You Brand

As this picture clearly demonstrates, agricultural methods and marketing have a lot in common.

Over the years, monocultures have become very popular. It is all about planting crops with genetic similarity. These have uniform growing habits and requirements, which result in greater yields on less land. Planting, maintenance and harvesting are standardized. Sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly what marketers try to achieve with traditional advertising in mass media?

Next time you look in the mirror, just imagine seeing a head of lettuce. After all, you’re being treated like one.

How do you feel being manured?

I just read Seth Godin’s great post Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law and I hope that brands will do the same. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that, due to the size of our neocortex, the number of people with whom we can have social relationships is limited. As Seth Godin put it “One hundred fifty people in the tribe”.

There are 2 very valuable lessons for brands in this:

Empower your organisation. There is no way that 1 social media manager alone (which is the wrong job title anyway) can have social relationships with hundreds of thousands, may be even millions, of customers, let alone potential customers.

Make sure to do your research well. Find your most fervent 150 brand advocates out there and empower them.

I have mentioned before that brands shouldn’t try to engage with their customers before engaging with their employees. This calls for vertical integration.

Equally important is horizontal integration. In many companies – especially old economy – the caste system is still very much alive: There’s the R&D crowd, the guys from production, sales people, marketing people, finance people and so on. Sooner or later many different ‘esprit de corps’ develop.

For example the production guys will insist that they obviously do a great job, but R&D always wants fancy solutions, HR doesn’t give them enough people, finance doesn’t give them enough budget, purchasing doesn’t give them the best parts, sales wants the product yesterday and marketing insists on USP’s. Depending on the perspective, other divisions will argue in a similar way.

The system is held together by the good old hierarchy. Board members from all divisions usually meet once a week, but what about the rest? They only meet when working on a common project, which usually doesn’t involve all divisions. It is difficult and time-consuming to develop positive relations and common understanding under these conditions. Some employees, which are more proactive than others, develop their own ‘private’ and ‘personal’ networks. But this is not the solution.

Customers don’t differentiate between divisions – for them there is only one brand. Companies are well advised to break down the caste system and facilitate horizontal and vertical integration. It improves the relations: inside and outside.

What’s your view?

Brands are defined by their customers. Not only by what they say about the brand, but also by how they use it. This obviously depends on how public the usage is. Cars are a great example. On the German Autobahn – parts of which still don’t have a speed limit – some brands tend to spend more time in the left lane than others. I know, because I used to work for one of those brands

Driving behavior directly influences the brand perception by other users of the Autobahn. After all, the only thing they can see at high speeds is the car and the brand, but they can’t identify the driver. Some people consider fast driving to be aggressive, therefore the brand they saw will get an aggressive image. Many potential customers can be lost that way.

What can the brand do? Traditional broadcasting of other brand values will not be credible. After all, the above mentioned experience was authentic. People won’t trust statements that are contrary to what they have experienced personally. The personal conversation is the only solution. But how can the brand identify those that have a negative opinion, when it is not even aware of the incident that caused it? Social networks are a good place to start looking and listening.

Another learning from this example is that your most loyal fans are not necessarily your best brand ambassadors.

What’s your opinion!

In 1999 Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote ‘the cluetrain manifesto’, announcing ‘the end of business as usual’. Where do we stand 10 years later? Has everything changed? To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed.

Mahatma Gandhi said ‘You must be the change, you want to see in the world’ and that is exactly the point. I believe that we – the human race – are actually the major obstacle to fundamental change.

The technology is available and affordable. Are we exploiting the potential of the social web, are we leaving our comfort zone, are we liberating ourselves and really putting the pressure on? The answer is ‘no’. Many of us are happy to hitchhike down evolution alley.

2000 years ago, the Roman empire was built on several principles, one of which was ‘bread and games’. That still works for many of us today. Have you ever noticed that the party is always organized by the same people? The majority is waiting for the invitation and is happy to participate. The majority of the human race is not proactive. We wait for somebody to lead the way and take the decisions for us. This behavior has the added benefit that we always have somebody else to blame. We blame the politicians (who don’t usually elect themselves in democracies) and we blame the brands (who don’t usually force us to buy their products). Do we blame ourselves – of course not. We may change leaders and directions, but we’re happy to follow.

When asking people, why they are so passive, I usually hear ‘one person can’t make a difference’. People forget that ‘we’ is the sum of many I’s.

What are we waiting for?

Numerous reasons have been put forward recently as to why brands are slow in embracing social media: productivity concerns, security concerns, lack of adequate metrics etc. But ‘who’ is thinking that? Corporate management in most companies is still a man’s world. Could that be the real reason?

Numerous surveys have shown that women are more social than men. They favor building relations, whereas men love to broadcast. As a logical consequence they outnumber men in social networks.

Would more women in corporate management facilitate an authentic corporate engagement with consumers in social media and elsewhere? Would more women in corporate management enable the necessary restoration of trust?

The population in the Western world is almost evenly distributed, meaning that there are as many female consumers as there are male consumers. Of course this varies depending on the product category. Looking at the car industry where I used to work, one could argue that 50% of the cars are bought by women and the other 50% are bought to impress women! In other words, the influence of the female consumer is much higher than the gender ratio would suggest.

One more reason for brands to reassess their hiring practices.

What do you think?

‘Father knows best’ was a very successful US sitcom in the 50s. As the name suggests, moms were moms, kids were kids and father knew best. It reflected the paternalistic attitude that fathers – the kings of the respective castles – were wiser than mothers and kids. This empowered fathers to make decisions on their behalf, presumably for their own good. It resulted in the authority of the powerful over the less powerful, responsibility was not shared. Communication relied on commands and instructions rather than on conversation.

Many brands still have that attitude today: Consumers are consumers and brands know best. Social media have effectively proven that brands don’t know best, which is why many brands have a problem. They have to change their attitude, not just apply some new tools and technologies.

‘Father knows best’ was successful in the 50s and 60s. Times have changed dramatically since then. Brands are well advised to realize that. Prisoners of the past will not win their freedom in the future.

Who knows best?

For starters, social media are, at least according to the traditional definition, not a medium. Wikipedia defines media in communication as the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data – clearly social ‘media’ is more than that.

Social ‘media’ is still experiencing staggering growth rates with people from all over the world joining. Are all of these people active users ? Of course not. According to Forrester there are ‘authors’, ‘critics’, ‘collectors’, ‘members’, ‘viewers’ and ‘inactives’. Admittedly the number of ‘inactives’ is decreasing and the other groups are growing.

Social ‘media’ are not popular for one single reason. Some people are looking to add value and share insights, they are the new leaders. Many are happy to follow and consume what is being offered. They were driven to join by curiosity and a need of belonging. This is normal. Just because hammers are available for everybody, doesn’t mean that we all go out to get nails!

Social ‘media’ are, at least partly, a ‘gift economy’, where goods and services (recommendations, information, insights, news etc.) are shared for free – reciprocal altruism if you will. That is noteworthy and causes brands, living in market economies, headaches.

Social ‘media’ must have more self-proclaimed experts/mavens/specialists/gurus per user than any other medium worldwide. Despite that, many brands are still struggling to develop a business model that works for them and the users in social ‘media’. The traditional marketing-aspirin doesn’t work, the headaches mentioned above become worse.

Social ‘media’ are here to stay. It is imperative to develop a model that adds value for consumers and brands, because they are interdependent. Is it possible to combine the benefits of a gift economy with those of a market economy? Exciting question.

May be not such an ironic look after all – what do you think?

Guest post by Jennifer Leggio

viaSocial media consultants: A call to action.