Brazil

More newsjacking... Abrdn to bring back vowels after failed rbrnd. From Aberdeen to Abrdn and back. This is a prime example of how businesses can become far removed from their customers. For those of you who don’t know, Aberdeen is an investment company. A well established and trusted financial services business. So how on earth did their board approve a renaming and rebrand which involved removing (most of) the vowels from their name? Businesses need to know their audience. Investment is a conservative industry, and clients tend to be sticklers for detail - including spelling. So when you manage £78b in assets, best engage with your customers before you change anything significant. This is why we focus on Brand Understanding (Brnd Ndstndng) – bridging the knowledge gap between businesses and their customers.

Whilst I love commissioning surveys and poring through the results to find unusual themes, nothing beats the stories we can tell with real-time data. And the good thing about real-time data - you don't need loads of it to generate interesting subject matter. We've had the best time working with the team at Employment Hero to launch their monthly and quarterly UK SME employment growth and salary reports 🚀 🦄 Journalists have appreciated our data and insight into the impact of the Budget on our smallest businesses, and what this means for the wider UK economy and society. Culminating with stories over the past few days alone in Bloomberg, Daily Telegraph, MSN, Yahoo, LSE, and beyond. Whilst you may not think your organisation has data to create news stories, it does. Perhaps we can help you tease them out. Jack Crone Jessica Hale Lisa Cowie Tasman Page Marina Holmes Yi (Zack) Wei Kevin Fitzgerald FCCA Henry Cooke Willow Knight-Adams Brazil - Communications for world-changing businesses Telegraph piece: https://lnkd.in/e_ZaQriT Bloomberg piece: https://lnkd.in/enDu6Rr8

Community Fibre have had an interesting Monday afternoon destroying their brand through inept crisis comms. The ISP, which serves 1.4 million Londoners, is having some sort of DNS issue - causing problems for at least 10,000 London households. (Probably way, way more, this is just how many people have reported it on Down Detector.) Not a fun situation to be in, especially as Monday is one of London's top WFH days, but hardly irretrievable if handled correctly. Instead, Community Fibre have been totally silent on their social media pages, save for an outrageously timed, pre-written post about "Random Acts of Kindness" Day posted just as the outage kicked-off. If you go to their website there's nothing obvious about the outage, and no press release anywhere in their media section. If you hunt through troubleshooting pages you can eventually find a very bland statement about how "some customers may be experiencing disruption to their service." This is almost worse than saying nothing. They "are" experiencing disruption to their service. This is the same statement that is being sent to the journalists who have already picked up on this story and written about it. The horrible comms are especially ironic as there is actually a fix that customers can implement relatively easily, given the issue is with the DNS rather than the actual connection. So how did we get here? It feels like a crisis comms plan that hasn't been updated in years, with far too many layers of sign off. Social posts should be at the ready to roll out immediately when an issue is identified. The website should be updated - with a clear and easy to see banner - not long after. Statements released to the media and the public should be updated as the situation develops. And most of all - you should turn off your scheduled social media posts when you have a crisis. Immediately!

Is long form content back? 📖 Since the advent of social media, and especially easy video sharing, content has been on a relentless drive toward the short-form. This started in earnest with the 6-second limit on Vine and was taken up by TikTok, and is now known as the phenomenon of 'Brain Rot', the mindless stream of content you forget about as soon as you swipe up to the next video. So have we reached peak 'Brain Rot'? There's an argument that we are already past it. Being 'off grid' is already somewhat of a status symbol, and previously digital only publications such as The Onion are venturing into the physical print space once again. There is a real opportunity for brands to connect with their customers through this longer form, real world content, moving beyond the cliché and often cringe 10-second video posted on Instagram. The key to this will be production value and real insight. There's really no point dashing off a digital whitepaper without any proprietary research or insight and locking it behind an email registration on your website, but a glossy zine that you can distribute to 1,000 key customers or prospects? That will help you stand out. If you're wondering how you can stand out in a sea of brain rotting content get in touch today.

How do you encourage people take the tube on Friday, but not on Tuesday morning? My 8.30am trip into central London was as quiet as they come this morning, but I still paid the peak fare, as TfL's trial to make Friday an off-peak day has now finished. It's easy to feel for TfL. They are key to London being the economic powerhouse it is, but without any ongoing subsidy from central Government they have to charge their users a fair whack - £3.40 for a single peak trip (NZD$7.46). This kind of pricing should act a bit like congestion charging does for cars, diverting people to quieter times or other transport modes. It probably does, to an extent. But the reality is that most of the commuters on a crushed tube car at 8.30am on a Tuesday would far rather be coming in at 10am - they just can't. So they end up paying more for a less comfortable service, while those popping around London at 11am get a cheaper fare and a quieter ride. But another option *has* emerged for commuters on Fridays - Working From Home. The morning peak on Friday's is just 62% as busy as it was in 2019. This hasn't been great for all the businesses that rely on busy Fridays to make money, so a while back TfL trialled a £24m scheme making Friday an 'off-peak' day, essentially recognising how much lower tube ridership was on the day and offering a financial incentive to get back into the city. Long story short: It didn't work. The lower fares were yelled about from the biggest advertising network in the city and paired with vouchers for restaurants all over the city, but people didn't suddenly start coming to work on Fridays again. The campaign to promote the lower fares did a lot of things right. Partnering with local businesses to entice people in with more than just a cheaper fare was smart. Making sure there were lots of ads on social media as well at the tube network itself would have been crucial. But clearly the messaging didn't stick. So how would you change it? One idea from me in the comments below - but I doubt I have the only answer!

Do you post content every day? Should you? Social media algorithms certainly reward consistency. And given most of your followers will only see a small portion of your content, you shouldn’t worry about some themes or assets popping up in multiple posts. Yet people will punish anyone who junks up their feeds with repetitive and irrelevant content they don’t want to see. 🧪 Think about your content as an experiment. It really is! Each post lets you learn what works and what doesn’t - essentially what connects with your audience and what drifts by unliked. Even a failed post should let you learn something. ⚠️ This approach of consistency and testing doesn't mean flooding feeds with whatever you can cobble together at 8:59 AM. Those same algorithms will quietly bury your content if people scroll past it day after day. Before you commit to a daily schedule, ask yourself two crucial questions: 🎯 What do you actually want your content to achieve? Content for content's sake is rarely any good - everyone can tell you're just filling space. ⚖️ What resources can you realistically dedicate? If creating daily posts means your team is too stretched to handle core business operations, or the posts themselves are terrible, it won’t be worth it. The best posting schedule is one you can maintain while still having something worth saying. Sometimes that's daily, sometimes it's weekly. Sometimes you need an agency to help you out. If so - get in touch!

How the hell do you get through to Gen Z? Businesses of all shapes and sizes are currently wrestling with the issue of just what they can do to connect with younger audiences. Whether this be in attracting new customers or enticing prospective employees, statistics suggest there is a step change in attitudes and perceptions from this younger generation. One of the most important things you can be when it comes to communicating with younger people is authentic. Digital natives, brought up to think cynically about ads and the businesses that run them can spot greenwashing or any other attempt at deception a mile off. At Brazil we regularly review the week's biggest campaigns and often they fall at this first hurdle. This not only erodes trust in the business, but also quickly invalidates even the most truthful of message buried under the grand headlines. Younger people are also increasingly relying on social media or influencers to get their news and can be selective about which outlets they trust. This doesn't mean that mainstream media is dead, far from it, but you have to be careful about where you land your story. The Guardian is one of the most trusted outlets in this regard, but there are a range of others catering to each sector that, with good planning, will give you cut through. It’s also important to consider whether you really need to communicate with this generation yet. Or whether it makes sense to change your strategy to cater to them. Don't feel like you have to talk down to them - if you're a grown up business it’s still okay to be grown up, just in an approachable way. If you want to flesh this out into a real comms strategy, get in touch. #GenZ #PR #Marketing #brand

We're delighted with this review from Auto Express magazine! https://lnkd.in/dMAHVgiD