Highlights from the ‘Brand Agility’ event

Last Thursday PRmoment and Waggener Edstrom hosted an event looking at the trend of Brand Agility. The thinking behind the seminar was to look at, and learn from, how brands are using news themes to raise their awareness.

There are clearly significant benefits for brands taking this approach, but there are also plenty of risks.

For me there are a couple of key points that come out of the event. The first is one of relevance. Brands must empathise with their customer's and stakeholders to ensure the news theme they are producing content for is relevant and appropriate for them.

The second key theme is one of speed. If you’re going to attempt to piggyback a news theme you need short reporting structures with empowered people making swift decisive decisions.

Finally you most probably should take an integrated channel approach. You might not need to utilise every channel but you must use channels which are appropriate to your audience. And of course a one size fits all approach to content does not work, so you will almost certainly need to tailor the content depending on the channel.

At the event Tanya Littlehales from M&S talks about how Marks & Spencer have developed the shwopping concept to support their Plan A campaign. This was a really interesting large-scale integrated campaign  on many levels. It was not just a communications campaign, the logitstics required to support the joint M&S/Oxfam committment of recycling thousands clothes was a massive undertaking.

Gareth Mead from Virgin Media talked to us about how they used last summer’s blockbuster, Godzilla movie, as a theme for their new Big Kahuna broadband package.

Finally Gareth Davies from Waggener Edstrom discussed the key touch points that impact whether a brand’s attempt to piggyback a news theme will be successful. This included:

• Scalability
• Speed
• Relevance
• Engagement
• Right to Play
• Originality
• Personalisation
• Standout
• Sentiment
• Business Impact

See some thoughts from our speakers in the video below:

Brand Agility from PRmoment on Vimeo.