Below the Line

Starbucks heats up coffee wars with free Wi-Fi in UK

Perhaps in response to recent marketing efforts by Costa Coffee, Starbucks is now offering free Wi-Fi to UK customers who have signed up for their Starbucks Reward loyalty program.

Reward customers already received little extras, such as soy milk or specialty syrup in their coffee at no extra charge. This move brings the UK loyalty program in line with the U.S. offering, which is a good strategy for a global brand.

Interestingly, most of Starbucks' competitors in the UK do not offer free Wi-Fi, whereas in the U.S. many do - and they don't require customers to sign up for a loyalty program in order to receive it. Surely, it won't be long before another UK chain comes along and offers it completely free.

However, Starbucks is able to use their dominant market position to ask their dedicated customer base to jump through one small hoop in order to receive the benefit. While Starbucks may lose some business to customers who just want to use Wi-Fi on occasion and do not want to sign up for Starbucks Rewards in order to do so, they will gain a wealth of customer data which, if used properly, should help them innovate to stay competitive in the future.

The e-mail announcing free Wi-Fi is below, along with a teaser e-mail sent a month prior.

American Airlines finally segments international Net SAAvers

American Airlines is finally segmenting their Net SAAver Fares to avoid sending international customers irrelevant e-mail.

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Although they have always had customer address details for their frequent flyer program members and thus the ability to send targeted e-mail, customers living outside the U.S. received fare offers not relevant to their point of departure.

Apparently, this is the latest in American's efforts to offer more personalized e-mail. A press release from American Airlines in January stated "Net SAAver e-mails now highlight destinations that are on sale from a customer's home airport or from a city that is close to their home, making it more relevant for the subscriber...Additionally, the new, personalized content includes special offers and other news that may be of interest to the customer."

It's good to see American is finally including international customers in their strategy. Shame about the appalling e-mail graphic, though.

Your brand abroad

Global brands often struggle with how to roll out a global campaign. I was reminded of this on a recent trip to Budapest, Hungary when I came across this ad for BlackBerry in Business Hungary, the magazine from the American Chamber of Commerce in Hungary. Surely no native English-speaking creative team would hyphenate "al-ready" and "busi-nessmen".

Although they use a photo of a business woman and the somewhat cumbersome "he/she" pronoun, they state that "the device appeals mostly to businessmen".

(click to enlarge)

It looks to me like BlackBerry probably decentralized their advertising and let the regions do their own things, for their own markets. This isn't a bad strategy, but usually that means the markets are doing the creative in their own language in a way that appeals to local audiences. In this case, they've gotten it all wrong by (I'm guessing) writing copy for an American brand in Hungarian, then translating it into English. Surely they could have just adapted a U.S. or UK ad?

Related post:
Rolling out a global campaign

Rolling out a global campaign

One great thing about doing consulting work is that I’m usually brought in at an exciting time for the business, for example when the business is growing rapidly, or when a new campaign is launching. When an agency wins a piece of business, they may find themselves faced with new challenges. One of these is how to roll out a global campaign.

Here are some general thoughts and tips for account people who are rolling out a global campaign.

• Country adaptations:
  • How much can each country adapt the creative developed by HQ?
  • Can imagery be changed? This may come up as some images may not be seen as a cultural fit.
  • Who will review and approve country adaptations?
  • Will any new copy need to be back translated?
  • Who has the final call on country adaptations?
• Translations:
  • Will translations be managed centrally or locally?
  • What are the timelines for translations?
  • Who pays for translation costs?
  • Will some executions require a re-design or revised copy if the translated copy is too long/short?
  • Who will proofread translated executions?
  • Do all appropriate parties have the necessary character language fonts installed?
• Assets:
  • Where will assets be stored?
  • Who pays for data storage space?
  • Do you need low res and high res versions?
  • How will the country teams be notified when there is a new asset?
  • How can you ensure that old logos, etc. are removed from everyone’s system?
• Conference calls:
  • What time works best for most time zones?
  • Is a virtual meeting space needed?
  • What conferencing technology will be used? Who will pay for it?
• Issues list:
  • Who owns the issues/resolutions list?
  • Will all issues be communicated to the whole team?
  • Who pays for the central account management team time to resolve local issues? Often one or two countries cause a bulk of the questions/issues/problems. Will those costs be passed along to the local country?
• How can you keep track of account management time spent dealing with each country?

I still find it quite shocking how many agencies don’t have any tools in place to enable efficient communication. Yes, we all have phones and e-mail, but if you’re rolling out a large-scale global campaign with multiple elements, you need more. There are web-based tools available today that weren’t available even just a few years ago. Think about setting up an internal blog or wiki to document all decisions made for each campaign, and to link to stored assets. This will prevent you being asked the same question by multiple countries, or the alternative which is sending out long, frequent e-mails to every possible stakeholder. If your boss or I.T. department is not up to speed on these technologies, then be the champion for them in your organization. It will save time, money and headaches in the long run.

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