Contagious charisma and a case of classic marketing

Reviewing two sessions from The Marketing Society 'Creativity for Commerce' Annual Conference this year I looked at Paul Kemp-Robertson of Contagious and Mark Norman of Zipcar. These were two of the best presentations of the conference – with a marked contrast in both content and style.

Paul Kemp-Robertson of Contagious
Paul is a showman. He talks fast. He is smart, perceptive, interesting and engaging. He told us he would show us about four new trends: new currencies, pragmatic purpose, contextual integration, and living services. Most of his allotted time was spent on “new currencies.” This topic proved quite wide-ranging.

Content was topical: Bitcoin, a virtual currency but with a tradeable value, is in the news a lot right now. It’s used by post-global economy geeks in Silicon Valley and others who, for legal or illegal reasons, want to trade in a non-regulated currency; which segued nicely into stolen $20 bottles of P&G detergent which can be traded for $10 worth of illegal drugs in inner-city America; which segued in turn, into barter value items like Egyptian fakkas given as small change by market traders that are worth airtime minutes on Vodafone; which led to virtual currencies like sweat (aka exercise taken) that wins points for Nike Fuelband users.

If that all sounds a bit breathless – so was Paul and so were we.  

Bitcoin is worth a presentation in itself. Interesting thoughts like Brand Trust as a currency (and maybe others – like carbon trading?) could have been developed further and I hope Paul will. He has a big magazine to fill, and kindly gave us all an unsold back copy of the last-but-one issue.

Instead, with ten minutes down and three trends still to go, we scampered through “pragmatic purpose” (Coca-Cola supporting female entrepreneurs in Africa, Toyota supporting tsunami victims in Japan, P&G supporting moms, etc). Spot on as a current trend, if not exactly new.

Then we looked at “contextual integration” which is basically the digital world discovering that when, where and how and in which of their life roles you communicate with people, actually matters. (Oops! – did a digital person accidentally wander into the offline media planning department?).

And then “living services” which adapt to consumer behavior. I thought we would be back to the Nike fuelband but no, this was about Delta improving their customer experience and Garanti bank in Turkey (which had won 45% of the mobile retail banking) marketing the country by being “first in” with location-based mobile services.

Finally, back up with the clock, we heard about an ancient tribe in Mexico, where a mother going through birth contractions was given a cord to pull on her partner’s testicles and share the pain. I’m not sure which of the four trends this related to, but it certainly got people talking in the coffee break.

Mark Norman of Zipcar
Suitably refreshed, we tuned back into Mark Norman of Zipcar, the car-sharing service. Mark may not have Paul’s charisma, but he had one of the best cases of classic marketing practice I’ve heard in years.

Zipcar started with a truly transformational business idea: not (like others) how to make it ok not to have a car, but how to make it aspirational not to have a car. It used new technology (remotely coded ignition keys) to make car rental high tech and dis-intermediated – no bored staff needed on site.

It leveraged social trends like eco-consciousness, without hanging its hat on them. It reached people entering the target market at a habit-forming lifestage, through locations on college campuses. It mirrored demographic trends by setting up next-stage locations in crowded inner cities, where it has enabled customers to cut their transportation expenditure costs by 70% - from 19% of disposable income to 6%. And it sold the business to Avis, when it was ready to scale (and when Avis needed a shot in the arm).

They should be teaching this at business schools for years to come.

I must admit, though, I ticked the box for Paul K-R as my favourite speaker, rather than Mark Norman. I bet most people did too.

We should know better.

Julian Boulding is president of thenetworkone and Society fellow. Read more blog reviews on our conference, watch videos and more in our Clubhouse.