The top things that mattered to us in February

We’re back with our take on what’s happened during Feb that we think matters, and there’s been a lot going on in the world of purpose-led brands.

1) Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign

We’ve seen a huge momentum towards the end of last year of brands producing more impactful rallying cries - like this one we covered by Friends of the Earth last month. 

This month the spotlight was shone firmly on the huge amounts of material waste in the fashion industry, by Ecover’s Laundry Against Landfill campaign. We loved how their awareness piece is simply non-preachy yet effective, and how they’ve scaled the campaign to be multi touch-point, providing supplementary ‘how to’ guides on how to properly take care of our clothes on their site. 

Sara Mendez, Marketing Director at Ecover explained that  “with this campaign, we wanted to raise awareness of the problem of fashion waste. But also show people ways they can lessen their impact by falling back in love with the clothes they already own, keeping them in use, and out of landfill”.

2) Cans for Equity by BrewDog

It’s always interesting to see brands explore the ways they can attract and engage their superfans.

Look no further than what Brewdog have launched during Feb, with their Cans for Equity campaign - with the result being you can recycle 50 cans to become an ‘equity punk’ in Brewdog. 

This is such a great way to not just encourage behaviour change in the short-term, but also to show they care about their product at all stages through partnerships with First Mile to give their cans a second life. 

This initiative has created a more intimate perk for their superfans by feeling truly part of the brand, and we applaud it.

3) Sanctus’s campaign for Children’s Mental Health Week

This particular campaign is proof of how a creative can really thrive in the long-term. Sanctus, a brand providing mental health coaching businesses and individuals, decided to flip the script and create a film a couple of years ago on their socials for Children’s Mental Health Week. 

It made a comeback during the past month, and we wanted to highlight how much making this tonal switch on such a sensitive topic matters… it’s so great to see this from a brand with a more corporate audience. 

We spoke to George Bell, the brand and marketing lead at Sanctus who agrees that the power of the film also lies in the script. It’s comedic but authoritative on a subject when “all too often mental health is associated with images of someone sitting in a dark room clutching their head - this is, of course, part of mental health but it's not the full spectrum.”

“Although it's a couple of years old now, we still re-use it and still have a great response every time, which shows that it still remains uncommon for people to see mental health presented in this way.”

4) NHS x Notes to Strangers 

#notestonhs with @imalilo

411 Likes, 1 Comments - Andy Leek (@notestostrangers) on Instagram: "#notestonhs with @imalilo"

We’ve all seen these notes pop up around London over the years and one of our team is a huge fan, so we had put this in our highlight. 

Notes for Strangers started as an Instagram account by ex-creative Andy Leek, writing random notes on telephone boxes and bollards, spreading positivity and kindness where he noticed it’s severely lacking. 

This month we saw the launch of a collab with Notes to Strangers and the NHS, creating posters and notes for hospitals UK-wide to show support for nurses under severe stress. 

Hospitals tend to be a pretty bleak place and these notes are intended to spread positive messages at a time where political conversations are taking up much of the discourse around their work - it’s just a lovely thing to see.

5) ‘Meet the New Joby’ by Joby 

And finally in our roundup we wanted to include this really simple but effective repositioning campaign by Joby. If you don’t know who Joby are - they’re a tech brand that sells tripods for all different devices. 

We love how instead of putting their product front and centre, they hero their creators interacting with their product, weaving in UGC to add a mixed media element. 

It’s great to see Joby are exploring a new creative angle, becoming more experience-focused - so we’re looking forward to seeing their creative progression down the line!

Like what you’re seeing and want to create content that matters?

Email josh@mattr.media and let’s see what we can do...

The top things that have mattered to us in January

We’re back with our monthly roundup of campaigns, content and activations that we feel are making a difference to our world…

1. Hiyacar’s back to life

Hiyacar are in an exciting position as a high-growth spearheading a new sector of the car sharing market. And up until this point, they’ve been having to subsidise the majority of peer to peer insurance costs for drivers as that’s the sector norm. But when their insurance provider came back in late December with further increases to pricing for their drivers and no further changes to the claim policy -  they took the decision to cease trading for a couple of months. 

They’re happy to announce that they fully restored their service as of this week, but we wanted to reflect on how awesome their customer service was during this period of closure. They went out of their way to speak to each driver and owner in their community to personally explain the issue - and to people who couldn’t rent during this period, they gave them 50% of the funds it would have cost to rent a replacement with competitors service providers. 

It couldn’t have been easy, but they went above and beyond for their community, proving their mettle as a company which is not prepared to ‘grow at all costs’. Rob Larmour, their COO & Co-founder told Team Mattr that “the response we received from our members and from other companies who saw not only what we did by making a stand but how we handled the aftermath for our drivers and owners, has been fantastic. Being open and allowing everyone to see what goes on behind the scenes showed that we won't compromise our values for growth.”

2. Friends of the Earth’s newest campaign tackling eco-anxiety 

Eco-anxiety is a bit of a hot topic right now and this brilliant film for Friends of the Earth created by Don’t Panic is an awesome way to bring the conversation to life. We’ve been hugely inspired by this approach to raising awareness.

By sensationalising the heroine’s chase to win her plastic bottle back, Friends of the Earth have figured out how to communicate and tackle the topic of doing your bit for the planet without being preachy. With so many stats flying about on how many years we’ve got left and how much work is still left to be done, it’s easy to get caught up -  but take a leaf from this ad and start doing your own bit to help.

3. First Direct ‘money wellness’ TTL campaign & social content series

We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness

22 Likes, 1 Comments - first direct (@firstdirect) on Instagram: "We believe money is a wellness issue. Let's challenge how money makes us feel. #moneywellness"

We’ve seen some great ads over the years that focus on the difficulty of talking about money openly and confidently, like ‘The M Word’ by Lloyds Bank. Now First Direct have come out with their latest campaign looking at the concept of ‘money wellness’ in our everyday realities. 

To accompany their OOH billboard ads, they’ve also produced a new social video content series interviewing their existing customers and how they are trying to be more ‘money healthy’. 

It’s great to see the huge highstreet finance players take part in an unscripted conversation around financial pressure, a trend that has definitely not been appreciated before. We’re huge advocates for brands leaning on their real people to tell real stories, so adding new perspective to the ways in which we’re improving our health in our lives is incredibly impactful.

4. Hubbub’s coffee cup installation exposes just how much waste coffee cups produce

Hey London! It's your last chance to visit our brew-tiful coffee cup recycling installation on the riverwalk close to the Tate Modern (which means it's your last chance to get swallowed up in a incredible cave of geometrical cups). Will we see you there? It will be there until Sunday 2nd February in a major push to raise awareness around coffee cup waste (we go through 5,555 cups every minute in the UK!) and to signal the new bespoke recycling bins around town and the rest of the country. Coffee cups are lined with a sneaky plastic film, you see, and they need to be separated from other paper goods in order to be recycled correctly. See you at the installation and let's keep coffee cups #InTheLoop

339 Likes, 18 Comments - H U B B U B (@hellohubbub) on Instagram: "Hey London! It's your last chance to visit our brew-tiful coffee cup recycling installation on the..."

We’re all guilty of using coffee cups without realistically considering if they’re going to have a second life. To combat this behavioural habit, environmental charity Hubbub have created an installation to showcase the 5,555 cups used per minute in the UK - compared to the 222 of those that are actually recycled in the existing processes. 

Natasha Gammell, the project lead at Hubbub, told us that “at 3 metres tall and illuminated at night, the structure is unmissable, swallowing visitors up in thousands of geometrical cups. The installation has evolved into a fully interactive public artwork as the thousands of people who pass the installation each day write down their visions for a greener world on the cups.”

Hubbub and Starbucks have contributed over £300K to creating new recycling centres across different boroughs that will uniquely process coffee cups, exploring new ways of regenerating the used plastic. We loved the idea for such an aesthetic visual to raise awareness for such a widespread issue - and there’s immense possibilities to create new and impactful content around the outcome. Watch this space!

Liked what you’re reading and want to create content that matters?

Get in touch at josh@mattr.media

BBB tips: working on communications between teams, when to consider a re-brand, and how to create a genuinely engaged community

We’re back from another great instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie, with plenty of fresh insights to share from the real-world challenges our community of purpose-led brands find themselves in.

Changing the mindset internally towards to your marketing team

We’ve touched on this briefly before in previous roundtables, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to helping your internal teams work more efficiently together. But what we have noticed is that the usual tension lies between how each team is perceived in terms of the value they add (explored further in “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni).

An interesting method to resolving this, for one particular brand, was to have the marketing team sit in on sales meetings and vice versa. This helped ensure an understanding of what types of collateral were integral to guarantee sales and the loyalty of customers, and essentially drew a line in the sand to what shouldn’t be changed or branded as ‘not on brand’ - making sure all voices are heard.

Understanding the red flags that can help identify if you need to consider a re-brand

When you’re starting a business and your team is small, everyone knows each other, your brand and its values so intimately. But naturally, as you grow, new faces join the team and many of them won’t really know who you are or what you really stand for.

Several guests shared their experiences of why this was a problem: 

1. “If it’s not resonating with us, how are our customers going to understand it?” 

2. “I sat down with 10 different people, and nobody could tell me what we actually do” -

3. “OK they say, I get it you’re purpose-driven, but now what?” 

For a lot of the people around the table, it became necessary to go through a rebrand process with the aim of ensuring their values, tone of voice and general ways of working matched up with the vision they had for the company...interestingly the most successful of these processes was done extremely collaboratively with the whole team and became the benchmark to plan all communications out of.

Taking the steps to build a genuine community

Creating a genuinely engaged and involved community is something that many brands struggle with. It’s a tricky field to navigate and execute properly - as engaging each of your users/customers face-to-face is a big leap. But luckily, we had some fairly experienced guests round the table who could spill secrets on their success...

A great example of this from one of our guests round the table was through a closed Facebook community - but they take care to make sure the channel isn’t a free for all. The brand’s marketing team are admins, and the only ones who can post, but their audience can like and comment to their heart‘s content. These parameters essentially protect their digital community space from becoming another customer service channel, and also cultivate a very authentic channel to communicate to their community, when organising face to face meetings is next to impossible. 

Another brand told us of how they host monthly pub sessions for their brand ambassadors.  This brand prides itself on the fact that the ambassador roles are volunteered by their community, so as a reward and a way of getting insight to their guerrilla outreach, what could be better than going to the pub? They recommended this method as a way to boost your company culture and exchanging ideas straight from the eyes and ears of your brand’s community.

Be open about sharing everything, even if you think it isn’t a big deal 

But having the foundations for building a community isn’t enough - and one guest fought this argument with a pretty great idea. 

Using the digital medium above, they’ve actually benefited from their community being directly involved in their business decisions. As an example, they’ve collaborated on working files of brand guidelines and tone of voice documents, product initiatives and web designs, even down to the design and layout of a button on their app because of free flowing feedback. 

It’s been an adjustment to create an additional feedback round in all these processes, but it’s led to a huge amount of brand loyalty and investment in their brand. It’s a lesson to us all to be open about allowing your community to help make decisions that you might not consider important or be able to resolve internally.

AND we host a great roundtable breakfast for our community of purpose-led brand marketers: they’re small, intimate and exclusive - and works a treat to see your beautiful faces.

We’ve got our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie on Feb 11th, and there’s a couple of tickets left. 

Book yourself in here OR email sunnii@mattr.media to find out more!

BBB tips: sit down with your customer, use your mission to empower your colleagues & how to acknowledge your competitors

It’s a brand new decade - and what better way to start than to share learnings from the last Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable to add to your list of OKR’s and personal goals for the year ;) 

In this edition, we delve into how to get your customer more involved in your brand journey, why being vulnerable with your colleague will build trust, how to approach bigger competitors in your comms and the holy trio of truths to abide when defining your purpose. 

Take the time to sit down with your customer

A couple of our attendees confessed to getting carried away with what they assumed their customers wanted from their brand, without actually having the data and proof to back it. They also confessed to relying on their analysis of social and digital engagement with their content, which can be easily subjective and interpreted differently from person to person.

Ultimately, meeting your customers face-to-face and eliminating screens is the answer. One marketer found that by bringing together people in small focus groups, they discovered unique audience quirks, commonality in things they worried about all of which the brand hadn’t considered based on digital data.

And if time is lacking, one top tip was to create a quarterly brand health checker to distribute to your community online. Ideally, the survey lists up to 10 questions to understand what your customers love at the moment, but also where they think your brand needs to be in the future. It’s this data that will help you get your comms to be working as efficiently as you need it to be.

Be more transparent to better your company culture

At Mattr, we’re always encouraging our clients to showcase their brand authentically in their external comms. But one of our guests raised a great point that it is just as important to be vulnerable and authentic when communicating internally too. 

We’ve seen that the start-up world is particularly prone to being an emotional rollercoaster, especially as many start up brands today may not be around tomorrow. The conversation around the future of your company is difficult to face, so being honest and transparent with your employees is vital to making sure everyone is fully on board and know how important their roles and responsibilities are to make the mission succeed. Our guest recommended “Radical candor” ( a book by Kim Scott) as a great tool to read when approaching difficult conversations.

Another great approach was to initiate monthly OKR’s to help track the progress of your specific role and responsibilities in terms of the bigger picture business goals. This is really rewarding for all involved and certainly something we’re embracing as a team in 2020.

Taking on bigger companies negatively in your comms isn’t always the way forward

For those who read our content regularly you’ll know we’re all about supporting the challenger brands who are changing the status quo. But doing this successfully in your comms doesn’t need to come from by attacking what’s come before. 

Your product might be disruptive, but displaying an ambushing attitude in your external comms makes your customers think you’re focused on beating the competition and not about addressing the bigger picture about what the future could look like. 

Instead, by empowering your audience to make a change in their habits and spinning a positive light on the future and respecting competitors who’ve come before you, you will earn more respect in the long term.

Know your human truth, organisation truth and sector truth  

This sentiment came from one of our guests who revealed that identifying these truths had helped them navigate a tricky organisation wide re-brand. 

To dissect this into three parts: 

Interrogating their human truth (essentially what their audience thought about them) helped them face their realities of how their products/services weren’t performing, and what they could do better, for their community directly.

Their organisation truth (focusing on what the needs of the internal departments are) opened up conversations with stakeholders at every level of the brand, to establish what needs to change to enable the business to do what it says on the tin. 

And using these two truths finally looking at their sector truth (the position of the brand within their industry vs the competition).

While their re-brand isn’t finished yet, revealing all of these hard-hitting facts and truths has helped break down the brand’s values and purpose into digestible goals for all internal stakeholders, not just the brand + marketing team.

Feel like these conversations relate to your challenges you’re facing at the moment, and want to get involved? 

Join us at our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable in February. Email sunnii@mattr.media or call her on 07772343952 to book a place!

BBB tips: update your tone of voice, empower your customers and how to bridge gaps between your internal departments

Our latest instalment of Brand, Bitch & Brekkie saw an interesting mix of brands from the world of fintech, HR and charity sectors.

Intriguingly, everyone’s challenges seemed to overlap, no matter the stage of their brand’s journey. Here are a few things we chatted about...

Language is crucial for your brand

A couple of our guests had just come out of their re-brand process and one key piece of advice they gave was to review your guidelines every year so that you could update them as the company grew/developed.

One brand told us that before doing this, they’d kept using the same terms for their service users for years, even though personnel had changed and the brand had moved on to better the way they communicated with their partners, users and donors.

The key to success though wasn’t just updating the guidelines for marketing, but making sure they were being genuinely implemented properly across all teams.

How to empower your customers to be involved in your content

One of the biggest debates round the table was how to use showcase your customer’s stories in your content without it feeling like you’re taking advantage of them (especially when they’re about sensitive subject matters). So how do you reassure them they aren’t just a pawn in a marketing plan? 

We all agreed that much of that was down to trust...you need to put effort in to building a real relationship with your customer so that asking them to be part of your content is something they really want to do. You also shouldn’t shy away from checking in with the customer about the narrative and make them feel a part of the creative process.

And when dealing with sensitive subject matters, transparency is key. But it’s also nice creatively to push boundaries a bit, moving away from a “sob story” towards stories that let the customer feel empowered and proud of who they are.

Breaking down barriers between internal teams

All companies find their departments work in silos. None more so than the tech and marketing departments at high growth scale ups. The shame of course, is working together should breed better work, so one of the questions posed was how to strengthen the relationship between teams. 

One brand suggested turning empty walls in offices into physical roadmaps that work for both teams, to highlight the interdependency of everyone’s tasks, but also allow everyone to physically see how each role and action impacts the other.

For tech and marketing specifically, a really interesting suggestion was to use marketing resource to test the popularity of product features before they’re built - essentially getting feedback from your community and seeing if they like or dislike what you’re building. For the brand who tried this recently, their engagement rose significantly as their community became more invested in their product, and the tech team had full access to the feedback.

Creating channels bespoke for your audiences

Some brands really struggle to build consistency in their content on social. It’s even more complicated when you have multiple audiences who you’re trying to speak to.

One of our brands round the table confessed that they struggle with projecting their brand consistently with customers and new recruits through the same channels, but a solution from another guest was to simply set up separate channels (their example was an Instagram for their staff and another for their customers).

It allows them to create consistent customer content whilst showcasing visuals of their culture, stories and their values as a way to attract prospective employees that are the right cultural fit, all through separating the Insta- channels out. Their channel has worked so well that Instagram’s direct messaging function serves as a function for their HR team, who end up finding the majority of their recruits this way! 

Digital asset and project management tools

And before we go, there were plenty of tools thrown around that help make our brand marketer’s lives a little bit easier. For people who found that not enough people action what’s said in the brand guidelines - try Brand Folder as the ultimate resource for all your teams to access everything brand. 

Another tool suggested was Social HP, which allows you to write content on your colleagues behalf, if they’re bootstrapped for time or don’t really know how to flesh out an idea.

One of our marketers was a huge fan (nee, potential ambassador!) for Monday.com, the project management tool. You may have seen their witty print campaigns on TFL at the minute. It’s great for virtually keeping track on what’s going on, saving you chasing your colleagues for the thousandth time.

Learnt something new? Want to share your own thoughts on building brands that matter? Then why don’t you book a seat to our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable, at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any questions

BBB tips: How to win stakeholder buy-in, the best ways to measure brand, how you can combat the challenges of global vs local marketing

We had another brilliant BBB this week with some amazing attendees. The below are a few tips from the really great conversations that were discussed over smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and OJ.

How to get stakeholders to buy-in to brand

When they can’t track impact or results of brand, stakeholders typically find it harder to justify parting with budget. And this is often the biggest challenge brand marketers face in the debate of performance vs brand. 

A really great recommendation on how to win buy-in from one of our marketers was to interrogate the ‘unknown’ sources in Google Analytics. If your stakeholders agree that it’s not unreasonable to assume leads driven from this source are from brand activity, you can start to build up a picture of the quantity and quality of leads/conversions created from these campaigns vs your performance ads.  

She admitted that although this trial is a couple of months old, however, it should help to justify spend for future brand-focused campaigns.

Be smart with how you measure sentiment

If surveys are part of how you’re collecting that data, one of the tips shared was to really interrogate the questions you were asking people. Often surveys are unreliable because what people say isn’t necessarily how they feel.

For example - most surveys people are asked “how do you feel about our product?” whereas a better way to get the truth out could be asking “how would you feel if our product didn’t exist?”  This measures sentiment as a justification for the effectiveness of brand building on business growth.

Simple things like this can trigger much richer insights that help brand marketers justify campaigns or projects that would otherwise be ignored.

Know the platforms that you’re on

An interesting insight was that many marketers at our roundtable supported moving away from having accounts on every social media platforms. There is plenty of pressure put on brand and social media managers to be “everywhere”, but if your most engaged audiences aren’t on Facebook, it’s a drag on resource to focus energies on it. 

In that same vein, if you’re going to focus on the platforms where your audiences are on, make sure you know how to use them best to your advantage. One brand told of how they had great community success on their Instagram channel by hiring an ex-influencer to become their social media manager, growing their community from 2K to 10K in a quarter. 

Another brand marketer pointed out that while choosing the right channel is the first step, the second is to pay attention to what is being created on each platform. They explained that for them, Youtube shouldn’t just be a space for brands to create their own content, but to co-create with relevant Youtubers with relevant audiences.

Bigger brands shouldn’t lose touch with hyper-local stories 

One topic we discussed was the challenge of global brands creating effective localised campaigns. Often there’s tension between global teams (who have the broader vision for where the brand needs to be) and the local teams (who have an ear to the ground and ultimately know more about what their local markets tastes are). So how can you fix this and ultimately create more effective work?

There’s no easy fix here but the key is global teams can’t dictate the nuances of particular pieces of content, hence the importance of local sign-off. We recently lived the benefits of this sign-off for localised content within our global campaign with Grant’s Whisky and by pulling together as a team, we created an inclusive, socially diverse campaign that went against the status quo of advertising in the whiskey world.

As one of our attendees put it, why should you trust middle-aged white guys to dictate the content narrative for a place they’ve never been to?

Learnt something new? Want to share your own thoughts on building brands that matter? Then why don’t you book a seat to our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable, at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.

Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any q’s!