Threats of Brand management in social media Why Strong Social Media Presence Magnifies Brand Weaknesses and How International Brand Managers Can Address This Part 2

January 19, 2015

Written by Jenni Väisänen 

Demand for Transparency 

Strong presence in social media is a threat for brands due to the fact that all pieces of information, no matter negative or positive, ever published in the Internet, can be found conveniently and quickly with a few “clicks” (Akar and Topcu 2013). The availability of information via Internet has changed the marketing atmosphere and its rules: there are no secrets. Previously companies have been privileged to market brands and sell products to consumers without a true demand to be transparent in their messages and operations, whereas nowadays companies and brands need to be more accurate in their actions. As it seems to be, truth, no matter how ugly, will be tracked down and brought to public, and to social media. This, in turn, has a negative impact on brand equity and reputation. (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012). (Fournier and Avery 2011)

In case consumers find discrepancies in a brand’s external and internal image, its users and customers can point out their observations quickly in social media. (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012; Fournier and Avery 2011) Unilever’s famous Dove-case represents ideological differences between Dove and another Unilever-brand, Axe. While Dove fights for Natural Beauty, Axe promotes the idea of a total opposite of a Dove-woman, craving to get a piece of an Axe-man. Women in Axe-commercials are far from Dove-women in terms of their looks: they meet the standards of beauty industry. This created a wide conversation, questioning and threatening Dove’s authenticity. (Singh and Sonnenburg 2012) Pictures 5 and 6 below demonstrate the different perceptions of women between Axe and Dove. These kinds of cases, where a company’s actions are criticized can have a remarkable negative impact on brand reputation (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012).

The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, 6 women with a "normal" BMI

Picture 5: Dove Real Beauty

(Dove U.S. Homepage 2014)

Axe Lynx Effect commercial stating "the cleaner you are the dirtier you get". Skinny blonde woman holding bikini top at its place.

Picture 6: Axe Lynx Effect (Claudiu, 2011)

Another example of brand management gone wrong is the case of BP. When the Deep Water Scandal proved that the beyond petroleum -rebranding practices were implemented not throughout the company, but only as a public relations –trick, the brand and corporate reputation were deeply criticised. (Fournier and Avery 2011) This, lack of authenticity and transparency, generated a lot of negative publicity for BP, decreased brand equity, and made the company look like a travesty of an environmentally-responsible firm (Ritson 2010).

Stand for your values

Corporate integrity is not any more dependent on the company operations only, but also on its employees and brand image. In order to establish transparency, authenticity is a key factor. To become authentic, brands need to correspond to what they claim to be, and employees must stand for the same values as the companies they work for. Hence, both product and corporate brands’ external and internal images must correspond with each other, and enhance similar values. (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012; Fournier and Avery 2011)

Constant criticism 

Consumers have become more critical, and as they are connected in social media, they also interpret brand messages and values as a mass of people. Hence, if a brand message is supported, consumers are prone to show it by “liking” or “sharing”, whereas unaccepted brands are roughly criticized web-wide. Constant evaluation of companies and their brands either work for the brands as networks endorse them, or against them as consumers share negative experiences or pure hatred towards the brand. (Fournier and Avery 2011)

Because social media enables convenient opinion and experience sharing, consumers seek reliable comments on the internet. They perceive other consumers as the most reliable sources of information. (Blackshaw and Nazzaro 2006, cited in Akar and Topcu 2013)  According to Muñiz and Schau (2007), the source of information does not have an impact on the dispersion of it: even consumers’ perceptions about brand-stories, which used to be created by brand managers only, can spread as rapidly as if they were originated by companies (cited in Singh and Sonnenburg 2012). Pitt et al (2002, cited in Fournier and Avery 2011) point out that when negative comments are published, they travel fast and reach a wide audience. Therefore, Homer’s (2008) findings about the relationship between brand image and quality encourage companies to support and protect their brands. He found out that brand image is perceived as a more important factor than the actual quality of a product. (Homer 2008, cited in Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012)

As Dell and Pampers’ have witnessed, trying to control, and moreover, enhance positive brand image, requires resources and time. Dell actually created a new job position for one of its employees, in which he works as a real-time help desk, solving consumers’ problems online (Fournier and Avery 2011), whereas P&G’s Pampers, suffering of mothers’ social media accusations of causing diaper rash to their babies, remained convinced about their new product’s safety. However, it was only until a third party, Consumer Product Safety Commission, was involved to the case, when the buzz around the sensitive issue and angry mothers started to calm down. (Barwise and Meehan 2010; Geller 2010) Below, Picture 7 shows, how experiences regarding Dry Max-diapers were shared through Facebook.

Pampers Dry Max Diapers -anti-brand Facebook site; people sharing skeptical questions.

Picture 7: Dry Max Facebook conversation (Recall pampers dry max diapers! 2010)

Online word of mouth can, at its best, concentrate on promoting a brand and work as a co-operative force in enhancing the brand. However, when world-wide communities focus on attacking a brand, they generate rapid, negative, and widespread electronic word-of-mouth and hence, reputation, by reaching a large number of consumers. Especially strong brands have been associated with “anti-brand sites”, which share negative perceptions about the brand. (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati, 2012) Krishnamurthy and Kucuk (2009) identify three reasons why specifically strong brands are threatened by communities. First, the more known the brand is, the more attention one can draw and hence, try to influence the industry. Second, as strong brands tend to dominate the market, damaging their image can cause changes in the market shares, and third, the fear of decreased brand equity can make larger companies to listen to boycotters’ requests and mission. (Krishnamurthy and Kucuk 2009)

 Learn, develop, and communicate it!

Constant criticism can, however, encourage companies to learn from their mistakes and lead to an improved brand image, which, ultimately, strengthens brand equity. By listening to consumers’ unhappiness, companies can identify constantly occurring problems with their products and find out their root causes. This can lead to improved products and more satisfied customers. Companies who have been actively communicating online about their learning processes and attempts to compensate claims, seem to be appreciated by consumers. (Fournier and Avery 2011)

Conclusion

Nowadays, strong media presence and publicity have greater than ever impact on brand equity, corporate reputation, and company profitability (Fournier and Avery 2011; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk 2009). Therefore, it is vital to know the new environment and its rules when introducing and managing brands online. As the environment allows people to form strong online communities in which they exchange ideas and experiences, negative brand image is probably one of the most horrifying issues brand managers can think of.  And managing that image is more and more challenging due to the fact that in social media, brand managers do not possess full power over their brands. There, in the jungle, also consumers own the brand and take part in creating it. By realizing the new conditions of survival, learning from others’ (and their own) mistakes, and being constantly aware of the possible consequences of their actions, brand managers can not only survive at the era of online marketing, but also manage their brands successfully, together with consumers.

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Threats of Brand management in social media Why Strong Social Media Presence Magnifies Brand Weaknesses and How International Brand Managers Can Address This Part 1

January 15, 2015

Written by Jenni Väisänen

Nowadays, brand managers focus more and more on marketing online, due to the multiple opportunities it offers. However, to manage brands efficiently in social media settings, marketers need to understand the rules of their new marketing environment. This paper examines survival tactics of brand management in social media in the form of literature review. Based on Fournier and Avery’s article (2012) about the evident characteristics of social media and their impact on brand management practices, this paper discusses four factors, which can threaten brand management by magnifying their weaknesses, and ways to overcome them. The factors are characteristics and demands which have risen at the era of online marketing. They are 1) power of social collective, (2) entertaining parodies, (3) demand for transparency, and (4) constant criticism. Depending on the way these characteristics are addressed by brand managers, they can work either as an endorsement or threat to branding practices in social media.

Introduction

Today, being present in social media is necessary for most companies, as it provides possibilities to connect and create relationships with various groups of stakeholders. Intensive use of Web 2.0 technologies in marketing pays off, as it has a remarkable impact on company reputation, profitability and market share, when properly implicated. (Bughin and Chui 2010; Kietzmann et al 2011) Because web 2.0 is regarded as a door-opener for two-way communication and information sharing (Filho and Tan 2009, cited in Akar and Topcu 2013), including it to the traditional marketing mix provides various new platforms for marketing activities (Winer 2009). Akar and Topcu (2013) define social media marketing simply as a tactic to promote both company and its brands via different social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

Despite the opportunities social media marketing has to offer, brand managers need to realize that there is a thin red line between success and failure, when a brand is presented in social media. Rapidly spreading electronic word of mouth (Akar and Topcu 2013), powerful consumer activism within online communities (Cova and Pace 2006), and co-creation process of brand image (Singh and Sonnenburg 2012) do not run only with positive energy. If brand managers lack understanding of vital rules in the jungle of social media marketing, strong brand presence and visibility can turn into a threat for the brand. Negative brand reputation spreads fast in social media, which can have serious impact on sales and even survival of a company (Kietzmann et al 2011). As the prerequisite of social media is that it was created for people – not for marketers nor brands- companies should be aware that they are to walk on their toes in the online jungle. (Fournier and Avery 2011)

Fournier and Avery (2011) summarize four phenomena in social media, which brand managers ought to take into consideration when marketing online. They are (in other words than Fournier and Avery, 2012, presented) (1) power of social collective, (2) entertaining parodies, (3) demand for transparency, and (4) constant criticism. As social media has changed the landscape of marketing practices remarkably, resulting in “traditional” marketing techniques becoming invalid, it is important for companies to understand conditions of their new marketing environments (Awasthi, Sharma and Gulati 2012).  These phenomena, help to clarify the root causes of the benefits, without forgetting the threats, of having strong social media presence. (Fournier and Avery 2011)

Purpose of the study

The purpose of this paper is to understand, why social media as a marketing landscape is challenging for brand managers. The aim is to encourage learning from others’ mistakes, and discuss some ways to address the dilemmas. This paper is divided into two parts; in the first part, focus is to discuss the power of social collectives and parodies, whereas the second part concentrates on how companies should handle demands to be transparent and constant criticism.

Magnifying and managing brand weaknesses: need for belongingness and entertainment

Power of Social Collective 

Social media answers to peoples’ need of being accepted and feeling the sense of belongingness through its various communities, virtual friend-making and social bonding. By “liking” their friends’ updated statuses and “joining” different groups, people connect with each other conveniently. Online communities offer a place for like-minded people to share their opinions, photos and experiences, which enhances the feeling of belongingness. (Fournier and Avery 2011) Picture 1 below demonstrates, how many people Nike reaches via Facebook.

Nike Facebok coverpage, with 16,508,118 "likes".

Picture 1: Nike social media –Facebook (Nike 2014)

Marketers have traditionally been able to bring brands and their messages to the awareness of consumers, possessing full control over the message, but social media has changed this. Today, managers are creating their brands together with consumers by sharing experiences and opinions. Because this new type of branding process is dependent on consumers’ opinions and perceptions of the brand image, managers need not only to listen carefully what their customers are saying, but also engage consumers into the co-creation of their brands. This two-way communication has changed the ideology of branding online completely. (Corstjens and Umblijs 2012; Fournier and Avery 2011; Singh and Sonnenburg 2012) 

The fact that consumers may connect different characteristics to a brand than the previous owner, brand manager, can cause problems to the company and threaten the brand image (Fournier and Avery 2011, Corstjens and Umbljis 2012). Singh and Sonnenburg (2012) suggest that instead of trying to control the brand message too much, brand managers should concentrate on guiding consumers’ comments to support and endorse the original brand-story. According to Singh and Sonnenburg (2012), some corner stones of the new way of brand management are to switch focus to the process instead of the output and understand the role of “tension” in brand-creation.

Switch focus to the process, not to the output

As the core idea is to co-create brand-stories together with consumers, they need to be encouraged to participate into the process. Brand managers need to accept that brand image will be affected by different kinds of experiences and stories shared by individual consumers, which, in other words, means that there is no “one storyline” or “one image” of a brand. What brand managers can and should try, is to guide shared comments to reflect the desired brand concept. This can be done by e.g. engaging, provoking and seeding. Engaging can be done by encouraging different opinions and by challenging new stories, whereas provoking by addressing emotional topics for discussion. Seeding is a tactic to encourage co-creation in multiple social media platforms (Shau, Muñiz, and Arnould 2009). Additionally, brand managers should provide a suitable social media platform for consumer-discussions. (Singh and Sonnenburg 2012)

Realize the role of “tension” in branding

In order to activate consumers to participate in branding, marketers must provide tension to the story. Tension as a concept has been divided into three categories: internal, personal and external. Internal tension rises from the need to look into the mirror and identify oneself, whereas personal tension lies in the differences between people. By external tension, the issues between people and their environment, nature and even supernatural, are brought up to discussion. When holistically practiced, all sources of tension are discussed in a brand co-creation process. Hence, tension is the driving force to generate consumers’ emotional engagement to the brand story. (McKee 1998, in Singh and Sonnenburg 2012) Below, in Picture 2 it is visible how Ben&Jerry’s Icecream creates tension at their Facebook site: they promote well-being of cows and ask, which flavour their consumers prefer on “Belly laugh day”.

Ben&Jerry's ice-cream highlighting the importance of happy cows and asking flavour preferences, i.e. creating tension.

Picture 2: Ben&Jerry’s social media -Facebook (Ben&Jerry’s 2014)

The curse of co-creation is that it makes branding uncontrolled: if consumer societies’ opinions collide with brand’s mission or values, solving the emerging problems can be challenging. (Fournier and Avery 2011) A good example of a mismatch between consumers’ and brand managers’ perceptions of a brand is Frito-Lay’s: brand managers enhanced environmentally-friendly values in product development, whereas consumers considered “convenience” as a more important factor. The brand had to give up its ecological packaging material in order to meet customer wants: a package with less-rasping sounds. (Brady 2010, cited in Fournier and Avery 2011)

Entertaining parodies

Yet parodies about brands are not a new invention, spoofing has emerged as a form of entertainment in social media. Parodies about different brands and advertisements have become normal in different social media platforms, such as Youtube. Previously parodies were distributed mainly by professionals, but nowadays anyone can entertain others in social media. In general, brands and advertisements offer a variety of themes to make fun of. (Fournier and Avery 2011)

The Dove Beauty 'Sketches' ad has been parodied in terms of men's face. Sketches are completely different as men see themselves as more attractive than they are.

Picture 3: Dove sketches parody –men. (Adweek 2013)

When consumers use parody in order to attack a brand and in order to humiliate it, it is time for brand managers to get restless. Rude parodies concerning the core values and positioning can be particularly damaging for any brand. (Fournier and Avery 2011) After Dove’s Real Beauty campaign was launched, some parodies were uploaded into Youtube. They were made about men, with the same idea as “sketches”-video: men were drawn on the basis of their description about themselves, and then, on the basis of another person’s description. The descriptions concerned, depending on the spoof, their faces or their testicles. (AdhocVids 2013; Irakli Kopaliani 2013) Pictures 3 and 4 demonstrate the two parodies.

The Dove Beauty 'Sketches' ad has been parodied to put testicles front and center.

 Picture 4: Dove sketches parody –testicles. (Ma, 2013)

    Be fun if you can –and if not, know your audience

If the brand identity supports the idea of being funny, some marketers themselves can use the idea of silliness and implement “parody” as a selling tactic before consumers do. Indeed, there are some brands who sell by being funny, such as Blendtec. Even though the idea of a kitchen blender is not entertaining, commercials made it funny by blending almost anything. (Fournier and Avery 2011) However, if the brand image does not convert into a funny story, brand managers should realize that their online marketing activities can reach anyone. Even though target group is defined, social media allows other people, who do not even consume the product, share their point-of-views and therefore, have an impact on the co-creation of the brand. (Singh and Sonnenburg 2012)

Demand for transparency and constant criticism are discussed in part 2.

Internet’s development impact on consumers’ behavior in past 10 years and recommendations for marketers’ to adapt successfully

January 12, 2015

Written by Monika Vaiciulyte 

Purpose of the article

There is no denying the fact that the Internet has made a huge development and terrific impact on our daily lives. The main purpose and objectives of the Internet have been changed and adapted partly by society itself and partly by the technological shifts. Business units and entrepreneurs saw it as an opportunity and started to explore the possibilities lying there. The adaptation had to be accepted not only by the managers but from the consumer’s side as well. In this paper the first part is going to focus on the consumer’s changes issue and the second part is going to emphasize on the ways how marketers can adapt to these changes and recommend ways to do it. Including the shift from Web 1.0 where consumer was just the receiver of information and Web 2.0 where the communication and relationships started to matter. Gained experience and understanding of how Internet works allowed consumers to actively participate in the marketing process and be a big part of brand building.

This article is going to present the main changes of the Internet and its impact to the consumers’ behavior, grounded by the statistics available on this theme. Later, the recommendations for marketers will be presented, conducted from the peer articles reviews.

Development of the Internet in last 10 years and consumers’ behavior changes

Growth

Talking about the changes in the Internet I will follow J. Macdaniel (2012) suggested changes that were made upon the usage of Internet during the last ten years. 

The biggest one and the most obvious is the change in the number of users; the growth of Internet usage is just impressive – from more than 500 million Internet users worldwide to 2.7 billion people using it in 2013 which estimates 39% of the world’s population in total. At 2013 Europe was the region with the highest Internet penetration – 75%, while the Americas had 61% penetration (ITU, 2013).

This growth of course was followed by the business development and shift to the Internet as well. The major growth of websites number was witnessed and the statistics say that in 2002 there were roughly 15, 6 million websites and till the 2011 the number grew to 366, 8 million (Statistic brain, 2012). Of course this affected the amount and variety of information available for the users as well as the opportunities created and services available.

After considering the growth of Internet facilities available the next logical step is to review the availability of the broadband access; that leads to the conclusion that Internet, at the beginning was mostly related with work and its needs; just after a while it moved to the households, letting people to use it in a daily life basis as well as for entertainment. As the statistics are providing, nowadays 41% of the world’s households are connected to the Internet, but the region with the highest amount of household connected is still Europe (ITU, 2013). Considering this, it is logical to say that for users the shift from Internet as a work tool was made towards Internet as a daily life supporter.

Meanwhile, while Internet was developing, a growing platform of e-commerce has made its appearance. In 2012, the B2C e-commerce reached 1 trillion dollars, which means that in only one year it grew 21.1% in total. According to the statistics North America was in the first place of e-commerce sales, closely followed by Asia-Pacific region, which in 2013 was expected to outrun North America. Internet accessibility and high penetration in all regions led to the change of consumption habits. As it is visible from the statistics, contemporary consumers are more relying on e-commerce. Authors Ahuja, Gupta and Raman (2003) researched the motivations for the consumers to shop online and the most trending ones were – convenience, better prices, time saving and availability.

Technological changes

A huge step that moved Internet usage and its applications to the next level was the ability to access Internet through the mobile phone. According to the statistics in 2013 the global active mobile broadband subscriptions reached more than two billions. This is 29, 5% of the general population and in these area developing countries outrun the developed countries (mobiThinking, 2013). As it is observed by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) mobile Internet access in developing countries gives the opportunity to brands and marketers to reach the audience and expand the market shares in certain areas. Mobiles or so-called smart phones are being used not just for searching information and checking e-mails, but also for social media purpose and entertainment. This had a high impact on the Internet usage time and accessibility.

By the time Internet users became more sophisticated and demanding they needed to localize their search results and companies needed geographically targeted consumers; this need was covered by an online service called Google Local (J. Macdaniel, 2012). After a while, as the Internet and its users were developing, Google started to use intuitive or personalized advertisements, composed according to the e-mails content and users search information. Improvements are being done here constantly as the technological side allows specializing and understanding every consumer as a unique personality (B. Rangen, 2011).

The most influencing change that implemented the environment of the Internet itself was the appearance of various social platforms. Moreover, it had a tremendous influence on users’ interactions and activity online. The emergence of blogs, forums and other platforms where people can create virtual communities and interact with each other empowered users to let the particular brand or company to the community or not. It is the place where users have the power and are able to set up the so called “game rules”. For example fashion bloggers who became famous and powerful because of their social media usage or the companies that created buzz around their brand using videos that became viral, like Vodafone flash mob in the Heathrow airport. As Fournier and Avery (2011) are explaining in their article – brands rushed into the social media, expecting that users are waiting for their one way messages and more information about products; but that was not the case. People came to social media to hide themselves from marketers and were not willing to let them in, using the traditional marketing methods.  

The infographic to visualize changes discussed above can be found here.

First step to successful online marketing implementation

In this part the attention is being paid to the social media and its usage by marketers, because this is the area where the influence for consumers could be made, not taking into consideration traditional online advertising methods, like banners and pop ups.

The understanding of Internet changes and their influence on current or potential clients is crucial for successful e-marketing. Being aware of the consumer activities and attitudes is not enough. New marketers need to know the whole social media ecosystem, to be able to create and maintain flawless strategy and not getting lost with the messages spread to their consumers. As  Hanna, Rohm and Crittenden (2011) are explaining in their work, one of the biggest mistake that a company can do is to treat all the platforms separately and not synchronized with each other and with marketing strategy. However, Internet based marketing cannot be treated as a substitute for the traditional marketing. Marketers need to understand that in social media there is no monologue, consumers are receiving the messages and deciding to start a dialogue or ignore it.

Social media platforms as a connected online environment

Social media usage for better consumers’ understanding

After understanding the social media environment and the principles of how to manage it as a system, it is time to dig deeper into the usage of it. Knowing the tendency that Internet users are keen on spending more and more money online and trusting e-commerce, marketers can conduct the online shopper’s segmentation as it is suggested by Aljukhadar and Senecal (2010). Used to identify characteristics of buyers segments it could help marketers make a decision to move part of their sales online, provide 24/7 online shopping support or any other service to encourage and lead consumer to purchase action. In this case author’s example can be used when the emails inviting consumers to shop in actual shop were used by providing a special discount offer.

Similarly, the social media networks can be used to illuminate consumer world and create better understanding about their environment and problems they are facing (P. Barwise, S. Meehan, 2010). It leads rather more to innovating than instant growth of the sales, but at the long perspective, solving consumer’s problems and making certain things easier, more comfortable or even more entertaining, might drive sales up eventually and create positive brand/company reputation.

Moving even deeper in the online marketing, the analyzed Internet development and usage changes are showing that mobile connection with Internet is growing fast and that needs to be observed and considered by marketers too. Firstly, it can help to gather information in real time; for example from check ins and comments made during the visit, till the particular emotions that a person felt there. Combining this knowledge together with the modern technologies, marketers can reach a great communication level, which might feel like one- to-one marketing and give back some power to the companies (Andreas M. Kaplan, 2012). The author also presented the 4 I’s (integrate, individualize, involve, initiate) model that can be used as a powerful tool by marketers to create, engage and implement relationships with their consumers.

When talking about the creating of relationships, it is necessary to mention that certain loyalty for the brand or company in social platforms can grow into the online communities that could provide incredibly valuable advertising, through e- word of mouth, straight to the potential and undecided consumers. The consumers themselves might create the content and perception of a certain brand.  This is one more niche that marketers can explore and use to improve relations with Internet users.  Collaboration with consumer’s communities is also being discussed by Antorini, Muñiz, Jr. and Askildsen (2012) who are providing the example of Lego group when the desire to collaborate came from its adult users. The main idea and lesson taken from this case is that after observing people’s want and aspiration to participate in the product creation or development, Lego management provided them with the communicational platform and gave them the tools in order to collaborate with the company. In this way marketers might get not only the valuable ideas for the future product lines and implementations, but also collect information about their users. Some particular expertise knowledge helping to develop and innovate could be gained too. Consumer generated content can be developed and empowered by using Muñiz Jr. and Schau (2011) proposed steps :

• Systematically employ consumer created content in their long term marketing campaigns;
• Consider the role of the firm in facilitating prolonged CGC endeavors;
• Actively encourage collaborative CGC.

However, consumer skills should be examined before investing a lot of time and money to this process.

Conclusion

Having observed the main developments of the Internet (growth and technological) and its effect on the consumer behavior the recommendations for the marketers have been made.

The most important thing in this constantly changing and vital environment called Internet is to keep scanning the periphery for the new technologies coming, appearance of the new social channels or other signals that the environment is likely to make a shift again. As Day and Schoemaker are claiming – being aware of the signals from environment that can have an effect on marketing and business itself, might provide not just understanding about threats on the way, but enlighten the opportunities as well.

The recommendations for marketers are:

• Before jumping into the online and social media marketing to be aware of its environment and understand that it works as a system;
• Conducting the online shoppers segmentation might help to characterize consumers;
• Using social media channels can help to illuminate the so called consumers world;
• Spotting the new coming Internet usage trends – as for now it is mobile Internet usage and try to implement in marketing plan;
• Provide consumers the opportunity to participate and be part of the brand. Provide a platform and facilitate this process.

To sum up, it is just a small list of recommendations for the marketers to implement. In order to achieve success, investment of time and practice is needed.

Reference list

Ahuja, M., Gupta, B., Raman, P. (2003). An empirical investigation of online consumer purchasing behavior. Communications of the ACM - Mobile computing opportunities and challenges. 46 (12), p145-151.

Aljukhadar, M., Senecal, S. (2011). Segmenting the online consumer market. Marketing Intelligence & Planning. 29 (4), p421- 435.

Antorini, Y. M., Muñiz A. M. Jr., Askildsen, T.. (2012). Collaborating with Consumer Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group. MIT Sloan Management Review. 53 (3), p73- 79.

Barwise, P., Meehan, S. (2010). The one thing you must get right when building a brand. Harvard Business Review. p80- 84.

Day, G. S., Schoemaker, P. J. H. (2005). Scanning the periphery. Tool kit. Harvard Business Review. Noverber, p1- 13.

Dyer, P. (2013). How the Internet has Changed in the Last 10 Years [Infographic]. Available: http://www.pamorama.net/2012/10/06/how-the-Internet-has-changed-in-the-last-10-years-infographic/. Last accessed 12th Feb 2014.

eMarketer. (2013). Ecommerce Sales Topped $1 Trillion for First Time in 2012. Available: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Ecommerce-Sales-Topped-1-Trillion-First-Time-2012/1009649. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.

Fournier, S., Avery, J. (2011). The uninvited brand. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, 193-207.

Hanna R., Rohm A., Crittenden L.V. (2011). We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, p265- 273.

International Telecommunication Union. (2013). ICT Facts and Figures. Available: http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2013-e.pdf. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.

Kaplan, A. M. (2012). If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media 4x4. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 55, p129- 139.

Kaplan, A. M., Haenlein, M. (2009). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 53 (1), p.59- 68.

Macdaniel, J.. (2012). 10 Years, 10 Ways The Internet Has Changed and Changed Us. Available: http://www.1stclickconsulting.com/blogs/1st-click-works/2012/04/02/10-years--10-ways-the-Internet-has-changed--and-changed-us. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.

mobiThinking. (2013). Global mobile statistics 2013 Part B: Mobile Web; mobile broadband penetration; 3G/4G subscribers and networks. Available: http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/b#mobilebroadband. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.

Muñiz, A. M. Jr., Schau, J. H. (2011). How to inspire value-laden collaborative consumer-generated content. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, p209- 217.

Rangen, B. (2011). Gmail Plans for More Intuitive Ads. Available: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049807/Gmail-Plans-for-More-Intuitive-Ads. Last accessed 10th Feb 2014.

Statistic brain. (2012). Total Number of Websites. Available: http://www.statisticbrain.com/total-number-of-websites/. Last accessed 6th Feb 2014.

How social media are changing Television, with a focus on Twitter

January 5, 2015

Written by Alessio Stringari

Introduction

In the last few years internet and social media changed completely our daily lives. The way in which we relate with other persons has radically mutated since the introduction of social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Nowadays news travel at the speed of a tweet, everyone with its smartphone has become a reporter, with just a finger touch users can spread news about accidents, natural phenomenon, sport etc. These innovations not only are changing people’s lives but also the “old” mass media have to adapt themselves in order to “survive” in this new environment. According to Hermida & Thurman (2008) websites such as YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia enable any user to upload videos, comments, photos and much more online, becoming what is defined as User Generated Content (UGC). At this point newspapers, broadcasters, radios have to make a decision: embrace this new technological and social development or risk to face shrinking figures in the number of customers.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how social media and in particular social networks like Twitter are changing the principal mass media or rather the television. The approach of this essay is composed of a first part based on a literature review to examine the existing works concerning this phenomenon and in the second part the focus is on three different case studies that aim to explore deeply the potentiality of social media in the Television business.

Literature Review

As often happens with new technologies and internet related innovations also the terms social media and social networks are frequently misunderstood or used as a synonym. Although this implication is wrong because the two terms have different meanings that now we are going to define. Social media as claimed by Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) is a set of different internet applications established in the Web 2.0 environment that allows the creation and sharing of User Generated Content. Furthermore as stated by Mangold & Faulds (2009, p.358) “Social media encompasses a wide range of online, word-of-mouth forums including blogs, company-sponsored discussion boards and chat rooms, consumer-to-consumer e-mail, consumer product or service ratings websites and forums, Internet discussion boards and forums, moblogs (sites containing digital audio, images, movies, or photographs), and social networking websites, to name a few”. Therefore social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are just a slice of a broader entity named Social Media.  The cases in the coming part are based on the social platform Twitter, therefore in this section we explain what this website is about and how does it work.

Twitter is a social network and microblogging website founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. This particular social media “allows people to publish (tweet), reply to, and forward posts that cannot exceed 140-characters in length” (Smith, Fischer & Yongjian 2012, p.103).  Every user has a profile page, where is possible to find all the texts or “tweets” sent by this particular user. Although Twitter is not limited to publish something in your personal board, every tweet has the capability to reach potentially every person registered on Twitter (except the case of private profile, in that case only the followers can read the tweet).

One of the main characteristic of Twitter is the use of the so called “hashtag”, that means writing the word or argument that interest you and put at the beginning the # symbol. In this way you can show to your followers that you are talking about a specific topic and by clicking on the hashtag you are able to see all the tweets regarding this topic.

A research conducted from Jansen et al. (2009) shows that 19% of the tweets analysed mention either a company, organization or product brand. Furthermore 20% of these tweets are about expressing opinion, personal point of view, positive and negative feedback about brands, company or products. This figure shows how the word-of-mouth generated on Twitter and other similar social network can have a significant impact on the companies mentioned.

Over the centuries word-of-mouth (WOM) has been considered as a vis-à-vis conversation between customers, consumers about a product or a service experience (Sen & Lerman, 2007). Yet we now live in a high technological environment, where WEB 2.0 is at hand from morning to night; for WEB 2.0 we meant all the “computer network-based platforms upon which social media application/tools run or function.” (Weinberg & Pehlivan, 2011). Consequently we have to distinguish between the old-fashioned WOM and the brand new Electronic WOM, eWOM include any comment, both positive and negative, made by current, potential or past consumer about a specific company, product or service through the use of Internet and WEB 2.0 based applications (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2004).

Focusing on the television business, one of the daily choices of every viewer is about which television shows, news and broadcaster decide to pick. As suggested by Romaniuk (2007) one of the common assumption about WOM is that dissatisfied people share more their negative experiences compared to satisfied users, in order to prove it the author analysed  the effect of WOM in the selection of different tv shows. The results indicate that the reach of WOM was mostly low, but positive word of mouth was prevalent and likely to influence people compared to negative word of mouth. 

Nowadays in the modern environment, more and more power is gained by the “WOM 2.0”, and Twitter, due to the characteristics discussed before, can be selected as the ideal social media where people are able to share their opinions. As mentioned by Hanna et al. (2011), interactive technologies enabled the change from a passive WEB 1.0 model to an active and participant WEB 2.0, where consumers are both the initiators and receivers of information and contents. In the following section we are going to analyse how practically social media are changing television, using examples from TV shows, sitcoms, Breaking News and the social network Twitter.   

Case studies

I.         TV Shows

Taking a cue from the inspiring article of Hanna et al. (2011) we are going to examine how the Twitter community, without any organised campaign, can affect a TV show. In the mentioned academic research it has been analysed the effects of a social media campaign on the American music show Grammy Awards, which helped to achieve the best ratings in years. The show was nominated program of the week with more than 26 million viewers and an increase of 32% in the profitable segment of 18-34 year old.

Otherwise the example chosen for this paper is the Italian Music Festival of Sanremo, the most important music award in Italy, first broadcasted in 1951 which in the last years experienced shrinking number of viewers and low percentage of young audience.

The purpose of this case is to prove, or at least show, that eWOM can impact the viewing results of a TV show even without any organised campaign from the show producers.

During the 2012 edition (in the years prior to 2012 Twitter was barely known in Italy) more than 244.000 tweets were using the hashtag #sanremo, with an average of almost 50.000 per evening (source: tech.fanpage.it). As shown in the table below, the red lines representing the number of viewers (in thousands) have a similar trend as the blue line which stand for the number of tweets mentioning #sanremo. Even we can only assume there is a positive correlation between the number of tweet and the number of viewers, additionally we have to consider that #sanremo related words were in the Twitter trend topics during all the Festival days and that created even more eWOM.

img “stringari_image” alt=”Sanremo data 2012"

Source: techfanpage.it

II.         Breaking News

Compared to other Social Media like Facebook or YouTube, Twitter is considerably faster and straightaway. Many political leaders now communicate theirs ideas and statements first on Twitter, for instance Enrico Letta (Italian prime minister), on the 13th  of February 2014 posted on Twitter that he was going to resign as prime minister the following day. Twitter hence has become one of the main sources of information for news broadcaster all over the world; it is not possible for them to avoid it, they are “compelled” of using Twitter both in order to get news and share news.

Another major example of the capability of Twitter is during extraordinary events like earthquakes. Taking once more Italy as a model, during a recent earthquake that hit a region in the north east, Twitter was the first source of information, with users promptly tweeting using the hashtag #terremoto (earthquake in Italian). Even before the office of Geology released any press report about the epicentre and power of the seism, it was possible through the number and geolocalization of the tweets attest quite precisely where the earthquake hit most. Moreover Twitter was not just a social media, it has been used to help rescuing persons from remote zone where the landline communications were damaged.

img “stringari_image1” alt=”terremoto hashtag earthquake”

Source: Focus.it

  III.         Sitcoms 

Previously we analysed how social media transformed TV Shows and Breaking News, but also TV series have been affected by this innovation. When any of the most famous sitcoms like “How I Met Your Mother” or “The Big Bang Theory” are aired, on Twitter the spectators immediately start to comment their favourite scenes using the dedicated hashtag and at the same time interact with other fans to share their personal opinions. But since not all the viewers of a sitcom are able to watch it live, the phenomenon of the “spoilers” grown considerably in importance, for spoiler it meant the fact of commenting in a place (for instance Twitter or Facebook) where other persons interested in the show could be “spoilered” by reading some comments that will break the surprise effect.

Can broadcasters do more other than invite people to comment using the dedicated hashtag? Yes, they do, an interesting sample is the exploiting of Twitter from the producer of “The Big Bang Theory”, whom created for each character of the sitcom a personal Twitter page (using the artistic name) that allows them to enhance eWOM even in the days that the TV series is not aired.

img “stringari_image2” alt=”Sheldon Cooper Twitter”

Source: Twitter.com

General Discussion and Conclusion

Even if the aim of this paper was very challenging, I found this topic particularly interesting to research and the analysis of a phenomenon like social network could be rewarding and demanding at the same time. The findings show that television is not fastened in the “World 1.0”, it is moving following the latest social trends, especially in order to not lose younger audiences.

As mentioned by Chorianopoulos & Lekakos (2008) Television is moving towards a concept of Social TV, where viewer are not passively watching contents but they are actively participating and interacting. This could be achieved thanks to the latest technologies, such as interactive televisions or more often via smartphone and social media applications.

Albeit Twitter is not the social network with the largest number of users, it is growing at exponential rate all over the world, and as shown in the previous cases is having a remarkable effect on the television galaxy, definitely changing it. 

References

Chorianopoulos, K. & Lekakos, G., 2008. Introduction to social TV: Enhancing the shared experience with interactive TV. INTL. JOURNAL OF HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION, 24(2), pp. 113-120.

Focus.it, n.d. [Online]
Available at: http://www.focus.it/scienza/dove-si-e-sentito-il-terremoto-21062013_7844_C12.aspx
[Accessed 10 February 2014].

Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden, 2011. We're all connected: the power of the social media ecosystem. Business horizons, Volume 54, pp. 265-273.

Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh & Gremler, 2004. Electronic word-of-mouth via consumer-opinion platforms: what motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the internet?. Journal of interactive marketing, 18(1), pp. 38-52.

Hermida, A. & Thurman, N., 2008. A Clash of Cultures. Journalism Practice , 2(3), pp. 343-356.

Jansen, Zhang, Sobel & Chowdury, 2009. Twitter power: tweets as electronic word of mouth. Journal of the American society for information science and technology , Issue 60, pp. 2169-2188.

Kaplan, A. M. & Haenlein, M., 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizon, Issue 53, pp. 59-68.

Mangold, G. & Faulds, D., 2009. Social Media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, Issue 52, pp. 357-365.

Romaniuk, J., 2007. Word of mouth and the viewing of television programs. Journal of advertising research, pp. 462-471.

Sen, S. & Lerman, D., 2007. Why are you telling me this? An examination into negative consumer reviews on the web. Journal of interactive marketing, 21(4), pp. 76-94.

Smith, A., Fischer, E. & Yongjia, C., 2012. How does brand-related user-generated content differ across Youtube, Facebook and Twitter?. Journal of interactive marketing, Issue 26, pp. 102-113.

Techfanpage.it, n.d. [Online]
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[Accessed 10 February 2014].

Twitter, n.d. Twitter.com. [Online]
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Weinberg, B. & Pehlivan, E., 2011. Social spending: managing the social media mix. Business Horizons, Issue 54, pp. 275-282.

BRAND BUILDING BY CROWDFUNDING

January 1, 2015

Written by Master Student at Lund University

Introduction

When creating a new venture, a successful establishment of the brand is a crucial activity in customer acquisition process and order to create a favourable reputation (Bresciani & Eppler, 2010). Small enterprises generate economic growth and create working opportunities to the society. However, banks are often reluctant to take risks and venture capital firms looking for bigger companies and require quick results. This denotes difficulties for new ventures to obtain financing through traditional approaches and to even get started with the business idea (CrowdCube, 2013). Moreover, with today’s noise in the market sphere, it is extremely important for the new venture to stand out and build a brand in order to survive. There are several channels where entrepreneurs can promote and communicate their brand. As the new media landscape opens up for opportunities it also raises challenges, such as building establish a brand in a short time and send a consistent message regarding the brand value (Winer, 2009).

A relatively new path to get funding and market validation in an early stage is through crowdfunding. In this short paper, I will examine the topic of crowdfunding as a tool to build brand awareness through social media channels. In order to observe this further, I aim to define the area of crowdfunding, start-up branding and the essence of word-of-mouth in an online setting. Additionally, I will base the discussion trough thoughts from an entrepreneur that started a venture through a crowdfunding campaign.

The basics of crowdfunding

Crowdfunding platforms occur over several sectors from non-profit purposes to consumer products to music and film production. Commonly, these platforms consist of three actors; the receiver seeking financing, the public financing platform and the individuals that provides with financial support. The crowd platform acts as a link between the project and the financers (Ordanini et al., 2011).  Crowdfunding can take various forms such a donation, reward or pre-emption or capital model through equity or loans (Hemer, 2011). Belleflamme, Lambert and Schwienbacher (2007, s.7) defines the topic as ”Crowdfunding involves an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donations (without rewards) or in ex-change for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes". Belleflamme, Lambert and Schwienbacher (2011) indicates that there are three main reasons why people engage and support crowdfunding; following the process of a new product that never been launched, a pre-order of a certain product before it reaches the mass-market and identify themselves as privileged financers that partake in a community.

Brand your start-up

According to Rode and Vallaster (2005) studies of branding is a very unique phenomenon in the context of start-ups and claim that further researches in this area is necessary. This is further discussed by Bresciani and Eppler (2010), claim the field of branding on new ventures to be an under-explored area and its marketing strategies cannot be directly copied of established firms for success. For example, start-up branding distinguishes from established firms in terms of no rooted identity, spread reputation and lack of organizational structures (Bresciani & Eppler, 2010). Additionally, the limited resources such as capital, knowhow and time are also typical issues for new ventures.

Since the entrepreneur is responsible for many areas of the business, Barbu et al. (2009) findings were showing that the marketing strategies mainly surrounded sales. This research declared that the branding strategies were hard to overcome due to lack of managerial competence. Moreover, almost all start-ups are focusing on one product or service. In the context of small ventures, Resnick and Cheng (2011) claim the firm’s branding cannot be separated from the owner’s personal brand. As product and entrepreneur cannot be distinguished from the each other, the branding could be seen as one. 

Social Media Branding

The web is a unique social environment with the ability to link a piece of content to another, which creates content webs that contain value (Akar & Topsu, 2013). Social media is applicable in various fields from customer management, market intelligence and research to public relations and promotions. Social media is today a vital tool for marketers from both small and large firms to spread their message to customers. An advantage of social media branding is the possibility to gain effective and relatively cheap customer insights such as feedback, attitudes and analyse customer movements (Barwise & Meehn, 2010). 

From the consumers’ perspective, social media provides the ability to generate and share information about firms and products, influence buying behaviour and a vast effect on brand reputation. When a firm is present on social media communities, it’s possible for the customer to interact around the clock. From the firm’s perspective it is, according to Barwise & Meehan (2010), essential but hard to sacrifice control of the brand’s channel. Word-of-mouth regarding customer opinions are perceived to be more trustful in comparison to the firms marketing efforts (Akar & Topsu, 2013). Thus, social media has a great (positive or negative) impact on the firms sales and as claimed by Kietzmann et. al (2011), ultimately the impact on the firms continued existence. Moreover, Singh and Sonnenburg (2012) examine the essence of co-creation storytelling, which implies that the customer can actively affect the content and distribution of the message. This active participation forms a feeling of belonging to a community. The firms should consequently focus on generate connection among its followers, rather than promote its brand and commercials.

The Crowdfunder Discussion

Due to the time frame for this project I concluded that a convenience sampling would be most suitable. This sampling process is a non-probability sampling process that entails my accessibility to the respondent, thus I highlight the lack of generalizability (Bryman & Bell, 2011, p. 190).

An interview was held with an entrepreneur of a new consumer product that crowdfunded during ten weeks in 2013. The entrepreneur recalls the starting phase to take a long time, since the idea needed to be clearly conceptualized before the crowdfunding campaign. The campaign was the first representation of the product, “Since we’re aiming at the ‘ordinary people’ we wanted to see if the backers (people that found in an idea) liked it first” the entrepreneur said. When I ask about their branding strategies, my respondent is hesitating a bit before saying, “We got our concept, however crowdfunding will help supporters to create the brand and we will to some extent adapt accordingly”.

My interpretation after this discussion is supported by (Bresciani & Eppler, 2010) in the sense of lacking organizational structure and a rooted identity. The entrepreneur continues, “The invisible presence in social media before the crowdfunding launch was an active choice”. Social media accounts for the start-up was created just before the launch, “We wanted to come from nowhere and ride on the wave”.

The advantage of a crowdfunding campaign is the ability to get natural spread. “Our campaign becomes very intimate, since the viewers can grasp our passion about our project. If we did a more traditional commercial, it could be harder to portray or vision”. The entrepreneur is thinking in the same terms as Singh and Sonnenburg (2012) regarding the focus on the content story and not the brand itself. The entrepreneur continues with the importance of gaining trust and let the customers’ out from a passive role, “Our campaign is not an advertisement, or we can pass the “filter” being perceived as one because we simply ask for cooperation and engagement”.

Learning and conclusion

Crowdfunding has indeed redesigned the innovation sphere. Small venture should interact as a personal friendship during the brand building process, which is a strategy that is impossible apply by big firms. That would enable the entrepreneurs to not fear the loose of control, since the customers feel that the venture is theirs. Crowdfunding is a great tool for start-ups to get market validation at an early stage and engage personally through social media channels. Furthermore, I believe that crowdfunding opens up for the entrepreneur to faster form their brand identity. Additionally, crowdfunding has the possibility to build brands before the start-up is created, potential customers help with feedback, money and engagement to build the final product. Thus, the main drawback is the possibility of unique product to be copied. Social media has the ability to facilitate the creation of meaning and highlight the uniqueness of each brand only if start-up finds the formula to consumers’ heart. The challenge remains to target the individual consumer and at the same time please the collective mass. A crowdfunding campaign is made locally and convey a personal feeling, that can be spread and engage globally. To conclude, social media enable start-ups to build personal networks based on small communities around the brand and through crowdfunding the chance of spreading faster increases- This text demonstrate that social media presents the start-up firm the opportunity to tap into the enormous collective intelligence available on the web to build the brand further.

References

Akar, B, Topsu, (2013), “An examination of factors influencing consumers’ choice of social media marketing”, Journal of Internet Commerce, 10(1), 35-67. 

Barbu, M.C., Ogarcă R. F. & Barbu M.C.R. (2009). Branding in small business. Management & Marketing. Vol. VIII. Special issue 1/2010, pp. S31-S38.

Barwise, P. and Meehan, S. (2010), “The one thing you must get right when building a brand”, Harvard Business Review, December.

Belleflamme, P., Lambert, T. & Schwienbacher, A. (2011). Crowdfunding: tapping the right crowd. Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Discussion paper  2011/32.

Bresciani, S. & Eppler, M. J. (2010). Brand New Ventures? Insights On Start-Ups’ Branding Practices. Journal of Product & Brand Management. Vol.19, Issue. 5. pp. 356 – 366. 

Bryman, Alan. & Bell, Emma. 2011. Business Research Methods Third Edition. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press

CrowdCube, 2013. Vad är Crodwfunding. Available online:

http://blog.crowdcube.se/vad-ar-crowdfunding/ [Accessed 10 feb 2013]

Hemer, 2011. A snapshot of Crowdfunding. Available online: http://www.isi.fraunhofer.de/isi-media/docs/p/de/arbpap_unternehmen_region/ap_r2_2011.pdf [Accessed 10 feb 2013] 

Kietzmann, J.H., K. Hermkens, I.P., McCarthy & B.S. Silvestreet (2011), “Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media”, Business Horizons, 54, 241—251.

Ordanini, A., Miceli, L., Pizzetti, M., & Parasuraman, A. (2011). Crowd-funding: transforming customers into investors through innovative service platforms. Journal of Service Management, 22(4), 443-470.

Singh, S. & S. Sonnenburg (2012), Brand Performances in Social Media”, Journal of Interactive Marketing 26, 189–197.

Rode, V., & Vallaster, C. (2005), “Corporate Branding for Start-ups: The Crucial Role of Entrepreneurs”, Corporate Reputation Review, 8 (2), pp. 121-135 Schmeisser w.,  

Resnick, S., and Cheng, R., 2011. Marketing in SMEs : A proposed ‘4 Ps’ model. Academy of Marketing: Annual Conference, July 2011.

Winer, R.S. (2009), “New communications approaches in marketing: issues and research directions”, Journal of Interactive Marketing 23, 108-117.

Heritage brands storytelling by viral marketing in social media Part 1

December 25, 2014

Written by Onsurang Siripiyavatana

Introduction

Powerful stories always link to the heart and mind of people. Well-crafted stories reach out to the audience, making each and every story unique for the individual. Audiences develop their own imagery and co-create the brand. Heritage brands are rich in track records and longevity; they have good stories to tell. Storytelling is an opportunistic marketing tool for heritage brands, if marketers package it right.

However, heritage brands come with the ‘sincerity’ characteristics of being honest, authentic, trustworthy, caring and unassuming (Aaker, 1996). The model of heritage brands view the consumer as passive commodity but it is no longer relevant in the social media era.

In the social media era, companies are now evaluated by much more than their products. It is the era where brand’s values and emotions they evoke are narrative material (Hamm, 2013). It’s indisputable that the best way to link the brand’s idea with an audience’s emotion is by telling a compelling story (Hamm, 2013). Moreover, the opportunities of hyper-connected and social consumer as well as new distribution platform enable rapid sharing of information and contribute to the effectiveness of viral marketing. Viral marketing, by Cambridge Dictionaries Online is defined “A marketing activity in which information about a product spreads between people, especially on the internet” (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Trusov et al., (2009) state that customer involvement is crucial for company’s survival in the social media era and viral marketing is a necessary tool to gain attention in a cluttered marketing environment.

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine and analyze how heritage brands keep the heritage story relevant in an era where social media is increasingly important and how they utilize viral marketing to elevate the consumers to brand’s value co-creator. Two heritage brands’ storytelling strategy via viral marketing are examined, namely Thai Life Insurance and Volkswagen. These brands are of irrelevant categories and of different base location, one in service another in automotive, one in Asia another in Europe. The two distinct examples are selected to give evidence of powerful storytelling regardless of circumstances.

How the organizations with strong heritage brand strategy manage to stay relevant in the social media era? How they embrace storytelling and make use of viral marketing? What are the keys for success? This is focus questions of the paper. A summary will be given to how heritage brands can adapt and create a sustainable competitive advantage in the cluttered social media environment, “as our new brands of today turn into the heritage brands of tomorrow” (Liebrenz-Himes, 2007) 

Who write the brand storyboard in social media

A brand story is more than content and a narrative. The whole picture of the storyboard is made up of facts, feelings and interpretations, which means that part of a brand’s story is not told by brand owner (Jiwa, 2013). As mentioned by Winer (2009), the communication of brand story has changed and with the emergence of social media, the power of storytelling shifts from the hands of brand owner to the consumer through user-generated brand content. According to Vargo and Lusch (2004), the three ingredients central to co-creation of brand story are networks, relations, and interactions— which are enabled through discussion forums, blogs, community platforms, and news-sharing sites. In the landscape of open source branding, Fournier & Avery (2011) used the metaphor of “un-invited brand” to address how branding through the internet is viewed upon by the consumer. The authors claim that the social media was made for people, not for brands. Hence the people, more specifically the stakeholder, is all it matter in the age which the context of social collective, transparency, criticism and parody are relevant.

Storytelling involve a narrator and listener however, because of the two ways interaction nature of social media, both the consumer and brand owner can play the role of a narrator and that of a listener, resulting in an interactive co-creation driven by the participants. Consumers evaluate products or brands online and influence other consumer’s perception, give consumers an active role in branding and storytelling process (Singh & Sonnenburg, 2012). Hence the brand storyboard in social media era is crafted by interlinked content and co-creation of brand from interrelated stories is the key.

Brand heritage and the ability to make use of viral marketing to stay relevant

Brand heritage is a dimension of brand’s identity found in its track record, longevity, core values, use of symbols and organizational believe that its history is important.
Heritage brand make use of its history as a key component in brand identity and value proposition. Many brands have heritage but did not make use of it are not heritage brands (Urde, Greyser, & Balmer, 2007).  Heritage brand appeals to its current and past consumer, and if it continues to appeal to future consumers, its heritage continues to be a key asset of the overall brand equity (Liebrenz-Himes, 2007).  Aaker (1996) highlights that identity equity in heritage brands is extremely strong and valuable, the brand’s footprints add sincerity and differentiation, especially as the brand’s history and origin are re-interpreted in contemporary time (Aaker, 2004). Benson (2005) notes that heritage brands convey their heritage in a form of storytelling and the key that these brands all have in common is that they have had the time to build a meaningful and relevant past – a heritage. Barwise & Meehan (2010) also see this as an opportunity for heritage brands and that they should exploit the social media and revise the marketing playbook rather than rewriting it—meaning brands should strive to go viral, but protect the brand.

What makes a heritage brand stay relevant from generation to generation is the ability to respond to changing marketplace. Researches point out that the existence of successful brands has to be built on strong core values (Seybold 2001, Moser 2003) that consumers can relate. Seybold states “Your customer’s experience with your brand includes how that customer feels when he is in you brand’s presence” (Seybold, 2001). Hence, it all comes down to the “feelings” or consumers’ emotional engagement. In a diverse marketing landscape of today, the challenge facing heritage brands is to deliver the message and to appeal to the younger generations and stay relevant in changing marketplace. A study by Merchant & Rose (2012) confirms the positive impact of advertising-evoked vicarious nostalgia, a longing for a period that an individual did not personally live through, on brand heritage as “Promoting brand heritage bonds the consumer to the brand by enhancing trust, reinforcing perceptions of stability, creating positive emotions, and communicating the consistency of the brand’s promise over time”. According to Woerndl et al.(2008) the critical characteristic of successful viral marketing is the ability to reach out to the targeted audience and emotionally engaging message content.

Continue reading: case discussion 

NEW MEDIA, OLD PROBLEMS

December 22, 2014

Written by Dylan Sellberg

Information is knowledge. In 2014, the biggest marketing firms all the way to the National Security Agency (NSA) all want to understand who the people of the world are, and more importantly what they are interested in. But, the real question is what do these companies want to do with your information and how will they leverage it? 

There are now over 1.15 billion Facebook users and over 550 million registered users on Twitter. That’s a lot of people, translating into a lot of untapped advertising dollars. So, I set out to see exactly where these advertising dollars were being spent.

Data collection began on January 30th, 2014. The collection would last for 14 days and the task was simple, record every advertisement I saw on my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Not only were the advertisements recorded, they were also checked for relevant metrics of effective advertisement; the company who they were advertising, my interest in a given advertisement, whether or not the advertisement was recommended through my network, and the advertisement’s relevance to my demographic were all considered.

Back in 2011, the term native advertisement didn’t exist. Marketers used the context and content of a page to target their audience (Aljukhadar, Senecal 429) as opposed to their users, to determine which advertisements should be placed where. This new media has been categorized using two characteristics: 1) interactivity and 2) digital, (Shankar and Hollinger, 2007) both of which are inherently present on both Facebook and Twitter. In this new media, there are three groups of advertisements. Intrusive where the consumer is “interrupted” (Godin, 1999) by advertising, non-intrusive where the consumer chooses to receive the communications, and user generated where the consumer actually creates the communications.  From what was recorded in the study, Facebook and Twitter advertisements would fall under the category of non-intrusive. While they do clutter a timeline with information that was not consensually signed for, they do so in a manner that blends and adheres to the look and feel of the page. Over the course of two weeks, a total of 182 of these non-intrusive advertisements were recorded across Facebook (135) and Twitter (47). 

FacebookvsTwiter

Was it interesting?

For the sake of this study, although ambiguous, I categorized an ‘interesting’ advertisement as one that would typically yield a click-through or a purchase in the near future. These ‘interesting’ advertisements were all effective in creating a buzz in my mind about the company or their product and/or service; something that social media provides the opportunity for. (Papasolomou & Melanthiou, 2012). An advertisement has not served a proper purpose if it has not interested its target. 

After two weeks of survey 27% of Facebook, and 26% of Twitter advertisements were defined as ‘interesting’. Those numbers seem strikingly low considering how much both of these platforms know about the individual. These results are a contribution to the conclusion that even though these social media sites are aware of my gender, age, education, location, and much more, they still have a difficult time targeting what interests the user. Being so unsatisfied with the results, I turned to a Men’s Health Magazine to study those advertisements. Out of a total of 51 advertisements in the magazine, 17 (33%) struck me as interesting. This helped cement the notion that even though companies know plenty about their consumers, both digitally and traditionally, it is difficult to specifically trigger what makes them interested in each and every advertisement. 

Was I connected?

“Billions of people create trillions of connections through social media each day.” (Hansen, 2011). I set out to measure how effectively advertisers were leveraging this phenomenon as stated above.

To do this, I measured if an ad was “liked by a friend” or “followed” by somebody I follow. On Facebook, 17% of advertisements were accompanied by the text “Facebook friend likes this” and on Twitter 32% of advertisement were alongside a “followed by somebody I follow” text. This is perhaps the only instance where Twitter earned a superior statistic to Facebook in advertisement, and this particular category means a lot. On Facebook, it seemed that if a friend liked the ad that it was a mere coincidence. On the contrary, advertisement on Twitter seemed to be placed on my timeline purely because I followed somebody who followed the advertisers account.

Consumers can be fooled into thinking something is not spam if the ad is also liked by a member of their tribe, somebody who has a common interest in a specific activity. (Cova & Dalli, 2009) In layman’s terms, this strategy is like the advertising agency saying “Hey! Your friends like this, you should too!” This is perhaps one of the most important qualities of an effective advertisement. 

Another reason for this feature in advertisement is avoidance of the interpretation of spam. Spam in general has an extremely negative connotation, in some communities spammers or “trolls” are even banned from taking part altogether. (Seraj, 2012) If an ad is seen as spam or a nuisance, it violates the feeling of being non-intrusive as discussed earlier. One way that these advertisements avoid this perception is that they do in fact fit seamlessly into your timeline or newsfeed. Their placement and design are sometimes even mistaken for a friend’s post, which would be the ultimate goal here. It is important to note that overall, Facebook is much less crowded with these trolls and spammers than Twitter. Facebook and Twitter differ on this account due to the complex and simplistic nature, respectively, of registration for an account.
It has been suggested that in order to tap into the social connections we have developed the advertiser must understand the “social media ecosystem”, visualized in three types of media: owned, paid, and earned (Hanna et al. 2013). The way I see it, through analysis of Facebook and Twitter advertisements, first a firm must pay for media space, at which point it owns certain portions of the media. Then, once it has garnished credibility it earns the right to be shared with a subject’s connections. This reason alone is enough to justify tapping into the aforementioned trillions of connections made each day through social media. 
 

Was it relevant?

The ‘relevance’ test of these 182 advertisements was admittedly ambiguous, much like the interest test. An advertisement was deemed relevant if it would be considered useful or effective to anybody in a similar situation to me. The qualifications here were much less strict than the ‘interest’ test, yielding a 75% relevance rate for Facebook advertisement and 53% relevance for Twitter advertisement. 

Relevance of an advertisement is essential to ensure the widest range of consumer enjoyment. If an advertisement has no relation or connection to the audience targeted, there will be widespread dissatisfaction. It is crucial to understand that just because an ad is not interesting to a consumer, it could still serve as relevant. For example, car advertisements are not interesting to me because I am not in the market for a car. However, when I see a car company promoting themselves or their models on my Facebook or Twitter feeds I understand that they are relevant to my demographic. 

The essence of enjoyment is a good attitude, therefore it is important for companies and marketers alike to shape their marketing activities in ways in which consumers enjoy them, as opposed to looking like a blatant attempt at a sales pitch. (Akar & Topu, 2011) As long as an advertisement maintains perceived relevance in a potential consumers life, it is not seen as merely an advertisement, it is seen as a product providing entertainment or enjoyment. 

What does it all mean? 

After 14 days of tracking the so-called “future of advertising” social media frenzy, it became clear to me that there is still much to learn and develop through this platform. The truth is, social media advertising is not all it is cracked up to be. This epiphany did not come to me after I had finished analyzing Facebook, nor after dissecting Twitter; it came to me after flipping through a Men’s Health Magazine. What shocked me most about this Men’s Health Magazine is that 100% of the advertisements were relevant, and 1/3 of them interested me. Now, how is it that a website that knows so much about me cannot put together a better advertisement showing than that? 
Aside from my realization that traditional media advertisements were better served than social media, I have come to realize two limitations that may inhibit new media marketing growth. The first is privacy concerns, and the second is cost. 

Primarily, in regards to privacy, “recent development has raised privacy concerns, and calls by privacy advocates and lawmakers for regulations that set limits on web tracking across web sites by Internet service providers.” (Varadarajan et al., 2009) These privacy concerns should prove as hurdles for marketers moving forward as people and governing bodies alike become more concerned with their personal digital protection.

The second hurdle social media marketing will need to jump is the myth of low-costs. The traditional and overused phrase and perception that “social media marketing is free” is complete garbage.  Ever since I was a kid my father has taught me “nothing is free, son” and that stands true with social media marketing. All of the posts that show on Facebook and Twitter as promoted have been paid for. These types of advertisements are not cheap, either. It is also important to consider that even though reach may be higher per dollar on a social media ad versus a magazine, the magazine leaves room for volumes of creativity and design beyond 140 characters. 

To conclude my arguments drawn from observations I would like to allude to a quote by one of the greatest financial moguls of our time: 

“If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late” –Sir James Michael “Jimmy” Goldsmith

Reference

Aljukhadar, M & Senecal, S (2011), “Segmenting the online consumer market”, Marketing Intelligence & Planning . [Online] Emerald Database P. 421-435. Available from: http://emeraldinsight.com [Accessed 15th February 2014]

Cova, Bernard & Dalli Daniele (2009) “Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory?”, Marketing Theory [Online] Sage Publications Volume 9(3):315-399 DOI: 10.1177/1470593109338144

Erkan Akar & Birol Topu (2011) “An Examination of the Factors Influencing Consumers' Attitudes Toward Social Media Marketing”, Journal of Internet Commerce, 10:1, 35-67, DOI: 10.1080/15332861.2011.558456

Godin, Seth (1999), Permission Marketing, New York: Simon & Schuster

Hanna, Richard & Rohm, Andrew & Crittenden, Victoria (2011) “We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem” Business Horizons [Online] Elsevier database P. 54, 265-273. Available from www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor [Accessed 15 February 2014]

Hansen, D., Shneiderman, B., & Smith, M. A. (2011). Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world. Boston: Elsevier.

Hollinger, Marie (2007), “Online Advertising: Current Scenario and Emerging Trends,” Marketing Science Institute Report, 07–206.

Ioanna Papasolomou & Yioula Melanthiou (2012) “Social Media: Marketing Public Relations’ New Best Friend”, Journal of Promotion Management, 18:3, 319-328, DOI: 10.1080/10496491.2012.696458

Seraj, Mina (2012) “We Create, We Connect, We Respect, Therefore We Are: Intellectual, Social, and Cultural Value in Online Communities” Journal of Interactive Marketing, [Online] Elsevier database P. 209-222. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2012.03.002 [Accessed 15 February 2014]

Shankar, Venkatesh (2008), “Strategic Allocation of Marketing Resources: Methods and Managerial Insights,” Marketing Science Institute Report, 08–207.

Varadarajan, R & Yadav, M (2009) “Marketing Strategy in an Internet-Enabled Environment: A Retrospective on the First Ten Years of JIM and a Prospective on the Next Ten Years” Journal of Interactive Marketing. [Online] Elsevier Database P. 11-22. Available from: www.elsevier/locate/intmar [Accessed 15 February 2015]

Diesel’s lesson for the digital brand manager of tomorrow

December 18, 2014

Written by Master Student at Lund University

Introduction

Mr. Renzo Rosso was facing a serious problem that could have melted its brand as ice under the sun.

Having built the first e-commerce ever for a fashion brand in 1995 (Rosso, 2011), he is proudly one of the first entrepreneurs that embraced the digital revolution, but in 2012 his brand was not anymore appealing to the young people.

How to save a global brand of a multibillionaire holding (Forbes, 2013) in the fashion industry?

By creating  an Instagram account and hiring Lady Gaga’s stylist, of course. Why that answer cannot be found by a digital brand manager on books or any academic papers?

There are few reasons.

Traditional media is not working

During the last decades, the digital disruption generated a new environment in which it is effortless for users to communicate (Deighton, 2009). Not only digital communication is unlimited in space and time, but also it is spread in the type of the entity exchanged, from information to real data and objects, (Deighton, 2009).

The conversation, however, happens between users, which are on the same level consumers, marketing executives and digital brand managers. There is no structural difference between business and individual users. In fact, many digital innovation, especially the social media, were not built with business as the main purpose.

Nevertheless, commercial and market activities have soon entered the scene following the marketing style of traditional media (Deighton, 2009). The attitude of business, defined by marketing and brand managers in the digital environment has been one of incursion in customers’ conversations.

Social Media Marketing is not enough

Social media marketing is meant as the use of social media for the promotion of a company and its products (Akar, 2011). The structure, the rhetoric, and especially the relationship between consumers and companies are radically different from traditional advertising and digital brand managers should be aware of that (Armellini and Villanueva, 2009).

Regarding brand management, the new digital environment requires a unique style of communication (Hansen et al, 2011). Interactivity has been defined by Blattberg and Deighton (1991) as the possibility for individuals and organizations to communicate directly with no restriction of time and distance.

Second, in the digital world, variables are different, especially when measuring brands. Social media require more complex drivers than reach, such as engagement, intimacy, loyalty and advocacy (Hanna et al, 2011).

Reach and frequency are simply not enough for marketing and digital brand managers to picture the the interactive media environment and the ROI of social media marketing cannot be based just on such variables (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010).

Digital markets do not deal in measurable messages, but conversations (Levine et al., 2001) Therefore, corporate messaging, with the obvious purpose of encouraging purchase, cannot be effective, as attention and interactivity are not presumed (Russell, 2009).

Community is not everything

Several ways have been proven to be effective as alternatives to traditional corporate messaging. It has already been argued that building a community is essential to provide meaning to digital brands (Wolfe, 1994) and that users are now consumers, marketers, brand managers and advertisers at the same time. Users can create content related to companies and products and influence the perceptions of brands (Roberts and Kraynak, 2008).

The power given by the digital media is potentially equal for all the users, both individuals and organisations. In that sense, the authority of digital brand managers has been reduced (Deighton and Kornfield, 2009; Denegri et al, 2006) while the influence of consumers on brands has increased (Kucuk, 2009; Urban, 2004 ).

Thus, the new balance of powers needs to be shown by brand management (El-Amir and Burt, 2010).

The behaviour and processes of communities on the web creates value for its members (Schau et al, 2009) and later also for the brand through co-production and social production (Benkler, 2006). However, the scope of the benefits for brand managers of co-production still has to be defined (Cova and Dalli, 2009; Toffler and Toffler, 2006). Consumers as digital users are proven to create value for companies (Cova and Dalli, 2009). Moreover, consumers show signs of appreciation for being recognized as contributors to building brand value (Humphreys and Grayson, 2008).

It has also been suggested that the construction of shared meaning within a community enriches directly brands and their brand equity and that capitalism itself would soon rely entirely on consumer contribution to brands (Arvidsson, 2008).

Crowdsourcing is not what it seems

On social media, digital brand managers are aware that the driving factor of a successful relationship between brands and consumers is reciprocity (Tadajewski and Saren, 2009). One way to build reciprocity is crowdsourcing, which was first appreciated as an efficient method to outsource to people (Safire, William, 2009).

As defined by Howe and Robinson, editors at Wired Magazine, Crowdsourcing is the use of achieving services, content or ideas from the contributions of an extended group of individuals, usually an online community, instead of employees or suppliers (Howe, 2006).

Crowdsourcing is effective for marketers and digital brand managers. It helps developing ‘engagement’ with varied audiences (Simmons, 2008). Engagement on social media has been demonstrated to be effective to improve marketing strategies (Joseph and Seb, 2012). Crowdsourcing consists of gathering good ideas and discover the best ones and works both as a source of ideas and understanding of the customers (Lazzarato, 1997)

In particular, crowdsourcing is a form of engagement which is based on consumers’ work, being social interaction or contribution, previously named ‘immaterial labour’ by Lazzarato (1997). It seems logic for digital brand managers to consider it as a technique to empower the users of a community, but that implies a certain distance of power between brands and contributing users.

Renzo Rosso and the Diesel campaign

In April 2013 Renzo Rosso enrolled as the new artistic director for Diesel Nicola Formichetti, the stylist of Lady Gaga and former Mugler art director.

The campaign, launched by Formichetti, was named #dieselreboot, a permanent crowdsourcing project built on a tumblr blog - dieselreboot.tumblr.com. The blog was aimed to showcase public contributes in order to discover talents as nominate the next brand ambassadors among them, instead of leaving the choice to brand managers.

Through Tumblr all the users had the possibility to upload their artworks according to different topics and interactive missions.

The promotion of the campaign followed the dna of Diesel as defined by digital brand managers, based on provocation, sex appeal, rebellion. Provocative images and guerrilla marketing actions have been shown in the main cities of the world. Among them, as an example, a female pope projected on the Colosseum in Rome (Diesel, 2013).

The real novelty of the campaign, however, is not referred to the innovative and rebellious style of its communication. A number of previous campaigns had already made Diesel win several advertising prizes (Rosso, 2011).

The lesson for the digial brand manager of tomorrow

The innovation relies in the digital communication style chosen by brand managers Nicola Formichetti and Renzo Rosso.

First, the missions, called ‘call-to-actions’, are communicated via youtube uploads. The video cannot be even remotely referred to a corporate ad. It is rather an amateur clip recorded from a smartphone. The first video featured Nicola Formichetti itself in a chinese restaurant, asking the community to submit what inspires them. Definitely not an ordinary digital brand manager.

Second, the campaign was mainly spread not through the official Diesel channels and social media accounts, but through Nicola Formichetti’s and Renzo Rosso’s personal Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr accounts.

The Tumblr blog itself of #dieselreboot is detached from the official Diesel channels. It does not have a custom domain and has no direct links to the Diesel website.

Third, Formichetti, as a digital brand manager of himself, has always been active sharing his lifestyle on social media, especially on Twitter and Instagram. Renzo Rosso has followed Formichetti’s style, creating a Facebook, a Twitter and an Instagram account and sharing his ordinary lifestyle.

Fourth, Formichetti and Rosso are characters whose strong personality is aligned with the Diesel brand.

A brand can be deconstructed according to Kapferer’s prism (2004) into six facets. Among them, the personality trait, for Diesel, could be expressed by the following adjectives: rebel, challenging conventions, modern and innovative. Both Rosso and Formichetti embrace the mentioned qualities.

The sender, therefore, is coherent with the message, a brand manager would state.

Renzo Rosso guerrilla marketing for dieselreboot

Fifth, content shared on their social accounts is not refined. Photo captions are amateur, as well as text. Grammar and typing mistakes are left untouched. There is no filtration by copywriters. The quality and the style of content remember the one generated by ordinary social media users.

Sixth, crowdsourcing activity of the #dieselreboot campaign is aimed not only to create content, but also to elect brand ambassadors within the community, instead of choosing representatives from models or famous public characters. It is a clear intent to empower users by Diesel’s digital brand managers.

The use of social media as individual accounts leads the path to a new communication style on social media. In the digital world, especially on social media, brands can be uniquely represented by individuals that are aligned with the personality traits of the brand.

It has to be analysed whether it could be applied to brands of every nature.

The key for being social is being a user on the same nature of the other users. No distinction between corporates and individuals. The brand becomes a trait, a part of the lifestyle of the users. Belonging them to the organisation or not, it soon will not matter. This is tomorrow’s digital brand manager.

REFERENCE LIST

#dieselreboot Rome, available at https://plus.google.com/+Diesel/posts/ZySxm9sKoxt [accessed 24/01/2014]

Akar, E., Topcu, B. (2011), An examination of the factors influencing consumers’ attitude towards Social Media Marketing, Journal of Internet Commerce, Vol. 10, issue 1

Anderson, C., & Wolff, M. (2010, August 17). The Web is dead. Long live the Internet. Available at: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/ [accessed 9/2/2014]

Arvidsson, A. (2008), The ethical economy of customer coproduction. Journal of Macromarketing, 28(4)

Benkler, Y. 2006. The wealth of networks, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Brabham, D. (2008), Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An introduction and

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Cova, B. and Dalli, D. 2009. Working consumers: The next step in marketing theory?.Marketing Theory, 9(3)

Deighton, J., Kornfield, L. (2009), Interactivity's unanticipated consequences for markets and marketing. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 23

Denegri Knott, J., Zwick, D. and Schroeder, J.E. (2006), Mapping consumer power: An integrative framework for marketing consumer research. European Journal of Marketing, 40(9/10)

El-Amir, A., Burt, S. (2010), A critical account of the process of branding: Towards a synthesis. The Marketing Review, 10(1)

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Hoffman, D.L., Fodor, M. (2010) Can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?, MITSloan Management Review, Vol. 52 N.1

Humphreys, A., & Grayson, K. (2008). The intersecting roles of consumer and producer: A critical perspective on co-production, co-creation and presumption. Sociology Compass, 2.

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Kucuk, S.U. (2009). Consumer empowerment model: From unspeakable to undeniable. Direct Marketing: An international Journal, 3(4)

Lazzarato, M. (1997). Lavoro immateriale, Verona, , Italy: Ombre Corte.

Rosso, R. (2011), Be Stupid, Rizzoli, New York

Russell, M. G. (2009), A call for creativity in new metrics for liquid media. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 9(2).

Schau, H.J., Muñiz, A.M. and Arnould, E.J. 2009. How brand community practices create value.

Simmons, G. (2008). Marketing to postmodern consumers: Introducing the internet chameleon. European Journal of Marketing, 42(3/4)

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Toffler, A., Toffler, H. (2006), Revolutionary wealth, New York: Knopf.

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Wolfe, Alan (1994), The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science. University of California Press.

SOCIAL MEDIA – WHERE THE CONSUMER BECOMES THE BRAND MANAGER

December 4, 2014

Written By Karl Pollinger

Aim

The paper’s aim is to explain how the Internet and specifically social media platforms have changed the brand-consumer relationship in regards to branding control and influence. Do brand managers have lost parts of the control over the brand and is it a positive development?

Introduction

Once upon a time, in a realm far away, consumers were simply consumers - nothing more nothing less. They were bound to believe and accept the status quo set by companies and their respective marketers and brand managers regarding the latter’s products and services. That was the given relationship; the brand manager created an identity message (preferably around the company’s core values) and the consumer then interpreted the message and created his/her brand image – done (Kapferer, 2008, p. 174; Christodoulides, 2009). The only mechanism, which every now and then brought light into the matter of this relationship, was newspapers and other third party media, which uncovered scandals or gave ‘unbiased’ product information. However, the term ‘unbiased’ should be used carefully since it is an ideal and presupposes that third parties do not have their own agenda to distort information.

But then, in 2004 the corner stone of a new era was set by the foundation of a, at that time unexpected and unprecedented, mass social media platform commonly known as Facebook (Business Insider 2010). By now Facebook has accumulated a massive 1.23 billion monthly users, according to British newspaper The Guardian (The Guardian 2014) and has since been joined by other influential social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Google+, among others.

Together, they build a powerful tool for the common man and woman to share and listen with/to their fellow consumers (Papasolomou & Melanthiou, 2012). As a consequence, news are created and disseminated worldwide within split seconds. Tuten (2008) defines social media as online sites (or applications) through which users can produce, publish, control, rank, and interact with online content.

The Story

Afore-mentioned was not possible prior to the age of social media. Before, people could merely write letters or emails of concern to companies. This gave brands and their managers the hiding space of anonymity. A consumer wrote a letter, the brand manager did not answer, no one seemed to care, and due to the lack of social media platforms that was the end of the story.

Due to the emergence of mass social media like Facebook, brand manager have now the opportunity to animate consumers to participate actively and engage them emotionally into the branding process and, in connection with social media, can provide a platform for open discussion.

Yet, what is actually meant here by ‘opportunity’ is the fact that brand managers are rather forced to listen to the consumers who became active due to the simple fact of being able to write reviews, provide information about the brand at topic, and most of all share it via social media platforms (Singh & Sonnenburg 2012). Cova and Pace (2006) call this consumer control-takeover adequately a serendipitous hijack, in which the consumer captures control of the brand, unexpected by the actual brand manager.

Social media can therefore be seen as a catalyst that enables an ever-changing role-play between all participants/stakeholder. The consumer might be the brand manager at some point, sharing his/her views on Twitter, Facebook, and/or other available media and within minutes the social network can take over and manage the brand’s image without the influence of the actual manager. Singh and Sonnenburg (2012) describe this phenomenon as a metaphorical, improvised role-play in which the consumer and brand manager switch roles from the passive listener to the active participant from time to time. As a consequence managers loose partially control of their brand during the play - all thanks to mass social media platforms.

A fairly recent example where a company loses said control is the following: The Serco Group video (Serco Group Video), which was published in 2009 on the online platform YouTube. The rather critically toned video, made by a journalist, was aimed to unveil the intensity and scale the British based Serco Group is operating on. In a sense, it is warning the consumer of Big Brother (who is watching you), just as the fictional character in George Orwell’s world-renowned novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Within days the video was watch hundreds of thousands of times, mainly due to vast sharing on social media platforms such as Facebook. During the following months and years, more and more major (mainly British) newspapers such as The Guardian (The Guardian 2013) picked up on the story behind the Serco Group and the company’s brand reputation was hurt considerably as a result.

Problems for the Serco Group peaked in late 2013 as the British Serious Fraud Office, a sub-branch of the Ministry of Justice, put the group under investigation (Financial Times 2014). Inter alia, Serco’s mistake was and still is the fact that they did not build relationships with their stakeholders on a web-based social media platform, which is one key to successful brand strategies in the internet era (de Chernatony & Christodoulides, 2004). Quite simply put, they missed the chance to facilitate social media platforms as means to create an open relationship with consumers and other stakeholder. Serco rather hid behind the ambiguity and the enigmatic anonymity of silence. Granted, Serco is a B2B company with whom the average consumer entertains no direct business interaction; however, due to Serco’s operations (see Video above) they affect people in their everyday life. Thus, in order to strengthen and deepen the brand-consumer relationship for the Serco group in a more effective way, they might have to facilitate social media generated content (Van den Bulte & Wuyts, 2007) such as YouTube videos in a positive instead of an uncontrollable negative way.

On the other hand, a company who mastered the idea of partially losing control in order to connect with their consumers is the Danish-based Lego Group. In fact they are so good at it that consumers not only actively participate and provide innovational ideas during the development and production process but actually help Lego to progress products (Antorini et al., 2012). Lego realized as early as the 1990’s that consumer consumers have valuable knowledge which a company should utilize in order to generate a much larger (and much cheaper) pool of innovators. Now, Lego enthusiast can co-create entire Lego lines and earn recognition for their work. As did Chicago-based Architect Adam Reed Tucker with his creation of Lego Architecture (Antorini et al., 2012). This entire process was vastly enhanced by social media platforms on which third party developers are able to share ideas and creations with fellow enthusiasts (Antorini et al., 2012). In the end, by letting go of some of the control over the brand, the Lego Group was able to not only connect with their fans but also increase the innovative output of the company.

Other notable positive examples in the likes of Lucasfilm (providing material for amateur Star Wars DIY film makers) or Doritos (actual amateur films used as commercials) exist in abundance. The latter are just some of the many companies that managed to utilize social media platforms, and the therefore resulting loss of control over the brand, positively - even ingeniously. They managed to avoid what many brands, like McDonalds or Fox News, are currently facing – anti-brand web campaigns run by frustrated consumers, aimed to force negative attention on brands they deem harmful (Krishnamurthy & Kucuk 2008).

Conclusion

To answer the question whether brand managers have partially lost control over the brand due to social media. They clearly have. Above stated examples of the Serco- and Lego Group are just a few cases. Many more cases are widely known such as the ongoing Dove Real Beauty Campaign launched in 2004 and their latest video Dove Real Beauty Sketches, which went viral and sparked user generated mock-videos such as this one. The latter displays how a marketing campaign and its meaning can be distorted by the consumers’ ability to share their view via social media platforms. The Dove campaign earned further criticism, which rapidly spread on Facebook (i.a.) resulting in a Business Insider (2013) article with the title: “Why People Hate Dove's 'Real Beauty Sketches' Video”.

As to the second part of the question above – Is it a positive development? Yes, I believe so. Social media platforms cast off the veil of ambiguity and mystery that can lead consumers astray. Companies; however, need to actively engage and encourage the consumer to participate on social media platform in order regain control and also send a clear message of openness and trust. Also, brand managers have to realize that social media platforms caused a shift in power. Papasolomou and Melanthiou (2012, p. 320) speak here of ‘spreading the word about brands from a one-to-one basis to a one-to-hundreds, or even one-to-thousands.’ It all displays how brand managers lost control through social media – now it is time to adjust and regain.

In the end the questions is whether or not brand managers can fully trust what the consumer believes is right for the company and also from an ethical point of view right for fellow consumers. Is the consumer informed enough about intensions of a brand manager, is the consumer capable of accurately knowing what he/she actuals wants/needs? And is social media maybe also threatening to become a tool to easily dispense false news such as in the case of Konny 2012? 

References

Antorini, Y.M., Muñiz, A. & Askildsen, T. (2012), Collaboration with Customer Communities - Lessons From the Lego Group, MIT Sloan Management Review, 53(3), pp. 71-79

Carlson, N. (2010), At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded, Business Insider [Internet], available from: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3/they-made-a-mistake-haha-they-asked-me-to-make-it-for-them-2 [accessed 11 February 2014]

Christodoulides, G. (2009), Branding in the post-internet era, Marketing Theory, 9(1), pp. 141-144

Cova, B. & Pace, S. (2006), Brand community of convenience products: new forms of customer empowerment – the case “my Nutella The Community”, European Journal of Marketing, 40(9/10), pp. 1087-1105

De Chernatony, L. & Christodoulides, G. (2004), Taking the Brand Promise Online: Challenges and Opportunities, Interactive Marketing 5(3), pp. 238–51.

Harris, J. (2013), Serco: the company that is running Britain, The Guardian [Internet], available from: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/jul/29/serco-biggest-company-never-heard-of [accessed 12 February 2014]

Kapferer, J.N. (2008), The New Strategic Brand Management - Advanced insights and strategic thinking, 4th Edition, pp. 174, Kogan Page

Krishnamurthy, S. & Kucuk, S.U. (2008), Anti-branding on the Internet, Journal of Business Research, 62(9), pp. 1119-1126

Papasolomou, I. & Melanthiou, Y. (2012), Social Media: Marketing Public Relations’ New Best Friend, Journal of Promotion Management, 18(3), pp. 319-328

Plimmer, G. (2014), Serco wins first UK government contract since ban lifted, Financial Times [Internet], available from: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9cfe3482-9259-11e3-9e43-00144feab7de.html#axzz2t7vFqnGz [accessed 13 February 2014]

Rushe, D. (2014), Facebook posts record quarterly results and reports $1.5bn profit for 2013, The Guardian [Internet], available from: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/29/facebook-record-quarterly-results?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2 [accessed 11 February 2014]

Stampler, L. (2013), Why People Hate Dove's 'Real Beauty Sketches' Video, Business Insider [Internet], available from: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-people-hate-doves-real-beauty-ad-2013-4 [accessed 13 February 2014]

Singh, S. & Sonnenburg, S. (2012), Brand Performance in Social Media, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 26(2), pp. 189-197

Tuten, T. L. (2008), Advertising 2.0. Wesport, CT: Praeger.

Van den Bulte, C. & Wuyts, S. (2007), Social Networks and Marketing, Relevant Knowledge Series, Boston, MA: Marketing Science Institute.

Social Media

The Rise of Social Media: Effects on Consumers and Brands

November 29, 2013

Written by Ioannis Petalidis

Purpose – introduction

It is an undisputable fact that the Internet was a revolution that changed not only the consumption field, but in general the way people live and exist; according to Aleks Krotoski and his BBC documentary “Virtual Revolution” it actually created a brand new kind of human being: the “Homo Interneticus”. Nevertheless, the last 10 years this revolution, took a totally different shape that occurred with the rise of social media. When Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 invented the Facebook platform for his classmates in Harvard, no one could imagine that 10 years later he would be one of the world’s richest people. But what was the reason, behind the shaping of “Homo Interneticus”?   

social media connect the world

How the rise of social media and the evolution of the Internet changed the consumption landscape

Susan Fournier and Jill Avery (2011) claim that this dramatic rise and success has its roots to one of the most basic human motivations: “the desire to feel accepted, to fit in and to belong; they name this new era “the age of the social collective” and describe it like a community through virtual connections among like-minded people, that creates “micro-targeted niche groups” to which people can easily belong.

Hanna, Rohm and Crittenden (2011) argue that the main shift in the consumption landscape through the social media revolution is that consumers are no longer passive recipients in the marketing exchange process; rather than that, consumers have a progressively active role in co-creating the marketing content. In their effort to highlight this immense change in the rules of marketing game, they are attempting to bust some prevalent myths that existed in the pre-Internet era:

1. Brand managers own and orchestrate their brands

2. Phones are for making phone calls

3. The Web is for finding information

4. Companies use marketing communications to control their message

5. Consumers purchase products promoted by marketers

6. Providing a forum for customers to talk is dangerous and risky.

Those 6 myths that marketers believed in and were building their strategies upon them are today something more than obsolete; they can prove disastrous.

For instance, if one focuses on myth number 2, it will become clear that during the last years mobile phones transformed completely from a calling and texting device to a portable mini-computer. This shift resulted to the rise of a brand new marketing field, the so-called mobile marketing. Andreas M. Kaplan (2011) defines this field as “any marketing activity conducted through a ubiquitous network to which consumers are constantly connected using a personal mobile device”. Social media went mobile and this was a revolution inside the revolution; from a broader perspective, mobile social media allowed for a tighter integration of virtual and real life, proving wrong some researchers that believed the Internet would result in less communication. (Andreas M. Kaplan, 2011). The Facebook check-in for example is a tool that has proven powerful, as a mean of exhibitionism, but also for helping people meet each other. Nonetheless, as far as the consumption field is concerned, the increasing use of check-in, pushed companies (especially restaurants and cafeterias) to engage in the social media world.

Papasolomou and Melanthiou (2012) highlighted another great change in the consumption landscape that came with the rise of “Homo Interneticus”; the existence of intermediaries or Non Media Connectors (NMC) in the marketing procedure and their crucial role in the building of the brand in the virtual world. This evolution has made marketing being a field of Public Relations, rather than the traditional detailed strategic arena. 

Furthermore, the rise of social media democratized corporate communication, while messages and information about brands circulate with or without permission of the firms in question (Kietzman, Hermkens, McCarthy and Silvestre, 2011). From this point of view, the statement of BBC Business Editor, Tim Weber, summarizes in an emblematic way the position of the brands in the era of Homo Interneticus: “These days, one witty tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video – forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse – can snowball and kill a product or damage a company’s share price”. It is worth mentioning that his kind of anti-branding activism on the Internet is a very common phenomenon, which indicates the online consumer power and the growing consumer sovereignty in the virtual world; what is more, the majority of online anti-brand attacks target well-established and powerful brands (Krishnamurthy, Kucuk, 2008).

Moreover, another important aspect of the latest evolution in the virtual world is the high degree of credibility with which Internet users treat the online word of mouth (Akar, Topcu, 2011). There is no doubt that customers perceive the user generated content as more reliable than straightforward business communication; as a result, electronic word of mouth has turned into a dominating channel that influences consumer behavior; social media marketing has become multidirectional, participatory and consumer driven.

Movies industry – example

After having examined some prevailing theories about the major shifts that the Internet revolution and the rise of the Homo Interneticus brought to the consumption landscape, it is time to focus on a field that the virtual revolution not only had a strong impact, but changed it radically: the movies industry.

 IMDb (Internet Movie Database)

IMDb logo

“Those Eyes”, the predecessor of IMDb, was launched in 1990 by professional computer programmer and British film Fan, Col Needham and it was about listing actresses with beautiful eyes. Others with similar interests soon responded with additions of different lists of their own: “Actors List”, “Dead Actors/ Actresses List”, “Directors List”. The goal of the participants changed over time towards making the lists as inclusive as possible. By the end of 1990, the lists included almost 10,000 movies and television series. When Needham developed and inserted a program that could search among the lists, Internet Movie Database was born. In 1993 IMDb became an independent website run by its followers and the amount of stored data increased hugely. In 1998, due to restricted funding, Needham sold IMDb to Amazon.com, with the condition that he would remain in operational charge.

There is no denying the fact that nowadays, IMDb is the most powerful and useful tool for everyone, before watching a movie. The democratized way of its rating system and the message boards in which the users exchange opinions about movies and TV series, are its two strongest components that allowed it to prevail in the movie’s critic field. A series of negative e- words of mouth in the IMDb message board or a low rating can prove devastating for the reputation of a movie and lead to a catastrophically small attendance in the theaters.

Besides, the site gives the opportunity for users to make their own lists of top movies, in general, by movie category or by actor. The evolution of IMDb demonstrates the shift from the passive movie consumer to the active co-creator of movies industry’s reputation. Award ceremonies like the Oscars and film festivals like Cannes review movies every year, however, those judgments might be biased due to financial interests of the industry or lobbying and are likely not to be proportional to the public’s opinion. On the other hand, professional film critics lost their authority over the quality of a movie.

How can marketers best adapt

While in a world that is ruled by Homo Interneticus and social media, the challenges have become clearer, the answers that marketers should imply are still surrounded by fog. According to Fournier and Avery (2011) the traditional branding strategies seem obsolete, disconnected and irrelevant in a space owned by the social collective, where transparency, criticism and parody of the well established firms reign. Instead, they suggest a different approach where brand building gives its place to brand protection, as an ever present need to protect reputation from attack and demise. As it can be clearly seen, the old attack-oriented brand strategies do not apply to the world of social media; whereas, a defensive attitude is more applicable and a strategy focused on risk management and risk control is much more effective. In addition to this, Fournier and Avery (2011) highlight the need for a shift from strategic planning and proactive, pre-constructed strategies, towards a branding ruled by faith in intuition and excellence in execution; for this purpose they encourage firms to employ the so-called “digital natives” or “Generation Y” who was raised amid the social media revolution. Last but not least, for the best adaptation of marketers in this brand new world, it is proposed to stop giving priority to differentiation and turn towards the creation of resonant cultural conversations; following this road, marketers will start to focus on building short - term brands, opposing to the dominant branding philosophy that emphasizes in creating long- term brand assets.

Moreover, Kietzman, Hermkens, McCarthy and Silvestre (2011), suggest a framework with a form of a honeycomb that consists of seven functional blocks of social media activity: presence (the extent to which users know if other users are accessible), sharing (are users exchanging, distributing and receiving content?), relationships (at what point are users are related to each other?), identity (the extent to which users reveal their true identities), conversations (how often users communicate with each other?), groups (are users forming communities?) and reputation (the extent to which users can identify the standing of themselves or others in a social media setting). Having those seven blocks in mind, marketers should try to recognize and understand in depth the social media landscape, finding out if and where conversations about a firm are being held, who are the main influencers and gathering competitive intelligence. Also, they should adapt their strategies to the different social media functionalities and develop a clear understanding of how often and when a firm should interfere in conversations as well as who will represent it online; the key success factor here is to identify who has the ability to listen and care about online chatter and especially who is capable of creating emotionally appropriate content for the community. This has to be done by creating relationships that solve customer issues, not just sympathizing. It is significant for marketers to scan the environment in order to understand the velocity of information; even when it seems too late an appropriate response may turn the tide.

Likewise, the case of negative e- word of mouth and its managing by the companies has gained attention by a lot of researchers. It is claimed that bad evaluations have a stronger impact on the brand reputation than positive ones and this is based on Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) principle of prospect theory: people perceive losses more severely than gains (Shimabukuro Sandes, Torres Urdan, 2013); consequently, companies should remain vigilant and treat the criticisms properly.

At the other end of the scale, the example of Lego Group gave another perspective; not only monitored or interacted with customer communities, but took a step further and collaborated with them; the Lego paradigm is an exceptional case of how a traditional, tightly controlled company that for decades was run by the slogan “we don’t accept unsolicited ideas”, was transformed into an open-minded, collaborative and customer-oriented business. When LEGO management was found at the crossroad of either taking legal measures against the violation of their copyright or invite users to collaborate on new innovative products, the decision was brilliant and characterized by strong peripheral vision. Antorini, Muniz Jr, Askildsen (2012) highlight the main principles that marketers should keep in mind when collaborating with customer communities; at first it is important to clarify the rules and expectations; secondly there is a need of forming a win-win mindset, by creating the feeling to the collaborating customers that the firm does not only care about “getting the job done”; thirdly, it is significant to recognize that outsiders are not insiders, which means that user communities should always be treated as independent entities and not a part of the firm; additionally, companies should not expect one size to fit all and create different environments for each type of innovation; last but not least, they should be as open as possible in order to allow collaborators to interact with each other to the maximum extent and not sacrifice this openness for confidentiality reasons.

In the same wavelength, Muniz Jr. and Jensen Schau recommend to companies to take the initiative and create on their own the virtual community of their consumers in a well structured environment that embraces the differences of the members; it is very important for marketers to give motives at the members of brand communities in order to keep their attention and interest at high levels.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, it can clearly be noticed that the dawn of the 21st century was the transition point from a world that the big brands set the agenda, to a virtual reality that consumers break their chains and take things at their hands. Nevertheless, this era of the social collective and growing criticism about the power of firms, is also characterized by an unprecedented overload of information, where the consumer is bombarded in a daily basis by a huge amount of new data. Especially in the Internet field, the new experiences that an individual gets have become countless; consequently, the challenge for marketing experts is not only to create a friendly environment that serves their customers but also to keep the attention of the consumer in an everyday tough battle, among the never ending stimuli of the virtual world. Marketing strategies should be innovative, entertaining and avoid the web’s worst enemy; boredom.    

Reference list

Akar E., Topcu B. (2011). An Examination of the Factors Influencing Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Social Media Marketing. Journal of Internet Commerce. 10, 35-67.

Antorini Y.M., Muniz A. Jr. and Askildsen T. (2012). Collaborating with Customer Communities: Lessons From the Lego Group. MIT Sloan Management Review. 53 (3), 73-79.

Fournier S., Avery J. (2011). The uninvited brand. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, 193-207.

Hanna R., Rohm A., Crittenden V.  (2011). We’re all connected: The power of the social media ecosystem. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, 241-251.

Kaplan A. (2012). If you love something, let it go mobile: Mobile marketing and mobile social media 4x4. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 55, 129-139.

Kietzman J., Hermkens K., McCarthy I., and Silvestre B. (2011). Social Media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, 241-251.

Krishnamurthy S., Kucuk U. (2009). Anti-branding on the Internet. Journal of Business Research. 62, 1119–1126.

Muniz Jr. A., Jensen Schau H. (2011). How to inspire value-laden collaborative consumer-generated content. Business Horizons, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. 54, 209—217.

Papasolomou I., Melanthiou, Y. (2012). Social Media: Marketing Public Relations’ New Best Friend. Journal of Promotion Management. 18, 319-328.

Shimabukuro Sandes F., Torres Urdan A. (2013). Electronic Word-of-Mouth Impacts on Consumer Behavior: Exploratory and Experimental Studies. Journal of International Consumer Marketing. 25, 181-197.

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