Symposium "15 years SWOCC"

By Rogier Brussee on 8 October 2011

On September 13 2011, the Foundation for Scientific Research on Commercial Communication (Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Commercieele Communicatie SWOCC) celebrated its 15th anniversary in style, by organizing a symposium.  Its stated goal was to flood the participants coming from academia, advertising agencies and marketing departments with scientific insights from communication science. Unusual for a scientific meeting, it was held in Dutch, except for one apologetic (German) speaker who spoke in English. In practice this meant that the line-up of speakers was exclusively recruited from the ranks of Dutch universities, several of them still working on their PhD.  It was organized in the debate centre “de Rode Hoed”, beautifully situated on the imperial canal (Keizersgracht) in Amsterdam. 

De Rode Hoed was founded as a clandestine church   of the Remonstrant community in 1630, and used as a church  until 1957.  Later it became one of the homes of the “left wing church”. What sign of the times that it now hosted a symposium on the Machiavellian world of marketeering.

Noticing the beauty of the surroundings probably gave away that I came from a provincial backwater (i.e. not from Amsterdam), as I had the distinct impression that most participants called the Amsterdam “canal belt” (“grachtengordel”) their home turf. In the same gossipy anthropological spirit, the women in the field tended to be young and fashionably dressed, while the age of the men was more varied with a large fraction being middle aged men wearing blue suits. Despite or because of this, the atmosphere was lively, helped no doubt by the excellent food and drink, the overall flawless organization and a schedule that was well kept to, with enough opportunity to ask questions.  (update 20-10-2011, see also this video impression)     

Officially there were three central themes in the program that followed the research lines of the SWOCC:  “Brand and People”, “Brand and Organisation” and “Brand and Communication” in short, the theme was “brand”. That theme, was branched out to “brand awareness”,  “brand protection in the face of bad PR”, “presenting and corporate image”, “brand logos”, “branding with funny characters to make toddles eat vegetables” etc.  Before discussing some highlights, let me notice some things that stood out:
• There was a great deal of attention for new media in general and social media in particular.
• A lot of work that presented empirical data and statistically analysis. Often such data, came from “laboratory experiments”.

The day ended with awarding the “SWOCC master thesis price” to Sophie Boerman for her thesis on what elements in an advertisement actually attract attention. She is going to talk about this in the Crossmedia lab on 26 Oktober.

Abstracts of the Talks

I reordered the talks to group them in somewhat arbitrary categories. The original program folowed the three research lines of the SWOCC mentioned above, and is here.

Building customer relationship

Daan Muntinga talked about the use of social media and brand relationship. He considered interaction with facebook pages of several brands (the only one I can remember is Kips liver sausage). He finds that people who interact with the brand pages on Facebook are more brand aware, but I could not understand how he measured this other than by counting the number of interactions with facebook…

Peeter Verlegh did research on “word of mouth”, i.e. consumers talking to consumers about brands, products, services etc.  He quotes a report from Insites (2008) that this happens 3 to 4 times a week per consumer i.e. about 37 milion times a week. His main point was that word of mouth is considered credible by consumers because it usually happens between friends or family who have no financial incentives for their recommendation.  He did an experiment with stimulating word of mouth by (small) presents and finds that presents indeed undermine credibility, especially if word of mouth is given by people with weak ties to the consumer. However he also finds that there is no negative effect if the consumer can share in the present, if strong ties do the recommendation, or if the receiver is actively seeking advise.  I cannot help thinking that miss Brownie Wise who invented the Tupperware party   had a clue!)

Guda van Noort talked about the success of marketing campaigns on social media sites. She is clearly a social media believer. She claimed that people have less resistance to a brand when it is present on social media than when it is present on television (/me would like being able to click away annoying ads on television). Like Peeter Verlegh, she finds that social media campaigns are particularly effective when coming from friends and she believes that the main challenge is to use the information in user profiles in an effective way.

Brand and Corporate Image protection

Peter Kerkhof talked about crisis management on Facebook and other social media. The accessibility of social media and the possibility that social media authors produce content that goes viral, mean that brand reputation can be badly damaged when something goes wrong. Kerkhof mentioned “Dell Hell” ( bloggers spreading stories of bad technical support at DELL), ” Domino Pizza”  (a employee who did BAD things to a pizza and had fun putting it on You Tube, and got fired), and “United breaks guitars” (a United flyer who, to his horror, saw his precious guitar being maltreated) as horror examples.  His point was, that the time when a brand could effectively ignore the possibility of customers talking back is over, and that at least two things are needed in such a situation: a credible excuse, and human warm, rather than a business like corporate tone of voice. He did an experiment to test this on a group of students and found the expected results: credible excuses and a human tone of voice are very much appreciated.

Lotte Willemsen talked about webcare in response to negative word of mouth. Like Peter Kerkhof she noted that negative experiences being exposed on social media have a large impact, larger than positive experiences. Webcare is the monitoring of social media to be aware of what is being said about a brand before it goes out of hand, and (pro)actively and where possibly helpfully interact. Apparently webcare is being outsourced and a booming business. The main point is to convince consumers. She did an experiment with a simulated call-back action and found that webcare has a positive effect on brand attitude. It was not clear to me how she measured that, however. There was also a Mc Luhanite “the Media is the Message” effect on the choice of media. Proactive behavior was experienced as pushy on social media, but recognized positively on a brands own corporate channels.  She wrote a paper on this subject in Journal of Interactive marketing 

Friederike Schultz talked about social media and crisis communication. She started with the BP gulf spill crises as a defining moment in corporate communication (I agree, see my blogpost  on this subject). Due to social media, corporate critical information can spread much quicker and to a much larger audience. The higher the perceived responsibility, the larger the reputation damage. According to Schultz to counter damage, media choice and an tone of voice appropriate for the channel is even more important than what is said specifically, with blogs and twitter being particularly important and timely channels. She specifically mentioned the effect on share prices. Her group did content analysis on sources with the AmCat environment ( which looks quite interesting!) to correlate share prices with news. Turns out these are mainly correlated with US news sources.

Joyce Karreman talked about corporate image and annual reports. Annual reports have evolved from mostly financial information, to a glossy with a PR function. It typically has a shiny cover, some warm words from the ceo with his picture and, of course,  there are some financial figures.  She did research on what investors (a prime target for annual reports) actually used for their judgment. She prepared 8 versions of a mini annual report by varying three elements, text on the strategy of the company (good, reasonably sounding strategy, or poor, incredible strategy) , a picture with a smiling or serious looking CEO and good or bad financial figures. She tested how a group of people that had been selected in having (some) exposure to investor information  judged the report. Unfortunately she could not recruit real investment experts as they were unavailable. Unsurprisingly good results, a good strategy and a smile scored best. Surprisingly though, good finance, bad strategy, and a smiling CEO scored worst!  The lack of congruence apparently sets off the alarm bells. In general, serious looking CEOs scored better, and the strategy and the figures have to be in balance. Corporate reputation does not depend on Finances very much. 

Brand logos

Johan van Rekom talked about certification logo’s. He did a nice experiment, by comparing the result of putting logos on a pot of marmalade. Half of the pots got a logo from “ik kies bewust”  (a logo from a foundation heavily sponsored by the food industry certifying that product is “healthy” by some twisted standard that allows “light chips” to be classified as healthy )  the other half got the FSC logo (a logo from the Forest Steward Foundation founded by environmental groups, that certifies that timber is from environmentally friendly sources). People buy more marmalade if there is a logo on it, but  surprisingly, it does not matter much which logo. Also surprisingly, few people actually notice the incongruence of a logo for timber on a pot of marmalade and conclude that they are being used as guinea pigs.

Bo van Grinsven gave her talk the intriguing title “because there are sprinters and marathon runners”.  Brand logos are important in brand recognition, and she discussed what happens when a brand logo changes.  More exposure leads to more recognition and a more positive image, until people get fed up with it (or the marketing department gets convinced that a new logo is needed and manages to convince management RB.) Simple harmonious logos are recognized quickly. However, she finds that mildly complex logos, while taking longer recognize, do get remembered better in the long term!

Simone de Droog talked about the use of cartoon characters for making fruit and vegetables more attractive to children. Children relate strongly to cartoon characters, and a product with a cartoon character becomes immediately more attractive, to the point that fruit with cartoon characters is as attractive as sweets. However when testing, it turned out that it did not really matter whether the character is “real” in the sense that it occurs in a cartoon. A character that is invented and looks nice and recognizable “cartoony” works just as well. Making a congruent character does help though: a funny rabbit works better with a packet of carrots than a funny rhinoceros. 

Media use

Anneke Wonneberger did research on long-term trends in TV watching. She could use the numbers from “stichting kijkonderzoek van de publieke omroepen” which does all the ratings for the Dutch public broadcasters.  This is special because the numbers are usually a well kept secret. The trend is that, as a whole, the Dutch watch more and more television but the young watch less. Thus the gap between the elderly and the young is increasing. There was no attempt to find an explanation for these figures, in particular she did not discuss what the influence of demographics is.

Ivo Vermeulen gave a talk about the effectiveness of music in advertising i.e. “sonic branding”.  His point is that music can break emotional boundaries by going directly to deep, evolutionary old,  emotional centres in the brain.  His method is to find music that creates goose skin and associate that to a brand (he used Whitney Houston’s “ and I will always love you”, showing the SONY brand when the song has a modulation and she sings “ and IIIIIIIIIIIIiaai…..”). The theory is, that it is known that goose skin is sign of the release of dopamine and therefore an easily accessible proxy for the neural reward system.  He finds that the strongest association is created by direct “Pavlov kind” rewards, so: first the brand, then the goose skin moment. His original movie was therefore flawed!  Nemo has an installation with lots of such goose skin events.

Hilde Voorveld talked about media multitasking and the effectiveness of crossmedia campaigns.  Many campaigns are now crossmedial to the point where several media are offered simultaneously. (A good example is the second screen on the touch-pad or phone in combination with television RB.).  According to the psychological literature,  crossmedia should work because it allows to store the information richer with more links to other sources, variability in encoding and forms of repetition and more ways to create sensory differentials to help focus in attention. However research on this point is scarce. In particular simultaneous media use also creates a competing use of cognitive capacity and people are poor at multitasking. Auditive information is often forgotten, so Voorveld did an experiment in this area. She finds that combinations of different media work better for retention than just twice as much audio. The combination visual and audio cues is particularly effective.  See Hilde Voorveld (2011) Media Multitasking and the effectiveness of combining online and radio advertising Computers in Human Behavior Vol 26. 

Jos Horniks talked about the effect of the use of foreign languages in advertisments on the appreciation of products.  He noted that languages are usually strongly associated to countries and cultures. The use of a language for country specific products or to suggest that a product is from a specific country is therefore obvious. For example, this is seen in the use of  French for garlic and herbes cream chease (he also mentioned that when shown their native Dutch, people  assume a product comes from China !). However, language is also used to associate certain style elements. He noted French : stylish, German: solid, Spanish: Sunny and sensual. He did a clever experiment by first activating a language by showing people nonsense words which contained language typical spellings such as ü, à or ñ and asking them to do some unrelated task. Then he gave them an advertisement and asked for the main elements of the ad.  Respondents are indeed more sensitive for the language specific archetypes that are in the ad.

tagged with: swocc, conference, branding, Marketing, social media

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