All full of Glee
Alliott Cole - 23 July 2010
American television series seem to arrive with alarming regularity on these shores conquering all before them. From the early days of Twin Peaks, Fraiser, and Friends through to 24, The West Wing and The Wire, millions of viewers have grown accustomed to characters from Baltimore to Washington to Seattle and back again. And so it is with Glee: a television series that aired originally on Fox in the US and more recently on E4 in the UK.
In short, Glee focuses on a high school show choir, called Glee Club, at the fictional William McKinley High School in Ohio. The episodes follow the lives of a diverse group of students who at various points break into song in a Chicago meets High School Musical fashion. The dialogue between characters is strong and the wit sharp.
It is difficult not to fall for the delight and happy escapism that Glee presents: no guns, no gangsters, and definitely no oil spills. Take Sue Sylvester, for example, the cheerleading coach who wants to see the end of the Glee Club - ‘Even your breath stinks of mediocrity,' she spits at her arch-enemy, Mr Schuester, the Glee coach. ‘So you like show tunes,' she says in another episode. ‘It doesn't mean you're gay. It just means you're awful.'
Glee is notable for another reason however: it is one of the first television series to have successfully delivered content across the screen, the web, the console and the mobile. The content has been adapted across formats; channels; devices and geographies to reach global audiences whether they own a television, an iPod, a radio, a Wii, a desktop computer or a mobile phone or all of the above. The Glee experience is seamless and all encompassing. It is also extremely profitable: several million songs from Glee have been downloaded to date, not to mention the plethora of merchandising opportunities that now present themselves.
Businesses can take much from the success of Glee. Often CEOs run the risk of appearing myopic, persisting with traditional channels and readily dismissing others - note the continued lack of customer engagement within the UK retail banking sector - has no one at Natwest or RBS discovered Twitter yet? Successful brands (LoveFilM; StarBucks; Red Bull; Zappos) demonstrate that the DNA of a product or service can be atomized and distributed through numerous complementing, overlapping, and competing channels to great effect. It is intriguing to note that in a recent dataset from Famecount the most popular UK brand on Twitter at the start of this year was not a consumer brand, high street shop, or travel aggregator, but a London museum: @Tate. The how and the why is explained concisely by Matt Rhodes at Fresh Networks.
Equally, what many considered to be purely business-to-consumer channels are now emerging as powerful business-to-business channels as consumer and business buying behavior evolves and changes: you have only to note the launch this week of @Earlybird Exclusive Offers to witness the evolution of Twitter as an ecommerce platform. This development brings the appeal of private and limited-time sales (now familiar on GroupOn and Amazon) to a growing, engaged and willing audience. The success of Dell's sales strategy on Twitter bears out this trend.
Ultimately however, the same business truths apply: the businesses that know themselves best and can concisely and clearly articulate their own DNA, will be those that rise above the noise to inform and engage the customer. More than ever before customers will choose how to engage with businesses rather than the reverse: the when, the how and the why of customer engagement is fast becoming a decision for the customer alone.
