service them well, your marketing is not successful.

We cannot emphasize enough that marketing is a lot more than advertising or selling. It’s about providing an excellent customer experience, which involves putting systems in place so that customers get a consistent, high-quality experience no matter which employee is working that day. Think about the systems that McDonald’s has set up. No matter who is working there that day, you will always get the same experience. They always put X amount of salt into the fries, you always get your food within X number of minutes, and the employees always greet you the same way.

That’s how you want your business to be. The key to marketing is offering an excellent customer experience. You can’t just offer excellent service one day and crappy service another day. No matter how busy you are, no matter who is working that day – every customer must get the same customer experience every single time. How do you do that? You must implement systems and procedures, and make every employee follow them. This is how we do things around here. They either follow it, or they are out the door.

You see, since marketing is how customers perceive you, there are lots of ways to improve how you are perceived. Buying a bigger ad might increase your visibility when people open up the Yellow Pages, but do you see how there are a lot cheaper and more effective ways to improve how you are perceived? It might be as simple as training your employees on how to answer the phone. This is what you say when you pick up the phone, this is what you say when a customer asks for this, this is what you say when a customer shouts at you…so on and so forth.

You begin to set rules that your employees must follow. Rules like never letting the phone ring more than 3 times, never put a customer on hold for more than 2 minutes… The exact rules and procedures will depend on your business, but you must have some kind of rules that everybody follows. And guess how much it costs to write down a couple of rules and make every employee follow them? It costs nothing. And guess how much better you’ll be perceived in the eyes of your customers? A lot. Is this effective marketing? You bet it is.

Not saying advertising is not important. Advertising is one important way to attract new customers. In fact, we dedicate a large portion of our consulting program to the subject of advertising. But you should always remember that marketing is how you’re perceived by your customers, and advertising is only one way (and often the most expensive way) to improve that perception.