The top 10 list of storytelling brands in the UK usually includes Apple, Cadbury, IKEA and Walkers.
But looking at the annual list from AESOP, it’s Virgin Media that jumps out at me as a storytelling brand that breaks the mould.
Here I round up some of its activity that falls into my nebulous understanding of storytelling.
Let me know if you agree.
Virgin America’s new website manages to turn booking a flight into a joyous process.
That tells you all you need to know about how good this website is.
Here I’ve picked out 30 good bits. I urge you, of course, to read this post, but go and check out the website yourself for some great design inspiration.
Just 14% of UK online retailers offer live chat as a customer service channel.
In a recent survey by idealo, only a small number of UK retailers offered live chat as a customer service channel, and in the rest of Europe, an average of 18% of retailers offered access to live chat.
Live chat is the online support service that provides instant help for consumers who are seeking immediate help from a customer service assistant in real time. It normally appears on ecommerce sites or service providers in the form of a little text box that says “how can I help you?”
As you would expect, the most popular method of contact from the survey is by writing, with an average of 91% of all online shops offering contact via email or contact form. Although I’m surprised this figure isn’t even higher.
Perhaps this is down to many European retailers preferring customers to pick up the phone. Italy for example goes heavily against the email trend, with 98% of their online retailers offering phone contact, but only 56% offering email contact.
This leaves live chat somewhat in the doldrums.
In October 2012 Econsultancy ran a survey which found that 90% of brands felt that content marketing would become more important over the following 12 months.
One year on it is hard to argue against the fact that content marketing is now among the most important trends in digital.
However when we published the Content Marketing Survey Report with Outbrain, just 38% of respondents had a defined strategy in place.
That is likely to have changed by now, however just to add more weight to the argument in favour of this discipline I have rounded up six case studies from various brands that have seen real results from content marketing.
Richard Branson’s Virgin empire incorporates a broad range of brands and companies that take in travel, TV, music and spaceships.
All these disparate businesses have their own websites, but the overall corporation is represented by Virgin.com.
This site has undergone a huge transformation in the past 10 years, morphing from a simple web portal into a content-rich site that aims to epitomise the Virgin brand experience.
At Econsultancy’s JUMP conference last week, which formed part of the Festival of Marketing, Virgin’s Bob Fear described how the site was redesigned by the content team working hand-in-hand with data scientists.
Fear’s team consists of journalists and writers, so the thought of working with big data appeared somewhat confounding at first.
Bob Fear is Digital Content and Marketing Manager at Virgin, and he recently been involved in the relaunch of Virgin.com.
He has devised the core Virgin brand’s digital content and social strategy from scratch, and will be speaking about using data to create engaging branded content at our JUMP event on October 9.
I’ve been asking Bob about the presentation, and Virgin’s approach to content and social media…
Although it may seem seamless to the naked eye, branding that is truly on-target is no easy thing to master. But effective branding can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars in the long run.
In fact, let’s imagine for a minute that you’ve just spent those thousands and as many hours working with a web developer on a website or a mobile app, or even that you’ve just created a physical product that fills a gap in the marketplace. Essentially, you’ve created the thing you want to sell to consumers and you know it can make their lives better.
So you’re all ready to go out with promotion, right? Sell that product to its fullest potential – you’ve finally perfected it, so why waste another minute? Stop right there, though. Before you spend another marketing dollar, back up and make sure your brand is solid – or risk throwing your hard-earned cash down the drain.
Innovation. It’s brought up in articles, at conferences and in board meetings. But how can we innovate in companies that still don’t have the flexibility or the right mind set?
Julie Cottineau, former VP of Brand for Virgin USA, brought the idea that we are all entrepreneurs to Columbia University’s Brite Conference this morning. Innovation isn’t just for new businesses so how do we bring it to the heart of an established company?
Claire Higgins is Head of Marketing at vtravelled.com, Virgin Atlantic’s social travel website. Last year, we interviewed her for our Impact of Digital Beyond Sales and Marketing report, produced in partnership with Blue Latitude.
Here, she goes into more detail about Virgin Atlantic’s strategies for social media, and digital more broadly, in 2011.