Groundswell – Chapter 10

1. Groundswell – Chapter 10 Connecting with Groundswell Case Studies – Unilever (Dove) & Dell Presented by: Praveen Mohan Stephanie Baker Diana JOHNSON

2. Groundswell – Transforms your company • Case 1 • Unilever: Parent company of brands like Axe, Lipton, Vaseline, Dove, etc.. • Annually they spend over billion dollars in marketing products. • Rob Master and BabsRangaiah helped Unilever to use Internet as media to market their Dove Brand products. • Dove’s 75 second “Evolution” Video on YouTube was watched by over 5 million people in less than a year • Dove "Evolution" Video

3. Groundswell - Unilever The “Evolution” video garnered the top advertising awards at Cannes advertising festival, and best of all it caused a surge of traffic to Dove’s Campaign for real beauty website- more than double what Dove’s 2006 super bowl ad drove. Dove spent 2.5 million dollars to air this commercial during super bowl whereas literally nothing for You tube commercial. The largest advertising spender embraced low-cost, low-control social technologies, but it did not happen overnight.

4. Groundswell - Transformation • The three essential elements to this transformation: Important to take step by step • First, mental shift takes time and practice and requires a repertoire of shared successes, building on these stepping stones is also essential to giving opportunity to adjust their concepts of how things should work. • Second, each of these stepping stones leads in a natural progression to the next step, you need a plan and vision to take your organization to the next level • Third, you have to have executive support. Realistically you need to start small and sell it to your upper management to embrace groundswell thinking

5. Groundswell - Unilever For Dove’s campaign for real beauty in 2004, they took a big risk by featuring everyday average women instead of industry norm of using slender, young, perfect models. This radical idea was well researched and it worked well. Dove tried to market their product using NBC reality television show “The Apprentice”, this paid well for them as well, as it generated increased number of hits to Dove.com transforming into higher sales. The above experiences and several other led them to experiment with the Web using the Evolution video that became a huge success.

6. Groundswell - Unilever • Lessons learnt from Unilever: • Take small steps that have big impact • Innovative campaign for real beauty • Featuring in “The Apprentice” • “Evolution” video • Have a vision and a plan • Transformational thinking can be maddening slow, but patience pays. • Top executives at Unilever had a vision of Unilever’s potential with groundswell thinking. • Build leaders into the plan. • The top executives were relentless in embracing emerging media and give consumers the voice in the brand

7. Groundswell - Risks Sometimes business books make it look easy by showing only success stories, companies sometimes fail to embrace groundswell. An ‘X’ company spent 8 months in detailed planning in creating an executive blog, but the idea never took of since it was shot down by the executives, who feared loss of control over marketing message and prospect of getting negative comments from customers. The executive team also did not have any idea about what groundswell was.

8. Groundswell - Dell Dell is pretty advanced in using Groundswell to its advantage. In fact, Dell’s entry into the groundswell began as real trial-by-fire crisis. In 2001, the company started off shoring its customer support, and its customer satisfaction began to decline in 2005 according to a survey. In 2005, Journalism professor and noted blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote in his blog about the abysmal customer service he was receiving from the company.

9. Groundswell - Dell Dell lies, Dell sucks.. Dell Hell. These were some of the comments he posted in his blog. Dell’s hell was not just a PR nightmare, starting Nov 2005, the company’s profits started dropping and was losing its investors confidence. On June 21, 2006 a Dell notebook caught on fire at a conference in Osaka, Japan, http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1042700/dell-laptop-explodes-japanese-conference

10. Groundswell - Dell Dell’s VP of corporate group communications, Bob Pearson and his team began tracking blog posts, but they didn’t have ties back to the customer service to act on complaints. There was no one in the company whose job was to reach out actively to bloggers with problems. Dell had over 3 million customer contacts per day. Later , Dell setup digital media plan with a blog and assigned a product expert to manage it.

11. Groundswell - Dell Dell started proactively responding to customer issues, they also issued an update on the flaming notebook at Japan. The blog team had access to departmental managers within Dell so that they could respond proactively in the blog to the issues related to them Taking up on the success of the blog, Dell later launched “Ideastorm”

12. Groundswell - Dell • Lessons learnt: • It took a crisis or two to get Dell get started. Once they were in, they really took it to the next level. • Dell mastered one thing at a time, starting with listening. Listening to blogs, to solving bloggers problems, to blogging themselves, to IdeaStorm, they pulled themselves up into the groundswell. • Executive push and cover made the difference: Michel Dell provided support from the top, giving Bob and Lionel the ability to breakdown departmental silos. • Authenticity was crucial: Dell couldn’t get anywhere in the groundswell until it honestly admitted its flaws.

13. Groundswell – Preparing transformation • Implementing Groundswell in an organization can be minefield with full of risks, but with proper planning you can succeed. • First, start small • Second, educate your executives • Third, get the right people to run your strategy • Fourth, get your agency and technology partners in sync. • Fifth, plan for the next step and for the long term.