On this day in 44B.C. Julius Caesar was killed at the Theatre of Pompey.  While various versions of the story have been told throughout the years (including that which featured Kenneth Williams’ now infamous outburst), if you believe the version told by Shakespeare, Caesar had been warned by a soothsayer to: “Beware the Ides of March!”

Now that the Ides of March have come around in 2012, I’m wondering which brands could have been saved from a sticky end had they been more vigilant and heeded warnings.

We often refer to the complacency of the American railroad business in the 1920s, which led to them completely ignoring the threat posed by domestic air travel – which subsequently supplanted the train as the default mode for traversing the country.

However, there are more recent examples in which businesses have gone from industry leader to graveyard in just a few years.  In a world where change has become the one constant, the need to monitor consumers’ evolving needs and competitor activity is becoming ever more acute.

When Friends Reunited was bought by ITV in 2005 the competitive threat from Facebook was given little attention. The business believed that the two brands were targeting different audiences with different offers.  Six years later, Facebook has achieved a 49% penetration of the UK population – while Friends Reunited is estimated to be worth less than 5% of its 2005 value.

But who could have foreseen the meteoric rise of the Zuckerberg empire in such a youthful and ill-defined market?

Perhaps less deserving of sympathy are the management of Kodak, who oversaw the demise of the one of the world’s biggest consumer brands. The company from a market leading position - possessing 90% of film and 85% of camera sales in the USA in 1976 – to filing for Chapter 11 protection earlier this year.

To make the story even more damning, it was Kodak that invented the digital camera which ultimately led to the demise of its mainstream photographic film business.  In fact, Kodak executive Larry Matteson wrote a report in 1979 that detailed the predicted gradual shift from film to digital photography. It outlined the order in which market segments would be affected, predicting that digital photography would finally reach the mass market in 2010.  The prediction was remarkably prophetic, and accurate to within 5 years.

The changing landscape of the category came as no surprise to Kodak, nor to Fujifilm, which was in a similar situation at the turn of the 1980s. Yet Fujifilm managed to adapt, and remains a profitable business to this day. So what went wrong for Kodak?

Kodak was slow to act and had become complacent in its position as market leader.  It also had a culture of producing the ‘perfect product’, which slowed the speed-to-market of its innovations and limited the number of those innovations that made it to consumers.  Kodak was also slow to abandon its “razor blade” business model, whereby it sold cameras at low cost in order to make money on film sales (as Gillette does with blades). It was a model that was not compatible with the digital world.  By the time the firm finally developed a sizable digital camera business, the camera phone had taken over.  It was too late to execute change.

In contrast, Fujifilm listened to the soothsayer and avoided the theatre on the Ides of March.

But such a scale of change is notoriously difficult to predict, and even harder to react to successfully.  So what can brands do to help them avoid a similar fate to that of Caesar?

• Take a long term view.  (Kodak was right to commission the report on where the photography category was going.  Its mistake was not acting on it in time.)
• Think about all possible competitive threats, including those from suppliers, customers and new entrants.  (Think Porter’s 5 Forces. The attack may come from the least expected places. Does ‘Et tu, Brute?’ ring any bells?)
• Don’t waste time developing the ‘perfect product’.  By the time it hits the shelves, your customers may have moved on.  (As they had done when Kodak finally got around to its digital business.  Facebook’s mantra is: “Move fast and break stuff.”)
• Incorporate competitive war-gaming into the innovation process, in order to ensure that there are as many competitive barriers to entry as possible.  (Innocent has created a great product in its Veg Pots, yet has not managed successfully to defend its position from attack by own-label retailer copies.  Cf. Covent Garden Soups, which built trial and awareness through inner M25 c-stores, giving the business a decent timespan to refine the product and communications, as well as build a loyal user base.)

I wonder how many businesses today are sleepwalking slowly to disaster, with words of warning ringing in their ears…

At first, when we thought about Facebook we thought about friends, social groups, photos, flirting even…and then brands waded in and we started to think about ‘likes’ and the idea of our ‘favourite’ brands being part of our social lives. But what’s the difference between a ‘like’ in the digital world and really liking and engaging with a brand’s digital presence?

This is a question which the cheese category has started to answer with aplomb.

That’s why we were delighted to discuss the prominence and prevalence of cheese in social media – why are so many brands investing in it and why is it successful given the seeming lack of connection between a lump of cheese and a social network? The Grocer’s December ‘Focus On – Cheese’ article discusses just this.

As ever, the key with any successful digital strategy is not to just ‘go digital’ for the sake of it but to use digital channels in a way that is relevant to your product, your audience and the relationship between the two.  And it turns out…cheese is well suited to the digital world. It’s a simple, familiar product that is easy to have fun with: people add their own touch to cheese and have a wide range of emotional memories and associations with it purely for the versatile and often omnipresent role it plays in their lives and fridges.

As I’m quoted saying:

‘At first simply having a Facebook page was enough. Now it’s about a real conversation, not just lip service.’

So…whether your brand is cheesey or not…is your digital strategy being used to maximum impact? Get in touch if we can help you think about it in a tastier, more relevant way.

A survey released this month by Booz&Co revealed that top executives perceive brand building to be the key benefit of social media activity.  And, quite remarkably, brand building featured much more highly in the perceived list of benefits than acquisitive marketing objectives such as broader reach.

But how are brand owners measuring the impact of their social media efforts on their number one objective – brand building? Historically a key metric has been the number of “likes” on the Facebook fan page, but what does that really mean? Fancy standing up in the board room to make the case for further budget based on the number of extra “likes” it would buy? Not me. And if your social media campaign isn’t just about reaching a broader consumer base, then likes isn’t even nearly the right measure anyway.

Those businesses at the cutting edge are already dealing with more data and more sophisticated metrics – generated by their own teams and via partnerships with the social media brands themselves. But last week Facebook launched a new metric on-tap and open to the public:  “People Talking About”.  This measures the level of activity initiated by consumers, including new posts, checkins, poll participation, mentions and shares.

Today, mashable.com published an interesting analysis.  How do the top 10 consumer brands on facebook ranked by “likes” fare when we look at their performance against the “People Talking About” measure?

As we might have expected, whilst there isn’t much between the  top 10 most liked brands, the “People Talking About” measure is much more differentiating. Try combining Likes and People Talking About and you’d get some sort of engagement measure – we’re getting there.

But ultimately, the key here is for the metric to be aligned with the objective.

And whilst brand-owners are still experimenting with the various social media levers and measuring the consequences (“…let’s try launching a survey of a certain length at a certain time on a certain day across 3 social media channels, and then see what it does for us – then tweak and repeat”), selecting the right metrics is half the battle

We are delighted to announce that Giles Lury, director of branding at The Value Engineers, has been quoted in The Independent. Giles comments in an article that sheds light on why people have started logging off Facebook in the last few months.

Giles comments:  “Privacy fears have always been around Facebook, but they are magnifying. For consumers, face recognition is scary. In Britain, we’ve always been slightly reticent of Big Brother watching us, particularly on a digital level. Just think about the reaction to ID cards.” When Facebook appears heavy-handed with privacy, he argues, users leave.

You can read the full article on The Independent online

Guy Grimsley, consultant at The Value Engineers, comments in this week’s The Grocer on Heinz scoring a Facebook food sale first.

Heinz will sell the first 3,000 bottles of its latest Tomato Ketchup with Balsamic Vinegar exclusively through Facebook UK - the first time the social network site has been used to flog groceries, it claims.

Guy commented that Heinz has struck on an innovative way of engaging fans and creating a buzz around NPD.  He also points out that only the most well-loved and “iconic” fmcg brands could get a big enough Facebook fanbase to make it effective.

Read the full article on The Grocer online.