What can King of Shaves teach us about social media marketing?

It has been suggested that successful entrepreneurs have the ability to see things a little differently from most people. And Will King, founder of rapidly growing shaving product firm King of Shaves, certainly qualifies for that. A case in point – when considering the company’s biggest competitor he overlooks both Gillette and Wilkinson, and instead nominates "lack of awareness".

 

"All we need to do is overcome lack of awareness of the brand so that when people are given a choice of shaving product, they will buy us rather than thinking it is only Gillette or Wilkinson," he elaborates.

 

And if awareness is indeed his firm's chief competitor, then he’s not doing a half bad job at besting it. Having founded the King of Shaves Company in 1993, the brand has overtaken Wilkinson Sword and Nivea to become number two to Gillette in the shaving prep market in the UK. The firm was named the T-Mobile Fast Growth Business of the Year and the Product Business of the Year by Growing Business earlier this year at the Fast Growth Business Awards and was crowned the CBI and Real Business Company of the Year in 2008. A King of Shaves product is sold every seven seconds in the UK and the product is now also taking off in the USA where it is being sold in over 20,000 stores.

 

All in all, not bad for a firm concerned about lack of awareness. King’s secret? To quote a recent blog post "'publicity point' and the heady 'amplification accelerant' that is social media will be at the heart of our King of Shaves brand hurricane and get the 'digital dialogue' flow going!" That's 'social media marketing' to you and I. And King acknowledges that his business would have nothing like its present level of awareness without social media.

 

"We would have largely been stuck to being talked about in the press in the UK, we wouldn't have had billions of visits to a top level domain and we wouldn’t have the communication and the conversation that goes on," he suggests. "It has been a good thing for challenger brands and competition in general."

 

Indeed, while King of Shaves' social media programme has been in the headlines recently with its high profile Shave Sexy campaign, King is no newcomer to internet and social media marketing. Since snapping up the domain name shave.com for a bargain $35 in 1995 he has used a whole variety of tactics online to drive awareness, including several successful advergames such as the 'King of Skeleton' game launched to coincide with the 2006 Winter Olympics and the football-themed 'King of Defenders' game that has clocked up 75 million plays since its launch and still attracts thousands of plays every day.

 

But it has been the advent of social media that presented King of Shaves with its most effective box of tricks and King has carved out a reputation for his organisation's use of social media platforms. The company's extremely active and customer-friendly use of its Twitter and Facebook profiles has gained considerable plaudits - read 'How King of Shaves groomed me (as a customer)' for one consultant's glowing assessment of the KOS social media customer experience and subsequent SEO benefits. But it also incorporates less leveraged social platforms such as Spotify into its marketing plans.

 

While KOS has dipped its toe into TV campaigns in the past with the launch of the Azor razor, its latest Shave Sexy campaign has seen it return to a purely digital model - stirring up some considerable controversy over its sizzling content. So what can Will King teach the rest of us about social media marketing?

 

 

"Within Facebook and Twitter you can have dozens, hundreds, thousands of people interacting with you and getting a 'digital dialogue' going. So from a general customer awareness and brand behaviour point of view with customers, it is absolutely fantastic. And of course the likes of Facebook and Twitter are still free!" says King.

 

"This digital dialogue contrasts with 'brand broadcast' – which is where a brand runs a TV commercial or ad, saying 'look at us, we're great, buy our product'. Some, like our King Of Shaves fan page or the Lynx community, facilitate people who like the brand and want to discuss the relative merits of the company in a conversation. Obviously the main difference with the brand broadcast is that in a digital dialogue the brand owner isn't in control of the conversation. If somebody writes that they have had a bad experience with a King Of Shaves razor we deal with that one way, and if someone says they love King Of Shaves then we appreciate that in a different way. If the conversation takes a turn for the worse or a turn for the better, you have to react and adapt. It can be quite scary for brand owners."

 

 

"If the digital dialogue is very personal to you then you have to keep it internal. Giving it to an agency to run for you is like putting your child into day care when you should look after them until they are a bit older. You have to be really careful because you don't know what people are going to say or do on your behalf.

 

"I do the Twitter handle myself using a variety of management decks like Tweetdeck and Osfoora. Some people say that it's a bit micro for the CEO to be doing, but the world we live in is so instant now and trends develop so quickly that it is just a balance between what I do as CEO of the business and what I do to keep the brand clean and fresh and working in the digital media space – which is an important space to be working in.

 

"Looking after Facebook we have my head of design Simon Watson. We also have Nicky Springle, head of customer care, who follows me on Twitter to see what I'm doing and following up on anything that flashes up of concern from a customer care perspective, as well as my PA. If someone is really happy with our product we might get them to DM us their address, for instance, and send out some product or a thank you. If someone has some sort of dissatisfaction, we'll find out more about it and hopefully get their query turned around."

 

 

"Social media is everything really. Because it is new, people are trying to pigeonhole it – it certainly shouldn't go into PR because then it will just be used to try and blow up the awareness of your business; it shouldn't just go in sales because then you will be going after people for money; and it shouldn't just be customer care because it has got other things to do. So I think it lives in a whole new area of 'social media awareness' and what that particular channel can do."

 

 

"If you don't have a publicity point and you don't have a point about what you're saying on social media, you have no hook to hang your business on. Social media is purely an accelerant it is not a means or an end in itself.

 

"I'll give you an example. Susan Boyle comes on, she's not a great looking woman but she sings like an angel - that was her publicity point. Then of course YouTube was the social media accelerant to the extent that she ended up on Oprah. Now if she'd have just uploaded her singing on YouTube for example it wouldn't have had that impact because you wouldn't have had the cut to Amanda Holden as her jaw drops, you wouldn't have had that context where people go 'Wow! Something different has happened here!'

 

"Even with the recent Old Spice campaign, had it not run an ad in the Superbowl and given the brand some breathing space for four or five months until they ran that campaign, you would have just had a bloke going up on the YouTube channel talking to people. You wouldn't have got the context of why he was doing that. So it is like anything – you have to have a hook to hang your coat on and once you've hung your coat you have to work out how you're going to leverage it out."

 

 

"With Twitter now indexing every time it is used – when I tweet or other people reference it – it is incredibly important now. Everybody has to understand, however, that you have to approach it the same as if you are holding a conversation at a dinner party – you shouldn't tell one of your guests to eff off if you don't like their opinion on your cooking, but also if they tell you they like what you've cooked then you should say 'thank you'. You have to remember that it is out there forever. What you say gets search indexed and it can be used – hopefully positively, but sometimes negatively."

 

 

"I disagree with Seth Godin [who is not on Twitter and says brands should pick a single social network and focus on it]. There are going to be three endgame plans in the market. You have got YouTube for content, which is a TV channel. You have got Facebook for communities, which is a connection channel. And then you have got Twitter as a means of alerting people to stuff that is going on very quickly, which is the news alert channel. So if you're not on Twitter and you have not got your followers and the interaction and dynamism of going out on it, then I think you're missing a trick."

 

 

"The big challenges are learning what to do and why you are doing it. You have to have a clear objective. For instance, because King Of Shaves is a brand that is in the UK and is globalising, and social media is a global phenomenon, we can use it to promote our brand in the markets we want to be in. It is not hard to work the strategy piece out behind it. If you are a small business, for instance running a bakery in Cornwall, you have to work out a different strategy and it has to be much more of a local strategy – maybe using Twitter as a way for people to place orders of bread. The evolution of Twitter into not just a global but also a local perspective is going to be very valuable for businesses. And again, it's all free."