Annual Review 2011/12

Why direct consumer connections?

For any business, knowing its fans and building a relationship with them is vital for a successful future. This focus is helping to drive the continued growth of our biggest brands. In 2011/12, BBC Worldwide's top five brands accounted for 30% of headline sales, and the top 12 for 47%, up from 24% and 36% just three years earlier. Understanding consumers enables us to have a far better chance of giving them what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. This becomes even more important in the rapidly changing world in which we operate.

Investing in fan relationships can help grow consumer loyalty towards a brand, extend consumer interest to similar brands in a company's portfolio and eventually, by the fan becoming an advocate for a brand, grow its engagement within new social circles.

The growth of social media platforms has given businesses another, and more direct, means of communication. The functionality of platforms like Facebook and Twitter allows companies to build brands and move from a traditional consumer relationship to one where the consumer can be an actively engaged fan.

How we are doing it?

BBC Worldwide is evolving from a predominantly business-to-business organisation to one which has a strong business-to-consumer focus. We are building direct consumer relationships through our websites, social media, consumer products, mobile applications, games and live events, and in particular through our biggest brands which have scale and global appeal.

Specifically we are harnessing direct consumer connections by:

• Building an electronic customer database to tell consumers about our brands, products and services

• Focusing on marketing our brands to core fans and increasing revenue per fan

• Extending our existing analysis of the BBC brand globally, covering more territories and all key brands

• Enhancing our existing e-commerce offering to grow deeper relationships with our consumers

Our target and progress against it

We have been increasing our investment in consumer insight and sharing this insight across the company. Over the past year we have invested in global segmentation studies for Doctor Who, BBC Earth and Top Gear and this consumer understanding is helping shape how we grow these brands in new territories and new formats.

We have increased investment in consumer engagement, most particularly in social media and electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM). This will allow us to personalise each offer and to communicate other products or services which may be of interest to the consumer, based on each consumer's preference. In the last year we've doubled our customer contacts from 2.3m to 4.6m and are setting up a single database with eCRM functionality for all our consumers. A new team has been established this year to lead eCRM and continue to drive consumer acquisition and the average revenue per fan.

In addition we continue to invest in an e-commerce offering on bbcshop.com to provide our customers with an improved consumer journey.

Social media sites are proving rich platforms on which to interact with our consumers. In the last year we have used skills and knowledge learnt from building successful profiles for our key brands on Facebook and Twitter to drive interaction across our portfolio of brands. Facebook fans of BBC Worldwide's global brands grew to over 23m. This year we have experimented with different ways of interacting with fans on social networks to drive consumers to our range of offers for each brand, including our own websites. Now 39.6% of the Top Gear website's traffic is directed from Facebook.

Live Events form a key part of our strategy of extending and deepening consumers' relationship with our brands. The breadth of Live Events we offer has grown significantly over the last year, and our ambition is for this to double again within the next year. Launches in the year included the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular, which sold out in Melbourne, the fifth Strictly Come Dancing Tour and the CBeebies Live event. More details can be found in the Performance Review.