Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

A world of big niches

The growth of social media has enabled small, niche interest groups to grow. Your local MG owners club with a handful of members who pootle down to a field somewhere once a year for a big national gathering, can now connect with thousands of other MG owners and enthusiasts around the world in an instant. This small niche group is now big. They’re big because geography is no longer a barrier to connecting with people. They’re big because their interest isn’t really that small when aggregated up – it’s just small in their local area.

Niches might be single issue, but people aren’t

Much like the intertwining storylines in soap operas, distinct online communities are woven together by people having multiple interests. Take Trevor, for example. Trevor likes cars, embroidery and swimming. Three pretty distinct hobbies. When Trevor announces on twitter that his car was broken into, his strong relationships with people will mean he gets sympathy from his embroidery and swimming friends as well as his car friends. When he says this is the sixth time it’s happened in the last two years. He’ll get a lot more sympathy. When he says he’s setting up an online petition to get his local police force to take the issue more seriously, his embroidery and swimming connections will sign it online alongside his car friends. They’ll also ask their friends to sign it. Many of their friends will have interests completely unconnected to any of Trevor’s interests.

Niches affect big issues

On the big issues of the day, niches come into their own as a way of organising people and disseminating information. A good example of this is the Occupy movement. First they occupied Wall Street, then others with similar interests occupied other cities around the US and globally.

A closer look at London’s Occupy movement reveals that they are a fairly diverse bunch. Indeed, one of the recurring themes in media coverage about them is that they appear to have no single message – they are made of distinct, niche groups. When they occupied the Guardian’s Comment is Free section, they described themselves as a “disparate smorgasbord.”

So, niche groups are growing in size and it’s easier than ever before to build large coalitions of support by tapping into them. The challenge for communicators is maintaining a consistent, single focus. The 99% have disparate interests.

Some thoughts on Visa’s repositioning

PR week recently reported that Visa Europe has retained Hill & Knowlton to promote Visa as a technology company to consumers and the business community. This is an interesting move. Traditionally seen as a payments company, why would Visa want to reposition itself?

My initial thoughts run to three possible reasons.

Firstly, I think consumers often perceive Visa to be a financial services company, in particular a credit card provider. The public’s dislike of financial services is obvious and “banker bashing” continues among politicians and commentators. Visa’s reputation might improve if it were to break the association with financial services and make people understand that although Visa processes financial transactions, it doesn’t charge interest or lend money.

My second thought involves mobile payments. Last night, I attended an excellent event called Digital Surrey where PayPal UK’s head of social media, Jon Bishop, spoke about the mobile web. His words on mobile payments in Africa and on NFC particularly struck a chord with me. He pointed out that people are, and will increasingly, use mobile devices to purchase products and services. With this in mind, it is obvious that if Visa is to maintain its dominant position within payments, it will need to convince businesses to use its technology rather than allow other companies to enter into payments (even if Visa still processes the underlying transactions).

Finally, there’s the money. Visa Europe is owned by its members – banks and other payments providers – however, Visa Inc. is a listed company. Perhaps Visa Europe wants to promote itself as a technology company not to reposition itself but rather to increase its profile overall in preparation for it to be floated at some future point.

The posing heron

Walking through Bushy Park last week I came across a pretty rare sight: a heron sitting in a willow tree.

I like taking wildlife photos but I’m not very good at them; partly because I don’t have a telephoto lens yet, partly because I don’t want to disturb the animals, and mainly because I’m not a very good photographer.

Anyway, slowly I walked closer to the heron to see if I could get a close up.

As I approached he turned toward me but clearly decided I was neither scary nor interesting and just sat there crouching in the willow tree while I took photos of him.

I snapped away and it quickly became apparent that this particular heron is a bit of poser.

Deciding he didn’t want too many photos of him slouching, he started to stretch his neck out.

Finally, he stretched fully out, beak pointing skyward, in what is no doubt his favoured pose.

Switching on competition

The Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) published its final report last week. While much of the reporting focused on ring-fencing and capital ratios, one important part went under-reported: competition.

Politicians and regulators have long seen competition as good for consumers. It is said to drive up standards and drive prices down. However, the retail banking is a very concentrated sector – the ICB report funds that the “largest four banks account for 77% of personal current accounts and 85% of SME current accounts”.

So how can we increase competition?

One answer, according to the ICB, is to make it easier for people to change who they bank with, commonly referred to as switching.

This concept is popular among regulators in a number of sectors, Ofgem, for example, looks at switching rates as one indicator of competitiveness among energy suppliers. It doesn’t require the state to intervene and break up firms, it is easy to measure and it is easy to apply to industries which have large barriers to entry.

However, despite the growth of price comparison websites and national advertising campaigns by energy companies only around half of consumers have switched their energy supplier – and this is during a time of squeezed incomes and double-digit energy price rises.

The Energy Secretary, Chris Huhne, recently told The Times (£) that consumers don’t put enough effort into getting the best deal.

“They do not bother. They frankly spend less time shopping around for a bill that’s on average more than £1,000 a year than they would shop around for a £25 toaster.”

If consumers aren’t changing energy suppliers, there’s little evidence to suggest that they’ll switch between banks. So will encouraging switching really switch on competition?

The difference between reputation and brand

It’s not uncommon to see the words reputation and brand substituted for one another in a manner not dissimilar to the way politicians use the words deficit and debt interchangeably. Like debt and deficit, brand and reputation are linked, but they aren’t the same thing.

By far the best definition of a brand that I’ve heard was given by Interbrand’s Rita Clifton who described a brand as the “organising framework” for an organisation. It is central to an organisation and guides everything from the logo and the colour of the reception sofa, to how its products are developed and the way its employees interact with customers, suppliers and one another. The key point is that an organisation owns its brand – it defines and controls it.

Reputation is a different beast. Reputation is how everyone who comes into contact with an organisation, and those who have never come into contact with it, perceives that organisation. Reputation is owned by people not organisations. Reputation is individual. My perception of a company is different from your perception of that company.

Reputation can be influenced, perceptions can be changed over time, but a company can never actually own its reputation.