If you want a conversation, say something interesting
4th November 09
Posted in Brands, social media
Lots of smart people have made compelling arguments recently for the shift from campaign to conversation thinking. We were particularly taken with this post by Kenneth Weiss courtesy of Rick Liebling at Eyecube which clearly and neatly maps the differences between the two approaches and we very much enjoyed this RGA film talking about the importance of long term brand platforms.
Campaigns versus conversations Infographic by Kenneth J Weiss
We’re big fans of conversation thinking. The danger, however, is that we believe we can simply shine a spotlight on the conversation, abandon the campaign and leave consumers to it. It’s dangerous for a number of reasons:
- They may not be saying very much at all. Writing about launching “Brands in Public” Seth Godin observes “If your brand has any traction at all people are talking about you”. That’s partially true of course, but only partially. If you’re say a bread brand, a detergent brand or a toilet paper brand they may not be saying a lot. As Oscar Wilde so memorably put it “The only thing worse than been talked about is not being talked about”. Or is it…
- In the absence of something positive to respond to, the conversation may be dominated by customer service issues or by mischief making. The Skittles experiment is a case in point where without a conversation starter from the brand the conversation is effectively high-jacked. Indeed many brand owners’ reaction to the Brands in Public initiative seems to indicate that simply letting the conversation run without interesting brand stimulus and curation is problematic for any number of brands.
- Our brands become the guy with no opinion-the one who responds to every question with “I don’t know, what do you think?”
Skittles' Twitter Homepage Experiment
It’s very easy to see the campaign as the poster child for everything that is wrong with communications today-monolithic, monomaniacal and myopic. But do any of us really want to talk to a brand with nothing to say for itself? The people I want to talk to are the ones who tell me interesting stories, make me laugh or show me something beautiful. The brands people participate with most are arguably the ones generating the most interesting material of their own. So perhaps we need to re-frame the way we think about campaigns, seeing them not as egomaniacal, one-way rants but as conversation starters and stimulators-the jokes, stories and provocations that start a conversation, keep it going, keep it interesting.
Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group in an excellent-and provocative-post on the subject of brands and conversations emphasises this need to do something worth talking about:
“I can’t help but feel that while we’re in a phase where our industry is looking at social media as a new marketing platform, what we should be thinking is that it’s just the newest place our audience goes to to talk about us when we do something worth talking about”
Smart and nuanced stuff, though I’m not sure I agree 100%. There’s no question that the age of the monologue is over. The conversations between brands and their consumers happen in the open today and we either embrace that or lose all control of the dialogue. Likewise, as media platforms fragment we need to create our own platforms; brand destinations delivering ongoing utility and entertainment. As consumers become ever more empowered and expressive we will want to embrace that expressive-ness and co-create with them.
Clearly, any smart social media thinkers will find ways of managing and directing the conversation. They will understand the role of content in giving shape to conversations, they will know how to associate brands with the subjects consumers do want to talk about, they will build in simple and scaleable ways of joining a conversation. They will find ways of aggregating the conversation into something bigger and more beautiful than the sum of its parts.
But we believe campaigns also have a pivotal role to play if we want our brands to be involved in the right kinds of conversations:
- Campaigns start conversations: Campaigns are the jokes, the chat-up lines, the anecdotes that get conversations started. Done right, they make our brands look interesting, sexy and funny-the kind of brand you want to talk back to. Campaigns bring people to platforms.
- Campaigns refresh and expand conversations: So you’ve started a conversation. People are talking about the brand, passing around branded content, buzzing about the campaign. You’ve used that buzz to draw some people into a deeper conversation, perhaps engaging with a long-term brand platform or utility. Now you want 1. to give those people something new to talk about and 2. to draw more people into that deeper relationship.
- Campaigns amplify conversations: You may have a hard core of loyal users who talk to you all the time. They’re fascinating individuals, they make excellent comments, they co-create some fantastic content with the brand. But they’re maybe 1% of your target audience. Campaigns can give these users and their content a much broader stage to play on.
The role of campaigns in conversation thinking
Of course, to do all this we need to be designing the right kind of campaign. Campaigns that provoke, entertain and inspire, campaigns that invite participation, campaigns that are designed to move consumers from buzzing about brand content towards a richer, longer term dialogue. We need to design in social features from the outset and incentivise social spread. We need to make a Campaign’s ability to drive participation a key metric, to try more things more quickly and see what catches fire. Campaigns have long been designed to be talked about, it’s time to start designing them to be talked to.
If we think of conversations as the fire and campaigns as the fuel for those conversations, it’s pretty clear we need both. There’s no fire without a spark. There’s not much heat without fuel.
Patricia, you used the phrase ‘…talk to a brand…’.
Semantics, for sure, but we’re talking about communication – so language is important.
People can’t talk to brands and brands can’t (or shouldn’t) talk to people.
The more faceless communication becomes, the less effective it is.
Have you ever tried complaining to an email address or a customer service team? It’s incredibly difficult unless you talk to a human being that takes responsibility.
It’s not just brands that shy away from responsiblity in communication. The good old anonymous comment illustrates what happens when you don’t have to put a name or a face to your message.
In any case, who wants to talk to a campaign? I don’t get it.
I have two campaigns in mind that I love to talk to and talk about. These two campaigns have strong campaign narratives and have built a personality that I like to engage with.
I like to see Facebook updates from Dos Eques – Most Interesting Man in the World (174,000 fans). They have two recent updates describing his character staring down a hurricane or playing rock, paper, trident. This content helps build the world that the Most Interesting Man lives in and I am disappointed that I will miss the Most Interesting Show in the World when it comes to Tampa in a few weeks. I speak to the brand through the narrative of the character when I comment on his status updates or share the update with friends.
I also like to see Facebook updates from Alexandr Orlov – Founder of Compare the Meerkat and the outbursts he has about his butler/ sidekick Sergei (600,000 fans). I particularly enjoyed the narrative about the Jacuzzi being fixed by Sergei and the plumber. Meerkat fur evidently clogs up the jets. Again, I speak to the brand through the narrative of the character when I engage with his Facebook page.
When I read the phrase, “do any of us really want to talk to a brand with nothing to say for itself?” My takeaway is to create a narrative that will be worth engaging with.
I also want to interact with brands beyond Tampa Bay. My wife just bought a book from Amazon.com.uk and she had to have the book shipped over seas to her. It has not arrived yet so she emailed Amazon who is going to send another book, but if the book shows up Amazon suggested donating it to charity instead of paying to ship it back to Amazon. This brand interaction from a faceless online customer service person has been much better than most human customer service people I have experienced.
I agree. The whole reason for social media has been taken over by “brands”. It’s not amiable anymore. SELL, SELL etc.
Hayes, many thanks for taking the time to comment. I think we’re at slight semantic cross-purposes here. I absolutely agree that where a consumer is having a one to one dialogue around a customer service issue, they need to speak to an individual not a faceless corporation-I couldn’t agree more. That said, I’d argue brands talk to consumers all the time and consumers talk right back. Every piece of communication from a brand from billboards to store fronts to packaging to a website is a brand “talking” to its consumers. Every time a consumer vents about customer service on Twitter, comments on brand communication on YouTube or creates their own content in imitation of or response to a brand, they’re “talking” to the brand. What I mean by campaigns people can talk to is this: brands today want to build ongoing dialogue with their consumers. Campaigns need to act as the spark or hook that draws consumers into those conversations. To do that, campaigns need to include mechanics that encourage consumers to participate and interact with them, and thereby with the brand. This is a different approach from simply hoping consumers would talk about our campaigns.
Hi Patricia,
Great dialogue you’ve got going on this post!
To add to your response to Haynes here – I think that new technologies like Twitter are amplifying the customer service experience, in many cases. Smart brands will look more toward this channel to listen to what their customers are saying about them and use that feedback to improve their product/service. The ability to keep an ear to the ground is revolutionary for brands and almost alluding to millions of micro-focus groups. However instead of stopping people on the street, they’re stopping you!
Customers want to know their favorite brands are listening to them and the ability to monitor and respond in real-time is making this process much more effective, but only for those who allocate enough resource to it.
The brands who do this the best will reap the most benefit from these new channels.
Maybe soon we’ll be saying we’d rather interact with customer service on these channels than having to dial in and hit the appropriate number of 0’s and 1 through 9’s to speak to someone… only to then be re-directed three more times…
Cheers,
Jackie
Hi Jackie,
Great point and I think you highlight both a huge opportunity and a daunting prospect for many brands. Investment as you say is key-in time and monitoring tools as much as conventional media spend. I think many brands are going to overwhelmed by just how much of a commitment this may take.
Patricia
Patricia,
Good thought-provoking site. I think many brands are disappointed to find that, in social media, not many people actually do talk about them.
But you’re definitely on to something in describing the process. Social media, like life (for most of us) is not one big, ongoing party. It’s a series of dispersed concentrations – sometimes I’m thinking about or talking to my various friends (brands), but most of the time I’m not.
Campaigns are like the parties that bring friends together. You get excited, decked out, have a great time, and keep on talking about it long after you’ve left.
The challenge with most marketing campaigns, though, is that social media is an add on, an extension, rather than an integral part. If you take home something from the party, you’re bound to keep talking about it long after your hangover has cleared.
Great stuff guys, and thanks for the mention. Just a note of clarification, the post on Eyecube was a guest post by Ken Weiss, who you correctly note as the the supplier of the graphic.
Another example of a brand that set up the conversation, but didn’t really join it is TGI Friday’s. Their Facebook-based Fan Woody campaign featured conversations not printable in a family website like this. It happened because Friday’s didn’t shape and guide the conversation, they just let it happen.
Many thanks Rick, have amended for clarity though of course credit is still due to Eyecube for excellent curation! TGI Friday’s is another excellent example.
Richard, I really love the party analogy. I think that’s exactly the point, that while we should enable people to dip and out of the conversation on a sporadic basis as they choose there are also times when we want to unite everyone around a single thought or event, an event that re-energises the relationship.
Great post.
One thing I would add; in addition to offering interesting content, campaigns need to offer that content through the right channel.
I’ve seen campaigns that are basically copy/paste jobs on facebook, twitter, myspace, youtube and flickr.
Ideally, campaigns understand the memes and tools available on each site and plays to them. Offering unique conversations on each site.
I love the analogy of conversations and what we can learn from them to make brands more social.
First: A conversation is a two-way street. This requires two voices. So the brand should have a voice, a belief, a point of view, and brands should cultivate the voice of the people.
Second: Conversations have to start somewhere. Who do you want to talk to? Let’s use the party analogy. Usually it’s someone that is attractive, interesting, someone everyone else is talking to, or someone that looks like they’re just having a hell of a good time. I agree that this is where campaigns can ignite fires.
Third: Once you start a conversation what do you do? The initial moments are usually spent feeling each other out, jumping around from once topic to another untill you settle on something you’re both passionate about. And when that happens you can talk for hours. With brands talking to very diverse groups of people with broad interests it seems silly to me that they are so monotone. So I agree that brands need to do more little things, instead of putting all their social eggs in one basket.
Fourth: When you have that great conversation with someone, you usually get together again and introduce that person to others that share the same passion. So as brands guide the conversations they can also connect people to others. At this point they’re a conductor of the system.
Just random thoughts, but more or less how I view “social strategy”. It’s not turning Facebook into your new corporate website, but mirroring the social behaviors of human beings.
I think 2010 will see the consolidation of community and conversation management as a paid-for / charged-for part of what the best agencies offer to their clients as part of integrated campaigns.
Of course many PR companies already do something approaching this, and that’s why I think they’re interesting places to hunt for new types of skills to bring into ‘creative’ agencies, especially around planning & strategy.
Wow, you guys have all said it much better than I did!
Griffin, I think Alexandr is a great example of a campaign that engages users in a conversation without forgetting the need to entertain and fundamental need to grab attention. I think there’s a slightly tendancy at the moment to see entertainment as an old-school indulgence versus utility but I think brands still need to offer both.
I love the idea of brands and campaigns needing to create a narrative consumers want to engage with-to Jordan’s point, a conversation is not about the same message in the same way at every point of contact but about involving the consumer in a story.
A good conversation is involving and entertaing and then, to Adam’s point, it can branch off into other areas and bring in other people. I definitely agree that if brands want longer term conversations, they will need to be interested in more than one thing. So as well as the singular brand essence or message we’re used to we will also need to start thinking about: what is this brand interested in? what would it like to to talk about? And how can it bring people together around that conversation?
Where we find those skills, to Ben’s point, is an interesting question.
I think this seems pretty obvious no? To get people talking brands have to change who they are – They need to become more transparent, more open, more thicked skinned, more daft (Think Blendtec). I also think a lot of nonsense is written around sentiment – the internet is owned and controlled by us all and long may that continue. Reacting and trying to continually peoples sentiment and opinion is border line madness. As an ex google person – Dont be evil still means something….
hey there,
i just spit out what i think.
somehow i feel a lil bit irritated by you attempting to find analogies in partys and conversations. maybe all this forced trying to fit advertisement into real life is our industries problem?
i dont think a conversation is yet realized.
this facebook campaigns that were mentioned here are in my opinion just two ways monologues.
and are at the end just entertainment like we always did but in a new form?!
Agree with Scott.
Also, as a customer, I don’t necessarily want to have a conversation with a brand. Even the brands I love. I talk to my friends and family.
I’ll talk to my friends about your brand, and that’s what the brand wants really. To do that, do something good, worthwhile, innovative, interesting, etc.
Stop making it so complicated. Not every brand needs a conversation.
i.e. Just do something worthwhile, rather than doing something shit and trying to generate a ‘conversation’
Scott, Rob, don’t disagree at all in lots of ways. I think it’s a huge mistake to assume consumers are avidly discussing our brands or want to have much of a dialogue with them. That’s exactly the point for me-that it’s very dangerous to assume the brand doesn’t need to keep doing things worrth talking about. And to Scott’s point, to be talked about they’re going to need to be doing more, taking more chances, being more playful and irreverent.
Rob is right. It’s all rather simple. The charts might help some people get a grasp, but if an agency or brand doesn’t have an innate understanding on how to do this, then I’m afraid they’re lost.
I can point to a specific example of how to successfully run a brand conversation: I’ll use a campaign my partner and I created way back in 2001 to re-launch Dr Pepper in Europe. We created what was then the world’s first live brand blog. Using the campaign’s antagonist characters, we set up a ‘live blog’ for them, on which we would answer people’s questions in real time (the character being us, sitting at our desk). In doing so, we gave a life to that characters that essentially joined the lives of our target in an ongoing dialogue.
At the same time, we set up an application where visitors could upload their photos (and using manual photoshop and 1-day concepting turnaround), we would ‘doctor’ their photos and incorporate them into the campaign All of this was immediately viewable on the website. This virtually guaranteed return visits from the target, since the campaign had become a vehicle for them to get involved in.
The campaign not only successfully repositioned Dr Pepper across Europe, but was voted as ‘favorite website to regularly visit’ by Dutch kids (ages 10-16) in a national poll.
This campaign would be difficult to recreate today, especially in certain markets, but the structure is still doable. The key was to have an incredibly streamlined process of client trust in order to respond quickly, as well as have the creative freedom to develop the campaign as you go. Essentially, an interesting campaign that evolves on a daily rather than quarterly basis becomes a conversation indistinguishable from any other conversation in the target’s life.
Talking about campaigns suggests that the penny has not dropped. campaigns suggest the dialogue is driven by the powerful speaker, rather than an ongoing engagement with social users ie people. social media is not something simply to be hijacked by corporations looking for a new channel. its a channel for people – not target markets – by people. so power to the…people. brands need to come last in the chain of thought not first in this game
I think you’ve got a great idea going here. The emphasis is basically *if the campaign is done right*. If it’s done wrong then the whole conversation can go into a totally different direction (ex. motrin moms). I posted your stuff up on my site. Thanks for the insight.
Many thanks for the link Shon and I agree totally, the campaign has to be very carefully nuanced and thought through. I don’t know the Motrin example but will go and seek it out!
Edward, with you on the need for ongoing engagement and the power of consumers in social media, I just don’t think that means there’s no role for campaigns. Every dialogue needs a start point or some interesting stimulus.
Edward – YES!
Completely.
When Cluetrain said ‘Markets are Conversations’, marketing and PR people have read that and thought “Ah, I do marketing, now I must do conversations”. No! The conversations happen without you. You create something for them to talk about. And by ‘you’ I don’t mean Marketing – I mean strategically creating a brand the provokes conversation and word of mouth.
Brands don’t need PR and Marketing people anywhere near as much as they did. A good product will get customers talking to themselves, putting up their own videos, putting up their own fansite, as social media has removed the financial (and other) obstacles to doing this. So create something worth talking about instead.
To take the Meerkat ad – it’s nonsense. Yes it’s easy, if you’ve a load of money, to make a funny advert with a character that people like. But it doesn’t mean anything as far as the product is concerned. (In fact, I hear the ad is to be pulled as the meerkat site is getting many more hits than the market site. Same with the Dr Pepper approach mentioned – fine whilst the campaign is on, but after that, so what? Nothing meaningful is created, just a distraction that happens to have a Dr Pepper design on it.
Let’s take Coke, as a fizzy pop example. They can create an amazing website, doing whatever they want, and loads of people will go to the site. But far better, as Scott is implying, would be to take the many criticisms of their working practices on the chin, and invest the huge marketing capital into making things better and fairer for their workers in these countries. Invest in the infrastructure that affects these people, their working conditions, etc, etc. That would generate far better word of mouth conversation than a website about something unrelated, or force starting a ‘conversation’ for the sake of it.
Rob, couldn’t have put it better. And I dislike the Meerkat campaign too.
You seem to forget the Meerkat campaign was intensely successful and loved by many. They created something funny and catchy the engaged people and when they did engage online they made the mental connection with comparethemarket.com. It’s not a load of money that made it successful but a great creative idea, money != success.
I think a lot of people, especially self-styled social media gurus forget just how successful great advertising can be and how completely multi-dimensional marketing is. The quality of the product and the service around it is also marketing. We are not going to live in world without marketing budgets. Ain’t happening.
Not engaging is the real enemy, misleading claims horrendous, boring interruptive advertising despicable, useless brand extensions a complete waste of money but not campaigns. There seems to be some thought here that all campaigns have the same characteristics, Edward’s “dialogue driven by a powerful speaker” which is just not true. Marketing have always tried to add stickiness to campaigns to prolong the effects; turn people into life-long fans, collect DM information etc, it’s just now we have more tools in technology to create stickiness by using campaigns to engage and then drive people to platforms where they be interacted in a conversation over the long term. The effect can then be listening and action on that information in a much more real time way. In our attention deficit and choice-intensive world we are going to need campaigns to realise we can converse with companies and how we can converse as that conversation will not be homogenous.
Also really agree with Jordan Julien, we should design for different conversation mechanisms in different and unique ways. But I can’t bring myself to call these channels.
I have been thinking about (and writing about) things in terms of ‘The Destination’ and ‘The Conversation.’
The Conversation piece is where people are talking, sharing, experiencing and the challenge for advertisers is to credibly participate / engage people in their spaces, on their terms. However, except for a very few cases, you ultimately want people to go somewhere – a Destination.
Traditionally the Destination was the website or a microsite, but with recent developments this could also be a Facebook Fan Page or a YouTube channel etc. This is effectively the activity hub / the campaign anchor.
The trick is then to manage push and pull together. This means both using traditional techniques to promote The Destination (display, Search, TV etc) and newer areas like seeding / outreach to drive The Conversation – though I agree the Conversation starter isn’t limited to these triggers, it could just as well be an event, a TV ad or anything else.
I think the point to remember though is that the more people talk about you, the more people come to The Destination and the more people talk about you and so on. It’s a loop and everything works together. (All of this obviously helps discoverability through SEO too.)
Things don’t happen on their own. Strategies may be changing and campaigns may look different, but without a co-ordinated approach across both Destination and Conversation things don’t work. I also struggle to see how Conversation activity can really be effective as an advertising strategy if it doesn’t have a well promoted and compelling Destination sitting behind it?
Some great thoughts and strong opinions here-it’s obviously a conversation that’s exercising a lot of us right now! There’s a real spread of opinion here, along a spectrum that seems to go a bit like this:
-At one extreme there’s the view that consumers don’t want to talk about brands. At all. So sorry, brands, but as channels fragment and personalise, you’re kinda screwed.
-At the other extreme there’s the view that consumers are having rich and fascinating conversations about brands all on their own and we should simply leave them to it.
At points in between there are slightly more moderate views:
-That consumers are happy to talk ABOUT brands if we give them something interesting to talk about but don’t particularly want to talk TO brands-this is I guess the viral model
-That consumers want to talk to each other and that brands can playing a role in enabling them to connect with each other-the community model
-That consumers are happy to talk about AND to brands if we make things intriguinging in the immediate term and rewarding in the long term-the conversation or platform model
Now I don’t know exactly what the right answer or model is-though it’s almost certainly a combination of a few different approaches. There are a few things though that I feel reasonably sure about:
-For the overwhelming majority of brands, conversations don’t happen without stimulus. There are a handful of brands in the world whose users are evangelists for their cause, who are creating fansites and UGC without incentive or encouragement. Yes consumers have the tools and the abiliy to drive the conversation today but that doesn’t mean they want to-particularly, as I say, if you’re a detergent brand, a bread brand or a tub of margarine. I’ve seen any number of tracking studies in my day and top of mind awareness for most brands is scarily low.
-If we want consumers to talk about us, then, we’re going to have to do something interesting. Does that have to be marketing? Maybe not, but
it does have to be something that commands attention, demands comment and is easily shared.
-As channels fragment and proliferate brand owners are going to want 1. to create their own platforms-destinations as Nick puts it and 2. to engage consumers in an ongoing dialogue rather than trying to re-engage them from a standing start every six months. I don’t think those are impossible goals and I think they will rapidly become commercial imperatives. The question then is how do we get to this point? There are some wonderful brand platforms that are struggling to drive traffic and traction and I’d argue, bluntly, that they need campaigns. Campaigns to draw people to them, to stimulate conversation and to keep recruiting new users to them.
-These campaigns will not be the campaigns of old. There probably won’t be just one or two bursts a year and the content will probably need to change-becoming more playful, more irreverent, more conversation-starting as Scott says. They’ll need to have mechanics for sharing built in from the start and we’ll need to think very carefully about migrating people from talking about us to entering a dialogue with us. But they will be campaigns-or perhaps they won’t. Perhaps we need a new word…”campaign” may simply be too laden with old-world baggage. Provocations? Conversation starters? ? Who knows?
To succeed in any conversation, you need to say interesting things. Say it in the right place, to the right people. And keep talking.
Rob, you’re right with ‘fine while the campaign is on.’ But that’s the whole point – when a campaign hosts or becomes a conversation, it will last as long as you keep creating something interesting to fuel it. Stop fueling it, and you disappear from radar…just as you would if you stop talking in any other type of conversation. You become stagnant and uninteresting. The Dr Pepper campaign I mentioned continued to build, engagement increased. The brand had a point of view, and it steered the conversation. But when it stopped talking, the conversation ended. Consumers don’t get bored with a conversation if it grows. One reason some brands lag is because they walk off and start new conversations, rather than develop the ones they’ve already begun.
To take your other point about Coke: True, just ‘doing’ something could possibly generate a conversation through WOM for a brand. But as Patricia points out in the post, you can’t just wipe your hands and be done with it. What about brand that might invest heavily in the developing countries they work with and also provide amazing benefits for every worker, yet, they still catch flack? They need to continuously monitor, promote and steer the conversation or it will be hijacked. Just ‘doing’ without promoting and fueling your point of view and relying on WOM could be less efficient and even dangerous to a brand.
The charts above are very scientific and important looking, but what they’re reverse engineering really is rather simple. What brands need to say and how they need to say it hasn’t changed, only technology and channels have changed. Treat a brand as an entity and act as a person would act: say interesting things. Do good. Be usable. Be funny. Relate. That’s how a brand stays talked about, just as would any person’s role in a conversation. If people enjoy dealing with you, they’ll check out what your offering and be more likely to believe your point of difference.
The first challenge is knowing where to engage, most efficiently. That comes down to technology and media (which is always being perfected through analytics). But the most difficult challenge is knowing how to create the content/fuel that engages and creates the conversation (great creative). And no chart can ever reverse engineer that. That hasn’t, and will never change.
[...] enjoyed this BBH Labs post that Pats tweeted to me yesterday – "if you want a conversation say something [...]
Last one for me, just got back after the weekend.
In the meerkat campaign, and others, the conversation is about the advert, or the campaign, not the brand. I hear a lot of people saying ‘simples’. Not many saying ‘compare the market is a great brand/company/really helpful/etc’
Creating content/campaign/etc should come second to the strategy of the company itself. Just my opinion, it’s early on a Monday for me, and I’ve been known to talk bollocks.
Brand identity has long been regarded, and rightfully so, as a cornerstone of building a cohesive and recognizable brand within the hearts and minds of your consumers. For a brand identity to be effective and more importantly liked, respected and trusted it needs to have some of the elements that make people likeable.
Identity can incorporate a host of aspects and traits. These are usually expressed and adhered to through the businesses marketing guidelines. The big brands will often have highly detailed brand guidelines and style sheets that determine everything from the types of materials the logo may be printed on, to whether a product’s image is allowed to have a shadow or not. LG, the home electronics manufacturer has a comprehensive 119 pages of brand guides, which is considered pretty standard for major brands.
Social media, social marketing, engaging, conversation, listening to your consumer, user generated content, user validated content, mash-ups, brand activists, culture jamming. Just a few of the concepts in the tag cloud of a brands digital presence. It is now widely acknowledged and (less widely) understood that “conversations” are happening around brands or about brands. I say “conversations” because realistically very few people care enough about your brand to have a full conversation about it. In the era of think speak which we have hurtled into, it’s more likely that brands are mentioned as a side thought, comment, criticism or to advertise a type of consumer cool amongst peer groups.
Now of course as exciting or terrifying as it is to see your brand being talked about, it is how you respond that matters. Knowledge is only power when you use that knowledge. So, what’s the link between conversations, consumers and brand identity?
When you listen to, respond and engage with your consumer, you need to ask three very important questions.
Who are you?
Why are you here?
Why should they care?
A little marketing truth for me is “It is all emotional”. When you connect with people, any people, anywhere, you need to know who you are. Are you chatting to them as one of the people from the brands marketing department? Are you the actual brand communicating directly with them? Do you speak to them as a consumer that you know and who knows you, or do you approach them with the same manners you would a stranger? As if it’s not bad enough having no defined digital personality, where most agencies and big brands really screw up is that it’s so unstructured that they have multiple personalities. Often conflicting and damaging, always confusing.
Like with any interaction its more exciting to engage with someone who has some personality. As a brand you don’t need to please everyone. Know what your brand personality, language, attitude and tone are. Then stick to it. Maybe the people that don’t really like you will even learn to respect you. Holding your ground and having some personality will set you apart in the social media space. Most brands entering this area at the moment are scared, and it makes them desperate and needy. No one wants to talk to that guy.
With the opportunity to really listen to and communicate with your audience, uncensored and in real time comes the responsibility of having a clear strategy. When deciding to enter the bun fight that is Social Media, it helps to know who you are and to not develop a multiple personality disorder.
A few words of wisdom from Marty Neumeier
Your brand is not what you say it is. Your brand is what they say it is.
[...] Från @CPeyron Analys om skillnaden mellan marknadskommunikation och marknadskonversation: Om balansen mellan planerad kommunikation och dialog: If you want a conversation, say something interesting « BBH Labs http://bit.ly/139Tfe [...]
[...] If you want a conversation, say something interesting [...]
..Or listen very carefully…
Best,
Magnus Lundin