A Donkey on the Edge

Good piece on FMCG blogging over at Positive Impact (one of Hill & Knowlton's Collective Conversation channels)

He mentions Stormhoek among others and includes a link to comments about Flora pro.activ's Lulu activity.

Many good points, but I wanted to add a wee clarification about Flora.

I'm currently working with Flora's agency to investigate and define ways the brands can collaborate (and co-create, of course) with digitally-enabled communities.

While the Lulu activity was before my time, I thought I'd mention that it was never supposed to be a blog (as I understand it the word 'blog' never appeared in any of the ads).

The idea (from looking at the work) was to suggest a feeling of closeness with a celebrity (getting past the bodyguards and high fences). Unilever has a page on the Lulu activity on its corporate site.

Once you're operating in the celeb space the rules change and you need to work with a whole set of assumptions (say, for instance, that celebs don't write their own copy). I think the man on the street understands these mechanics and I doubt any mums out there thought Lulu was actually blogging her experiences as you or might have.

That said, Lulu did genuinely have high cholesterol. She did eat all the products and believe it or not, they did help lower her cholesterol:-)

This highlights one of the conundrums faced by brand managers who want to enter the co-creation space: many brands have real, positive stories to tell, but even these seem to fear the airing of a single item of bad news or off-message content. Getting over (managing) that barrier is one of the toughest challenges I can see for them.