MarCom Professional

Big brands on the social web

I was reading Marketing magazine and one of the columnists was Will McInnes writing about Cadbury’s Wispa.

Itself a brand that’s been well used to great PR (thanks to inspiration from Mark Borkowski in the past). What interested me in what Will wrote was his criticism of Wispa asking visitors to register in order to get into the deeper engagement features of the site.

The registration was described as

a direct marketer’s fantastical wishlist

And that started me thinking.

The Early CRM years

When I was working with PRG doing CRM strategy – we’d set out a database specification that had hundreds of data points for each individual customer. We WANTED to know all about you.

The difficulty was getting that information from the customer in an appropriate way.

The way it is now

McInnes suggests that Cadbury use Facebook Connect to handle log-in and registration for its site.

Not a bad idea – the fan page relationship stays in FB and the marketing platform remains on the Wispa site.

As a marketer, I’d be nervous initially about allowing a third party to handle customer data particularly a closed one that didn’t allow data extraction. But then I had second thoughts.

How to assess your brand’s data needs

Wispa is a B2C brand – it has no expectation of selling direct off its site to customers and the ‘engagement’ is just about getting people to live the brand values of playfulness.  And so why not outsource the ‘grunt’ registration to a third party. Particularly one where security and data handling is a key expertise?

Who knows, FB might do a combined advertising plus deal with Wispa if they use its platform to drive new memberships into FB. I see a nicely balanced relationship with each brand delivering part of the site and playing to their own strengths.

Let’s face it, what will Wispa do with your customer data anyway?

P.S.  Afterthought – when the brave new world of VRM starts and customers hold their own data and brands have to ’subscribe’ to the customer’s data rules and regulations – the boot will be firmly on the other foot and all those multi-field-integrated-user-databases will be worthless.  And I’ve heard on the grapevine that Mydex has a launch date for its first version.  Grin.

Let’s get the tables turning.

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