Best,
Magnus Lundin

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.

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.

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.

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

-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?