A few months ago I decided to attend Planning-ness 2012 and wrote about why I was excited for it. Planningness is an “un-conference” for creative strategists, account planners, digital strategists, etc who want to do, build & make things (vs. just talk about them). Speakers don’t just talk at you, they teach you how to do things. I’m always down for non-didactic anything. Most sessions had a workshop component where we got to work through the topic at hand.
What I heard
Overarching statement heard from every speaker in every workshop: Failing is ok. It helps us learn. Today’s culture and technological advancements require most companies to be in a constant state of iteration; from their positioning to their strategies. We keep learning and turning corners of success.
Quite frankly no one wants to fail– those of us that work in advertising certainly don’t come into thinking we will fail, we think we will overcome anything! We come into it wanting to win! It’s a competitive state, a cognitive sport– have you watched The Pitch? Ha.
We all want to succeed at everything we do but failure does happen and that is part of how we grow; something I embraced many years ago which brings me to the overall trend I picked up on:
We Are In a Perpetual State of Beta.
What does that mean? We need to make sure we build, learn, iterate. Lather rinse repeat.
How can we apply that to our service-based industry, though? We can’t sell “we might fail” to a client. But we can stop selling certainty. Its all in the way you serve it up and we have a lot of work to do on retraining ourselves and our clients to understand that our overall mindset towards product marketing and advertising needs to exist with the environmental shifts as they arise, whether they be cultural or technological. Times have changed as to how we approach building strategies and how we go about executing against them.
Sometimes 1 “big idea” isn’t enough to hang your hat on anymore. We need to be more agile with the big idea to dissect it so there is strategic applicability across every facet of our brand’s challenges.
Each of the 7 tracks/workshops I attended over the course of 2 days was valuable in someway shape or form, however, there were 7 mini-trends that resonated with me the most from specific workshops.
Trends
Trend #1
Creative Expression Movement
Creativity is a core value— sharing what makes us creative, what inspires us. Awareness that turns into a product (when you raise awareness of your own creativity, you become a maker of your product).
We have seen this trend take shape amongst ourselves and brands on creative and visual based platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.
Trend #2
Design your own success
The fight for the carrot in the beginning of the professional path may not net out the expected outcome (ie: attorneys). Individuals will create their own path vs. a manufactured and promised one (testing into entrepreneurial business ideas for ownership).
Trend #3
Live like a tourist
Stay Enthusiastic, non-judgmental and curious. Explore beyond your comfort levels to understand your target consumer.Relax and connect and get in their shoes. Engage with the world, participate, be a apart of it, understand. Become a beginner. Learn by doing! Get Uncomfortable for the good of creativity.
all 3 Inspired by:
“How to understand and analyze cultural trends” Sharon Ann Lee Cultural Trend Analyst. Founder, Culture-Brain
Trend #4
Invent Based on Unmet Needs
Get into an alpha wave state to understand and synthesize people, their unmet needs and what will drive the behavior shift by focusing on inventing ideas and experiences in fertile territories where they can grow based on the unmet needs of the consumer target.
Inspired by:
“How to scratch an itch” Rob Perkins Tech startup entrepreneur, former CD at Wieden+Kennedy
Note: By far, my favorite workshop. Rob is an amazing storyteller. We worked in small groups to hack an idea for a brand by focusing on delivering on the unmet needs of the customer. The best part of the workshop was the high focus on NOT showing experiences in slides that die in transit after they are presented (even if they are presented well) Video captures the essence of experiences much better. Couldn’t agree more with this concept and use in practice at my agency.
Trend #5
Design an Experience like a Service
Helps consumers by going beyond what’s expected to interacting with a service-based model that delivers on brand promise.
Agents: messaging/creative that delivers on the brand promise Props: assets to bring the experience to life Setting: to make sure we execute within the desired mindset we are looking to shift Process: Logistical excellence
Inspired by:
“How to Design for Service: a service design workshop” Craig LaRosa Principal, Service Design; Continuum
Trend #6
Stop Selling Certainty
We are using old methods of responding to complexities–the world changes faster than we can adapt to it. We move too slow.
Reductionism
Taylorism (responding and adapting to environmental shifts and demands)
Robustness (protecting yourself from failure)–balance with resilience
Strategic planning
“In complex systems outcomes are the products of interactions.” Our mindset as marketers needs to stay agile and exist w/environmental shifts- we are in a perpetual state of beta.
Inspired by: “How to Play Go … And Navigate Real World Complexity” Bud Caddell VP, Invention Strategy at Deutsch LA
Trend #7
Connected you= Quantified Self
This emerging theme is being propelled by advances in mobile sensors, communication conduits, easier data tools, and our own interest in optimizing our bodies and minds. Technology is engineering our lives and bodies to be more quantifiable.
Inspired by: “How to get Intimate with the IOT (Internet of things)” Guthrie Dolin Principal, Executive Director of Strategy, Odopod David Bliss Director of Technology, Odopod
Special shout out to Pelle SjoenellExecutive Creative Director and Fran Hazeldine Strategy Director, both of BBH LA and for running the workshop on navigating the planner/creative relationship. They presented some interesting survey data on planner vs .creative perceptions of the strategic–>creative process and had us think about “special” creative relationships we currently have with the creative teams we work with. This was easy for me, I love working with our creative teams at my agency.
Closing Thoughts
I am a visual person. For years I have taken notes in clusters in sketchbooks with colored pens; differentiated groups of thoughts- it’s how my brain works. A week before Planningness, I attended a Art of Apps Exhibit at the Soho Gallery for Digital Art and downloaded Paper by 53, a sketchbook app featured at the exhibit. I took notes in that app combined with Evernote. Instead of writing a lengthy “here are the trends I picked up on at Planningness post” I decided to let the visual representation of the trends speak for themselves as I sketched them out. Get the app Paper by 53, it’s amazaballs!
The conference was great due to the diversity of the session topics. Considering I live and breathe digital 12+ hours a day I opted to partake in some sessions NOT focused solely on digital. The sessions on social influence and social data sessions received widely enthusiastic responses from other attendees- I was glad to see digital make it into the mix of what has largely been a traditionally focused discipline. One quote that made it’s way through Twitter from Gautum Ramdurai’s session was “The more digital we get, the more human we have to be.” AMEN.
I met some very cool people. Different types of planners from different agencies big and small, different levels varying from junior to uber senior, traditional, digital, some creative and some founders of startups—it was a great mix of minds. Sometimes you need to leave the work for a few days to figure out HOW to best get the work done. I’m refreshed and ready to think, and do.
Special thanks to Mark Lewis and Claire Grinton who orchestrated the meeting/social logistics and curated the speakers for this entire event—very well done.
Presentations from the conference will be up soon you can find them here.
Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the world’s third largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social media’s power. Companies diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty.
We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many executives, particularly nonmarketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. It’s no secret that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet it’s often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations, which take place across an ever-growing variety of platforms, among diverse and dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, there’s no single measure of social media’s financial impact, and many companies find that it’s difficult to justify devoting significant resources—financial or human—to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.
What we hope to do here is to demystify social media. We have identified its four primary functions—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior—and linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions. Being able to identify exactly how, when, and where social media influences consumers helps executives to craft marketing strategies that take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage with customers. It should also help leaders develop, launch, and demonstrate the financial impact of social-media campaigns (for insight into the world’s biggest social-media market, see “Understanding social media in China”).
In short, today’s chief executive can no longer treat social media as a side activity run solely by managers in marketing or public relations. It’s much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way its employees interact with customers or other parties.
The social consumer decision journey
Companies have quickly learned that social media works: 39 percent of companies we’ve surveyed already use social-media services as their primary digital tool to reach customers, and that percentage is expected to rise to 47 percent within the next four years.1 Fueling this growth is a growing list of success stories from mainstream companies:
Creating buzz: Eighteen months before Ford reentered the US subcompact-car market with its Fiesta model, it began a broad marketing campaign called the Fiesta Movement. A major element involved giving 100 social-media influencers a European model of the car, having them complete “missions,” and asking them to document their experiences on various social channels. Videos related to the Fiesta campaign generated 6.5 million views on YouTube, and Ford received 50,000 requests for information about the vehicle, primarily from non-Ford drivers. When it finally became available to the public, in late 2010, some 10,000 cars sold in the first six days.
Learning from customers: PepsiCo has used social networks to gather customer insights via its DEWmocracy promotions, which have led to the creation of new varieties of its Mountain Dew brand. Since 2008, the company has sold more than 36 million cases of them.
Targeting customers: Levi Strauss has used social media to offer location-specific deals. In one instance, direct interactions with just 400 consumers led 1,600 people to turn up at the company’s stores— an example of social media’s word-of-mouth effect.
Yet countless others have failed to match these successes: knowing that something works and understanding how it works are very different things. As the number of companies with Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, or online communities continues to grow, we think it’s time for leaders to remind themselves how social media connects with an organization’s broader marketing mission.
Marketing’s primary goal is to reach consumers at the moments, or touch points, that influence their purchasing behavior. Almost three years ago, our colleagues proposed a framework—the “consumer decision journey”—for understanding how consumers interact with companies during purchase decisions.2 Expressing consumer behavior as a winding journey with multiple feedback loops, this new framework was different from the traditional description of consumer purchasing behavior as a linear march through a funnel. Social media is a unique component of the consumer decision journey: it’s the only form of marketing that can touch consumers at each and every stage, from when they’re pondering brands and products right through the period after a purchase, as their experience influences the brands they prefer and their potential advocacy influences others.
A social journey For more on social media’s relationship to the consumer decision journey, explore this interactive exhibit narrated by coauthor David Edelman.
The fact that social media can influence customers at every stage of the journey doesn’t mean that it should. Depending on the company and industry, some touch points are more important to competitive advantage than others.3 What’s more, our work with dozens of companies adapting to the new marketing environment strongly suggests that the most powerful social-media strategies focus on a limited number of marketing responses closely related to individual touch points along the consumer decision journey. The ten most important responses, range from providing customer service to fostering online communities (exhibit). One of those ten—monitoring what people say about your brand—is so important that we see it as a core function of social media, relevant across the entire consumer decision journey. The remaining nine responses, organized in three clusters in the exhibit, underpin efforts to use social media to respond to consumer comments, to amplify positive sentiment and activity, and to lead changes in the behavior and mind-sets of consumers.
Gatorade, a sports drink manufactured by PepsiCo, has been diligently working toward its goal of becoming the “largest participatory brand in the world.”4 It has created a Chicago-based “war room” within its marketing department to monitor the brand in real time across social media. There are seats where team members can track custom-built data visualizations and dashboards (including terms related to the brand, sponsored athletes, and competitors) and run sentiment analyses around product and campaign launches. Every day, all of this feedback is integrated into products and marketing—for example, by helping to optimize the landing page on the company’s Web site. Since the war room’s creation, the average traffic to Gatorade’s online properties, the length of visitor interactions, and viral sharing from campaigns have all more than doubled.
Such brand monitoring—simply knowing what’s said online about your products and services—should be a default social-media function, taking place constantly. Even without engaging consumers directly, companies can glean insights from an effective monitoring program that informs everything from product design to marketing and provides advance warning of potentially negative publicity. It’s also critical to communicate such feedback within the business quickly: whoever is charged with brand monitoring must ensure that information reaches relevant functions, such as communications, design, marketing, public relations, or risk.
2. Respond
Valuable though it is to learn how you are doing and what to improve, broad and passive monitoring is only a start. Pinpointing conversations for responding at a personal level is another form of social-media engagement. This kind of response can certainly be positive if it’s done to provide customer service or to uncover sales leads. Most often, though, responding is a part of crisis management.
Last year, for example, a hoax photograph posted online claimed that McDonald’s was charging African-Americans an additional service fee. The hoax first appeared on Twitter, where the image rapidly went viral just before the weekend as was retweeted with the hashtag #seriouslymcdonalds. It turned out to be a working weekend for the McDonald’s social-media team. On Saturday, the company’s director of social media released a statement through Twitter declaring the photograph to be a hoax and asking key influencers to “please let your followers know.” The company continued to reinforce that message throughout the weekend, even responding personally to concerned Tweeters. By Sunday, the number of people who believed the image to be authentic had dwindled, and McDonald’s stock price rose 5 percent the following day.
Responding in order to counter negative comments and reinforce positive ones will only increase in importance. The responsibility for taking action may fall on functions outside marketing, and the message will differ depending on the situation. No response can be quick enough, and the ability to act rapidly requires the constant, proactive monitoring of social media—on weekends too. By responding rapidly, transparently, and honestly, companies can positively influence consumer sentiment and behavior.
3. Amplify
“Amplification” involves designing your marketing activities to have an inherently social motivator that spurs broader engagement and sharing. This approach means more than merely reaching the end of planning a marketing campaign and then thinking that “we should do something social”—say, uploading a television commercial to YouTube. It means that the core concepts for campaigns must invite customers into an experience that they can choose to extend by joining a conversation with the brand, product, fellow users, and other enthusiasts. It means having ongoing programs that share new content with customers and provide opportunities for sharing back. It means offering experiences that customers will feel great about sharing, because they gain a badge of honor by publicizing content that piques the interest of others.
In the initial phases of the consumer decision journey, when consumers sift through brands and products to determine their preferred options, referrals and recommendations are powerful social-media tools. A simple example is the way online deal sites such as Groupon and Gilt Groupe provide consumers with credit for each first-time purchaser they refer. Our research shows that such direct recommendations from peers generate engagement rates some 30 times higher than traditional online advertising does.
Once a consumer has decided which product to buy and makes a purchase, companies can use social media to amplify their engagement and foster loyalty. When Starbucks wanted to increase awareness of its brand, for example, it launched a competition challenging users to be the first to tweet a photograph of one of the new advertising posters that the company had placed in six major US cities, providing winners with a $20 gift card. This social-media brand advocacy effort delivered a marketing punch that significantly outweighed its budget. Starbucks said that the effort was “the difference between launching with millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”5
Marketers also can foster communities around their brands and products, both to reinforce the belief of consumers that they made a smart decision and to provide guidance for getting the most from a purchase. Software company Intuit, for example, launched customer service forums for its Quicken and QuickBooks personal-finance software so users could help one another with product issues. The result? Users rather than Intuit employees answer about 80 percent of the questions, and the company has employed user comments to make dozens of significant changes to its software.
4. Lead
Social media can be used most proactively to lead consumers toward long-term behavioral changes. In the early stages of the consumer decision journey, this may involve boosting brand awareness by driving Web traffic to content about existing products and services. When grooming-products group Old Spice introduced its Old Spice Man character to viewers, during the US National Football League’s 2010 Super Bowl, for example, the company’s ambition was to increase its reach and relevance to both men and women. The commercial became a phenomenon: starring former player Isaiah Mustafa, it got more than 19 million hits across all platforms, and year-on-year sales for the company’s products jumped by 27 percent within six months.
Marketers also can use social media to generate buzz through product launches, as Ford did in launching its Fiesta vehicle in the United States. For example, social media played an integral role in the success of “Small Business Saturday,” the US shopping promotion created by American Express for the weekend immediately following Thanksgiving (for American Express CMO John Hayes’s perspective on that launch, see “How we see it: Three senior executives on the future of marketing,” on mckinseyquarterly.com). In addition, when consumers are ready to buy, companies can promote time-sensitive targeted deals and offers through social media to generate traffic and sales. Online menswear company Bonobos, for example, provided an incentive for its Twitter followers by unlocking a discount code after its messages were resent a certain number of times. As a result of this effort, almost 100 consumers bought products from the site for the first time. The campaign delivered a 1,200 percent return on investment in just 24 hours.
Finally, social media can solicit consumer input after the purchase. This ability to gain product-development insights from customers in a relatively inexpensive way is emerging as one of social media’s most significant advantages. Intuit, for example, has its community forums. Starbucks uses MyStarbucksIdea.com to collect its customers’ views about improving the company’s products and services and then aggregates submitted ideas and prominently displays them on a dedicated Web site. That site groups ideas by product, experience, and involvement; ranks user participation; and shows ideas actively under consideration by the company and those that have been implemented.
Converting knowledge to action
Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent. One problem is that a lot of senior executives know little about social media. But the main obstacle is the perception that the return on investment (ROI) from such initiatives is uncertain.
Without a clear sense of the value social media creates, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many CEOs and other senior executives don’t feel comfortable when their companies go beyond mere “experiments” with social-media strategy. Yet we can measure the impact of social media well beyond straight volume and consumer-sentiment metrics; in fact, we can precisely determine the buzz surrounding a product or brand and then calculate how social media drives purchasing behavior. To do so—and then ensure that social media complements broader marketing strategies—companies must obviously coordinate data, tools, technology, and talent across multiple functions. In many cases, senior business leaders must open up their agendas and recognize the importance of supporting and even undertaking initiatives that may traditionally have been left to the chief marketing officer. As our colleagues noted last year, “we’re all marketers now.”6
Consider the experience of a telecommunications company that proactively adopted social media but had no idea if its efforts were working. The company had launched Twitter-based customer service capabilities, several promotional campaigns built around social contests, a fan page with discounts and tech tips, and an active response program to engage with people speaking about the brand. In social-media terms, the investment was relatively large, and the company’s senior executives wanted more than anecdotal evidence that the strategy was paying off. As a starting point, to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses:
If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts.7
If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements.
If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive sales—ideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.8
The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics. The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.
In other cases, social media may have a more specific role, such as helping to launch a new product or to mitigate negative word of mouth. Similar types of analyses can focus on mixing the impact of buzz, search, and traffic; correlating that with sales or renewals (or whatever the key metric may be); and then gauging the result against total costs. This approach can give executives the confidence and focus they need to invest more money, time, and resources in social media.
As these social-media activities gain scale, the challenges center less around justifying funding and more around organizational issues such as developing the right processes and governance structure, identifying clear roles—for all involved in social-media strategy, from marketing to customer service to product development—and bolstering the talent base, and improving performance standards. New capabilities abound, and social-media best practices are barely starting to emerge. We do know this: because social-media influences every element of the consumer decision journey, communication must take place between as well as within functions. That complicates lines of reporting and decision-making authority.
If insights from monitoring social media are relevant to nonmarketing functions such as product development, for instance, how will you identify and disseminate that information efficiently and effectively—and then ensure that it gets used? If you spot an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a key influencer, how will you quickly engage the right senior executive to follow through? If you recognize a fast-moving service concern, how will you respond rapidly and openly—and when should you do so outside the traditional service organization? Senior executives across the company must recognize and begin to answer such questions.
Social media is extending the disruptive impact of the digital era across a broad range of functions. Meanwhile, the perceived lack of metrics, the fear, and the limited sense of what’s possible are eroding. Executives can identify the functions, touch points, and goals of social-media activities, as well as craft approaches to measure their impact and manage their risks. The time is ripe for executive-suite discussions on how to lead and to learn from people within your company, marketers outside it, and, most of all, your customers.
More than half of consumers do not want to be bothered by advertisements on their social media networks, and businesses should be more careful in making social media marketing strategies, according to a new study by the market research agency TNS.
The study found that 57 percent of people in developed markets, mainly in the United States and Europe, do not want to engage with brands via social media. The figure in China is 52 percent, one percentage point lower than the global average of 53 percent.
The study researched the online behaviors of more than 72,000 consumers from across the globe. TNS of Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups, revealed the findings in the Digital Life study.
While consumers do not want to be bothered by brands, Chinese consumers were still found to be more open to brands on social networks than consumers in other countries. Nearly 60 percent of them see social media outlets as a good place to learn about brands. About 46 percent see social media as a place to buy products, while only 25 percent of people in developed countries do so.
A staggering 74 percent of Chinese digital consumers write comments on products online, which is the highest among all 60 countries and regions included in the study.
The study shows that Chinese consumers see the Internet as a forum for expression, a creative platform and a social tool that enhances relationships. Shopping online is not just a quick and convenient way to shop, but it is fun and something to enjoy and share with friends.
“In the developed world, people see advertisements on social networks as a kind of intrusion. They feel they already know enough about the brands and they could make the best choices,” said Ashok Sethi, Head of Consumer Insights, Emerging Markets for TNS, explaining reason for the differences.
“China is more in a developing phase as far as the consumption of brands is concerned. Consumers are still in a stage of wanting to know more about brands. ”
Sethi added that the intrusion comes from the situation “when brands are talking very blatantly about themselves, their quality and how they are superior to other brands”.
“The main motivation for people go to social networks is to bond with your friends or to bond with your loved ones, rather than to bond with brands,” Sethi said.
The race online has seen businesses across the world develop profiles on social media networks, such as Facebook and YouTube or their Chinese equivalents like Renren, Kaixin and Weibo, to engage with customers quickly and cheaply. But TNS’s research reveals that if these efforts are not carefully targeted, they are wasted on half of the consumers.
The proper way for brands to make use of social networks, Sethi said, is for brands need to take a more educative kind of stand, for example, to talk to the consumers about the category. “A cosmetic brand can talk about different skin types and how to take care of each type, then link the brand to the broader issues.”
“The key is to understand your target audience and what they want from your brand – social media networks aren’t always the right approach,” said Serene Wong, CEO TNS Research International China.
Wong suggested that companies use other online methods, such as creating their own digital media platforms, targeted sponsorship or search campaigns.
Sethi added that businesses should develop a marketing strategy that considers both the digital and mass media elements.
Nearly half of Chinese consumers use Internet to research information about a brand that they see advertised on TV or in newspapers. “The digital and non-digital is getting intertwined. The implication is that brands should make it easier for readers to get access to it,” Sethi said.
The TNS Research International China is a leading custom market research agency in China with about 500 employees and more than 200 researchers across six offices in the country.
Sethi said that the main way TNS has differentiated itself from other research agencies is through investing in tracking the changes in the market place and the consumers such as investing in the Digital Life study. Several million dollars were spent globally on conducting the Digital Life study.
“Digital trends have totally changed the way the consumers look at brands. TNS has invested our own money in learning about the changing marketing environment and marketing scenario.
“Over the past three years we have been doing this kind of research, trying to understand what kind of change is happening and how consumers react to the changed scenario. By doing that, we can better answer our clients’ questions and help them to grow,” Sethi said.
TNS is also investing in learning about new consumers. In China, the company is reaching out to consumers in second-tier cities to meet the demands of many companies that are expanding in other cities besides Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.
The company has also invested in developing new research methodologies and technical tools to better understand the views of digital consumers.
A software from the company can track the consumers’ mobile use behavior after it is downloaded to the mobile phone, as it is hard to get an accurate picture of how much time people spend on different apps and functions through direct questioning.
Fast, dramatic changes in the digital space have given brand marketers new opportunities to earn and sustain the consumer’s attention without paid media. Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to name just three, empower brands to communicate directly with an audience.
While many brands rush to leverage these direct to consumer channels, few have altered their brand narratives and their approach to content creation as they move from paying others to broadcast their brand content to leveraging it themselves for direct consumer engagement.
Despite the existing opportunities, it would seem that few brands — and only a few more of their agencies — have the content, process, and methodologies in place to fully benefit from direct distribution to the audience. The current brand-agency paradigm has been effective in leveraging search and social algorithms for more efficient distribution of “brand” assets, but the efforts stemming from this approach have failed to deliver some critical elements: engagement, efficiency, and scale.
Brands looking to achieve this “holy trinity” of digital effectiveness need to shift their content creation approach even further.
Owned media, redefined
Strategist Jim Cuene recently proposed a state of constant content to help marketers behave as publishers. And the Altimeter Group’s Content: The New Marketing Equation does a great job of illustrating a “path” for brands to follow in rebalancing their marketing efforts, shifting “from push to pull.” In fact, Cuene and Altimeter both reference the need for this shift in their content creation. But what characterizes this shift, and how can CMOs get started when looking to alter the manner in which their organizations influence consumers?
The shift they both reference is to a state of “owned media” — not the narrow, “brand-controlled” definition that seems to be pervasive across many media strategy blogs. Rather, it’s to a state of “media ownership” — a more progressive definition of owned media. By simply flipping the words and adjusting the grammar, we add clarity around the model. Jim Cuene is right. Brands need look no further than many online publishing properties for a model on how to create content using an operational discipline that ultimately leads to better results.
Do you own media?
Does your brand stand to benefit from media ownership? Answer the following questions to assess your brand’s state of media ownership:
Always-on: Are you publishing content for an audience on a daily basis?
Editorial: Are you publishing content that an audience needs and shares?
Independent: Do you own the technology or the platform delivering the content? Do you have the final say in all aspects of the user’s experience?
Networked: Is the content on your platform optimized for distribution?
Measured: Are you evaluating how efficiently you are producing media, or the consumption of your content?
Monetizable: Could your content platform be someone else’s paid media?
If you answered yes to all of the questions above, then congratulations, your content marketing initiative is optimized for better business-building results. If you answered no, then the next step is to assess where your organization is in its journey to operating as a publisher.
Ownership makes for better content
This assessment of owned media is important because it instills a level of accountability with content creation.
Online publishers operate by exacting principles because they need their audiences to consume, engage, and share the content they produce. Operationally, these publishers need to ensure that their editorial efforts are efficient and yielding high-quality content that resonates with their most important critics — the audience. Their very businesses depend on it.
Brands want their audience to consume, engage, and share content, as well. By applying the same business acumen in planning and evaluating your audience engagement as any publisher would, brands can effectively achieve the three goals of engagement, efficiency, and scale. Not employing this methodology, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason brands are finding underwhelming results in their current search and social efforts.
Discovering the path
With some brands, asset creation evolves into a content strategy, wherein incremental success can be achieved by delivering the same old brand narrative but doing so with a slightly broader focus on types of content, and through innovative channels such as Facebook and Twitter. But the issues of reach and engagement are not addressed by this approach.
I’ve had brands with significant search and social programs in place confess to me “We’re not getting enough traffic to the website,” and “We have 1 million Facebook fans, but very little engagement.” And, these brands are sustaining the same paid media spend to maintain the necessary share of voice in their respective categories. This is not the kind of efficiency brands are looking for when executing content marketing strategies.
The good news for brand marketers is that their preliminary efforts in content marketing put them squarely on the path to owned media. It’s within these initial phases of content marketing that brands soon discover how important some level of editorial process is in generating quality content at a faster rate, and at higher volumes. By editorial, I mean the constant process of determining what the audience needs. It’s also at this stage where brands discover how important the investment in a centralized platform is in helping them manage to and optimize content marketing across multiple digital channels such as Facebook and Twitter.
There are several successful, brand-owned media programs that can help guide other brands. Home Made Simple, Nutrition Possible, and The Responsibility Project are all examples of how brands can take an editorial approach to engage the entire audience — not just limited segments of it, which is where most brand marketers seem to focus. This audience-centric approach is paying dividends for these respective brands while amplifying their earned and paid efforts, as well. This shift to true “always-on” editorial is the biggest challenge most brands will face on the path, but it is critical to creating quality content that audiences prefer, and realizing the full potential of owned media.
Editorial shift
So how do marketers go from content that represents their messages to consumers to content that audiences themselves are looking for? It first requires thinking beyond the brand’s target segments and focusing on understanding the needs of the entire audience in much greater detail. This can be particularly challenging, as marketing operations are almost exclusively geared toward distilling layers of consumer research into one-size-fits-all insights and, consequently, focused messaging. And for good reason — brands don’t have the resources to talk to the entire audience through traditional paid means. But they can accomplish this through the right owned media strategy.
For most brand marketers, becoming more informed editorially simply requires organizing all of the available data around audience behavior to define and understand consumer’s content needs. For example, Man of the House publishes dozens of articles that present unique perspectives on personal grooming — from the best grooming gifts for dad to rationales for getting a manicure. This content might fall outside the focus of brands like Gillette or Art of Shaving, but Man of the House content is informed by extensive consumer research. And by interpolating this existing audience data, Procter & Gamble knows its articles are falling in line with what interests the site’s primary audience (dads), which is likely much larger than the consumer segments Gillette advertises to.
Once this audience editorial analysis is complete, it will continue to guide your brand’s editorial strategy development and help you determine the right level of owned media investment.
Having worked with a multitude of consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers, I’ve always been somewhat amazed with the sheer depth of consumer knowledge each organization possesses — and equally amazed at how little of this knowledge actually factors into its content creation. When brands take a deeper look at their broader audience, there is always a more detailed set of topical categories to map, and brands should follow this map in creating the content they deliver to this broader audience. The appropriate level of data analysis can help brands chart this map.
Editorial mapping
Beyond existing consumer data, analytics should be used to inform the editorial on an ongoing basis. The resources required to develop and sustain an owned media strategy can usually come from the brand’s existing investment in analytics. But even free resources, such as Google or Compete, can provide a wealth of information — especially if they are used in conjunction with more robust paid tools.
The process for mapping an editorial approach should rely on at least four key data channels:
As the chart illustrates, this process is well informed by analytics and can yield a detailed editorial map of topics that are based on the audience’s preferences. Revisiting our example around Man of the House, these various data sets are advising the editorial focus for the entire grooming channel:
Google Analytics data is being used to identify the most popular articles, which are then served up at the top of the page to drive further content consumption.
Google Trends helps to advise on topics that are trending throughout social media,
Google Adwords is being used to track topic popularity by reviewing search query volume across a host of long-tail keyword phrases related to grooming.
Lastly, it’s critical that publishers keep track of the competitive space for topics. This article in particular is a great example of observing what is being talked about and joining in the discussion. This editorial map is the foundation of an iterative process that’s always on, and optimized for producing content that gets consumed, creates engagement, and gets distributed.
And, not or
To be clear, the editorial shift required to create owned media impact is not an “or” that could replace another approach. It’s an “and” that supports a brand’s broader marketing strategy. Advertising and other paid media still work, but technology has now made direct distribution to an audience an affordable strategy (with the proper approach).
Regardless of where a brand might be in its use of owned media, it should consider developing an editorial voice that guides sustained content creation to address the needs of its audience that aren’t being met through that brand’s other marketing efforts.
It’s already been four years since my colleague Josh Bernoff published the book Groundswell, in which he discusses how organisations can harness the power of social media. Since then, there have been many heated debates at Forrester about how companies can measure the value that social media brings to their organisation — and whether they should even do so. But we’ve heard the voices of market insights professionals loud and clear: They want guidance on how to show how the role of being a Facebook fan is related to their customers’ purchasing behaviours. My colleague Gina Sverdlov has conducted a survey for a number of brands and has run a logistic regression analysis to understand this relationship. We call it the “Facebook factor,” and Gina explains how it works in the following blog post.
We proudly present “The Facebook Factor”: Forrester’s Facebook impact model quantifies the impact of a Facebook fan.
Gina Sverlov
We listened to marketers of the world’s biggest brands when they asked, “What’s the impact of Facebook on my brand?” and we decided to take a look for ourselves. We proudly present our latest research, “The Facebook Factor.” In the report, we answer the pressing question, “How much more likely are Facebook fans to purchase, consider, and recommend brands, compared with non-fans?” We used logistic regression modeling to find out. The impact? We call it the “Facebook factor,” and I urge you to read the report to find out how you can leverage our methodology to assess the Facebook factor for your brand.
In the report, we use four major brands as case studies to assess the Facebook factor for Coca-Cola, Walmart, Best Buy, and BlackBerry(Research In Motion [RIM]). Guess what? Facebook fans are much more likely to purchase, consider, and recommend the brands that they engage with on Facebook than non-fans. As the graphic below shows, Facebook fans of Best Buy are about twice as likely to purchase from and recommend Best Buy as non-fans.
And we didn’t just examine the impact of Facebook fans in a silo. We compared the impact of engaging with these brands on Facebook with the impact of other driving factors of brand engagement on these metrics. For example, being a Facebook fan has almost double the impact on purchasing from Walmart as having a Walmart near a consumer’s home.
So what does this mean for companies? The fact that Facebook fans are more likely to buy (and spend more on), consider, and recommend the brands they engage with on Facebook shows that the purchase process is not a dead-end road. Brand engagement is a driver of loyalty and purchase for companies, and Facebook is a great channel for advocates to share brand experiences with others. Read the full report to find out more about what this means for your organisation.
Interested in finding out more or having Forrester assess the Facebook factor for your brand? Please contact me for more information.
Reineke Reitsma is VP & Research Director at Forrester Research and oversees the research conducted by Forrester for Market Insights Professionals globally. On a regular basis she will present a blog post by one of the analysts on her team or herself here on a RW Connect. For more posts by Forrester’s MI analysts see: http://blogs.forrester.com/market_insights.
Is it possible that sneakers are at the forefront of Internet marketing? Judging by Nike’s recent online success trainers may be to the Internet what soap and laundry detergent were to the early days of TV. For Nike has boldly embraced the full spectrum of opportunities enabled by the ever-growing Cloud, that ubiquitous, always-on digital repository of content and applications.
Brands like Nike are transforming their advertising by mashing-up content and code in new innovative ways previously not feasible or practical in an analogue, short-tail world. In fact, this transformed advertising is often so helpful or so entertaining it doesn’t even feel like advertising, which makes consumers want to search, share, and spend more time with it. In short, Nike and other brands are transforming their advertising from passive, intrusive messages to interactive, rewarding experiences.
Take Nike ID, which enables consumers to snap a photo of any colour and pattern and have a pair of bespoke sneakers delivered to them. My kids had a field day capturing images with their mobile phone and creating their own personalized Nike trainers. My boys spent quality time engaged with the brand and never once considered it intrusive, interruptive, or indeed advertising.
Nike is also smart enough to partner with other brands to source content and functionality outside of their core competency in order to create these new mashed-up experiences. For example, Nike has combined forces with Apple to create Nike+, an online experience that enables consumers to sync their trainers with their iPod to monitor their exercise performance and share their progress with a wider Nike + community. To date thousands of runners have signed up to and regularly use Nike+ to compete with, compare, and coach themselves and their friends.
Yes, Nike still runs 30” TV spots and good old display banners. However, these branded signposts are increasingly leading consumers to online Nike hubs where consumers can find useful online utilities and brand experiences rather than another dreaded micro-site. Furthermore, these branded experiences and applications are often integrated into and distributed as Nike advertising, thus bringing the brand and some real utility immediately to the consumer.
Nike is not the only transformer in the industry. Pepsi has had remarkable success with their Quaker Oats Heart Healthy initiative in India. Similar to Nike, Quaker Oats found a key consumer need and leveraged the Cloud to blend professional and consumer-generated content and applications into a highly compelling online destination, which now has over 300,000 consumers actively checking on and improving their health not to mention over 25,000 Facebook fans. Mindshare worked with Quaker Oats to develop and promote Goodmorningheart.com, a one-stop destination for health diagnostics, healthy cooking recipes, nutritionists’ advice, calorie counters, and fitness tips brought to you in variety of ways including online video, crowd-sourced content, and sophisticated applications. Similar to Nike, Quaker Oats also partnered in this case with Apollo Hospitals to leverage professional and credible content for the program. We also helped Quaker Oats deploy these useful health utilities throughout the Internet via paid and earned media, while still using the Good Morning Heart site as central brand hub for all of the featured assets.
Quaker Oats has gone from passive 30” TV spots simply promoting the product to useful online applications beneficially featuring the product. Couch potatoes in India now have a rich source of fitness and healthy eating help while Quaker Oats sells more of its products, which are weaved throughout every diet and recipe. Quaker Oats even has a mobile application bringing all of this utility right to your phone.
In fact, mobile in particular brings enormous opportunities for brands to create useful applications. For example, Benjamin Moore’s iPhone application enables you to simply snap a photo of any colour to get the matching paint colour code for you to purchase. Toilet paper is even getting into the act. Charmin sponsored Sit or Squat, a mobile application that enables you to find local toilets based on your location. Via this mobile utility, Charmin gives you directions to the toilet, a photo, as well as consumer reviews and ratings to guide your choice.
Transformers are also expanding beyond just utilities and applications into entertainment, which has previously been constrained by limited distribution channels and fixed viewing schedules. Companies like Unilever are developing branded content and plugging it into the Cloud where it is viewable to everyone, playable anytime, and accessible on any IP-enabled device.
Unilever’s In the Motherhood remains one of the industry’s best known examples. Mindshare worked with the Suave brand team to produce short, online episodes featuring humorous stories of moms and their kids. The key to the program’s success was that these filmed stories were real-life tales submitted by real moms, voted on by a community, and later professionally filmed in Hollywood. The Cloud enabled Unilever to mash-up consumer-generated content with community management technology into a ground-breaking online video series. In the not so distant future IP-enabled TV will enable consumers to not only choose between today’s prime time programs but also new branded content like In the Motherhood from the likes of Unilever and other transformers. Now some financially-challenged clients may be intimidated by the scale, ambition, and possible budgets of some of these initiatives. Marketers should be reassured that not every transformer idea needs to be big and expensive. We worked with Unilever’s Axe brand in Japan to help them launch and promote their rather erotic Axe Wake-up service mobile application. Axe’s challenge was to get young guys to use the product on an everyday basis rather than just as a “special occasion” cologne. Meanwhile, Axe’s research found that over 80% of young Japanese guys used their mobile phone as an alarm clock. The Axe Wake-up service is a simple, small, and brilliant means to provide the target audience with a useful utility – an alarm clock – that also provided tremendous entertainment. And of course it reminded each individual to use the Axe product on a daily basis. The results were outstanding with over 20,000 participants downloading and using the mobile application to-date. We live in a time of exciting new possibilities. The Cloud enables today’s marketers to experiment with new forms of content unimaginable in the constrained channels and formats of yesteryear. Music, video, functionality, applications, and even brands are being mashed-up to create valuable and innovative experiences for consumers. It’s definitely more than just advertising as usual.
Integrating social media into brand marketing campaigns has shifted from a niche add-on to standard practice in a few short years, writes Cathal Smyth, managing director, The Group.
There may be some debate about the value of a Facebook fan to Dove, Guinness or Next, but most marketers accept that digital relationship building for brands is now essential to sales and marketing.
It may surprise some to know, however, that consumers are of their own volition engaging with the corporate parents of these brands in their millions.
By the end of last year, companies listed in the FTSE100 attracted 14 million followers to their corporate Facebook pages and more than one million followers on Twitter.
FTSE100 company YouTube videos attracted almost 35 million views in the last six months of 2011 alone.
These findings are from the latest FTSE100 Social Media Index, a research programme that The Group has been running since 2009 and repeated every six months to monitor how FTSE100 companies use social media.
The audiences we’ve monitored over the main social media channels have increased massively over this period and reveal a fundamental truth about brand marketing and corporate communications: that in the minds of the consumer, they are indivisible.
People care whether a product is cool, works well, will make them happy and gives them peace of mind.
But people also care about where products come from, how they were made, whether that process was ethical and how much damage it did to the environment on the way.
And, crudely put, they want to know that the companies they buy from are good and not evil.
When things go wrong for a company – think BP, Toyota or Carnival to name a few recent corporate crises – it’s not just the corporate reputation that is threatened, but the whole edifice of brand performance, sales and customer engagement.
But social media has of course empowered consumers to care more powerfully and consistently.
The role of marketing therefore is no longer just to sell stuff, it must also sell the company that provides it. Likewise, the corporate communications or corporate PR department can no-longer simply deliver factual information to corporate audiences without considering the wider audience and the brand perception.
Structurally the two departments have tended to operate in separate silos; two different domains of communication, but the huge and growing volume of interaction with corporate channels should necessitate a far closer relationship.
Our research found that many large companies are now actively using social media to communicate, but there are indications that these channels are not always used to best effect.
Twitter has become the leading channel for digital corporate communications.
In January, 61 companies had an active channel (up from 56 in June 2011. However, 42 companies (69% of the companies using the channel) did not respond to direct queries which suggests it is being used as a broadcast tool rather than to encourage dialogue.
The Evolution of Advertising Effectiveness Research
Over the past decade, cross-media research has become increasingly important to advertisers. Today's marketers utilize multiple media channels to reach their target audience, and advertising research methodologies have also evolved to compare those channels on their ability to educate and persuade. InsightExpress recently examined two popular methodologies to determine if and how their results differ.
Dueling Approaches
The first methodology is based on consumer recall of advertising. After a campaign launches, a respondent is asked a series of survey questions where one shows an advertisement that is part of the campaign being measured. Those who recall seeing the ad are classified as “exposed,” while those who do not are considered “unexposed.” Comparing the two groups leads to a statistical determination of the effectiveness of the campaign at changing awareness and perceptions towards the brand.
The second methodology is based on the “opportunity to see” an ad (OTS). Here, respondents are asked about recent media consumption habits including specific TV shows, channels, and magazines. In the digital world, cookie data is collected on advertisements sent to respondents’ browsers. This media consumption data is compared to the campaign's media plan or a TV post buy report to determine who had the opportunity to see the advertisements. Respondents who consume the “right” media but not at the specific time that the advertisements ran are assigned to the “unexposed” or “control” group to provide a baseline for comparison. As with recall, the two groups are statistically compared to determine if any changes in attitudinal measures resulted from advertising exposure.
The Contest: Recall vs. Opportunity To See
To understand the benefits and limitations of these two approaches, we examined a random sampling of studies that contained the ad recall questions and the OTS questions. They ranged in complexity and included a single site online advertising effectiveness study, a multi-site online advertising effectiveness study, and a multi-channel cross-media study. Results were calculated using the OTS and recall methodologies, with data averaged across the various studies to determine how the results differed.
The data showed considerable differences between the two methodologies. The OTS aggregation revealed that, on average, the campaigns were moderately effective at boosting two of the exchange of information measures: awareness of advertising for the brand (an increase of 2 percentage points), and association between either messaging in the creative or sponsorship elements with the brand (an increase of 5 percentage points).
The recall-based approach led to very large increases in every measure, such as an increase of 10 percentage points for aided awareness and 9 percentage points for association. This also included the difficult to increase persuasion measures like favorability (an increase of 23 percentage points) and purchase intent (an increase of 12 percentage points). But this was not surprising, since for Recall, the exposed group just includes people who remembered having seen the advertisement. Clearly, this approach would only be correct if 100% of the people exposed recalled that exposure.
The next step in our comparison was to understand the accuracy of each at assigning people to the correct group (which can be difficult to do). However, the digital channel tracking data provides information on which people were served the ads in the campaign, allowing us to see if people correctly recall their exposures.
Two digital campaigns were used for this second part of the analysis. The cookie tracking data was compared to respondents’ recall of the ads shown again within the survey. Between 16% and 25% of those who were not shown the ads incorrectly recalled exposure to the campaign. Only 52% to 69% of those who were shown the ads remembered the exposure.
Two campaigns may not provide enough data to definitely conclude what the false positive levels are across channels, but this analysis illustrates that people appear to have inaccurate memories for advertising recall.
While there may never be a perfect methodology for assigning people to cross-media exposure groups, using recall likely overstates the effect of campaigns considerably. It may be tempting to use it because the results are probably going to be very positive; however, marketers and researchers looking for accurate findings should be cautious about the recall-based approach.
Molly Elmore is vice president of market research at InsightExpress, a marketing research and data analytics provider specializing in the measurement of brand communications. Elmore is tasked with setting the company's analytical direction within the media measurement space.
A few months ago I decided to attend Planning-ness 2012 and wrote about why I was excited for it. Planningness is an “un-conference” for creative strategists, account planners, digital strategists, etc who want to do, build & make things (vs. just talk about them). Speakers don’t just talk at you, they teach you how to do things. I’m always down for non-didactic anything. Most sessions had a workshop component where we got to work through the topic at hand.
Fast, dramatic changes in the digital space have given brand marketers new opportunities to earn and sustain the consumer’s attention without paid media. Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to name just three, empower brands to communicate directly with an audience. 
Is it possible that sneakers are at the forefront of Internet marketing? Judging by Nike’s recent online success trainers may be to the Internet what soap and laundry detergent were to the early days of TV. For Nike has boldly embraced the full spectrum of opportunities enabled by the ever-growing Cloud, that ubiquitous, always-on digital repository of content and applications.
