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.

A Facebook guide on web 2.0

January 8, 2015

Written by Mathias Miller Thorneman

Abstract

The web has changed dramatically from web 1.0 to web 2.0. The change has been rapid, and has implicitly and explicitly implied a plethora of changes for both consumers and marketers. The consumer has been emancipated, given a voice and has consequently become a force, which has dethroned the marketers, and deprived them of their dominance. The tools that made this possible were the advent of social platforms that exist in variations on web 2.0. The various platforms offer a differentiated utilization scheme; herein the social networks are of particular interest. Based on the particular interest on social networks a Facebook guide is constructed to allow an eased and more successful employment of the social network.  The Facebook guide employs specific emphasis on understanding how the media functions, but also to development and control of posts and content.

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to shed light on what the Internet is today and to explore and understand the platforms web 2.0 offers. Hereafter the article will address and act as a guide for construction and development of social media communication with a particular focus on the platform Facebook. To accommodate the questions at hand in an optimal manner the composition of data for this article is based on academic litterateur, journals, blogs and lastly examples are applied to illustrate and underline points, in particular for the Facebook guide.   

The birth of contemporary Internet

Since the birth of the Internet the online aspect of our lives have become evermore consuming, and far reaching. The impact of the Internet has without doubt left deep marks, and forever changed the way we communicate, shop, work, and search for information. Norms that existed for millennia evaporated at the speed of light with the introduction of web 1.0 (Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011), and a new era proclaimed it’s importance by the introduction of communities (Seraj 2012), blogs, micro-blogs and social networks (Weinberg & Pehlivan 2011), namely a era characterized by a reciprocal flow and co-creation of information (Singh & Sonnenburg 2012). In geeky circles this era is referred to as web 2.0 (Weinberg & Pehlivan 2011).  Collectively this myriad of platforms wherein co-creation (Singh & Sonneburg 2012, Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011) takes place is referred to as Social Media. Within these social media platforms consumers are now advocating events, brands, products and experiences though an electronic word-of-mouth (eVOM) which have become significantly important (Akar & Topcu 2011). Thereby, emancipating the consumer and empowering him/her to play a decisive role in the success or failure scenario, which unfolds before the marketer on the web 2.0 (Papasolomou & Melantbiou 2012). By understanding, listening and co-creating knowledge and content with consumers through social platforms marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to strike gold, eureka!, by meeting consumer needs (Chrisodoulides 2009, Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011).  Consequently this has let consumers to expect that they will play an active part in the media process (Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011), and left the marketer in a role where he must fit in rather then dominate (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009).

With an understanding of what contemporary Internet offers consumers and marketers, focus is directed towards the platforms that facilitate the revolution web 2.0 ushered in. Therefore a closer examination of the platforms is conducted.

Flourishing platforms on web 2.0

The many platforms web 2.0 offers segmented into four primary categories, namely blogs, communities, micro-blogs and social networks (Weinberg & Pehlivan 2011).  Although the platforms operate and co-exist simultaneously on web 2.0 the purpose of the user and marketer utilization of the platforms differ dramatically. In the box below utilization purposes are displayed.

The box above is based on Seraj 2012, Weinberg & Pehlivan 2011.

As exhibited in the box above, there are various overall and sub decisions to be made prior to engagement of web 2.0. The importance and the potential of these platforms are becoming widely recognised, as they offer a unique opportunity to monitor, engage, share, collaborate with, which in turn hopefully leads to (brand) evangelism (Weinberg & Pehlivan 2011). But what is it these platforms offer the consumer on web 2.0? In accordance to Deighton & Kornfeld (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009) a five category scale is suggested, wherein one factor is of particular interest, namely Cultural Exchange. Cultural Exchange implies that the marketer aspires cultural production, which is then incorporated in groups or by individuals (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009). A recent example of this is Coca Cola’s online ‘Share a coke’ campaign which has been widely spread throughout all of the four platforms: micro-blogs, communities, blogs and social networks. Through the campaign users are encouraged to share a digital Coca Cola with friends.

A phenomena like Facebook is perceived to one of the most potent social media platforms as Facebook in particular enables cultural exchange, and functions as a facilitator of identity projection, and collective ascription of meaning and identity (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009).  

In sum, this article has suggested that web 2.0 have catapulted consumers and marketers into a more egalitarian paradigm that is nourished and rejuvenated through various platforms. In addition, it was suggested that especially platforms that presented possibility of cultural exchange were in particular potent. To provide a deeper understanding of the utilization of a potent platform (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009) in praxis the following section will function as a guide to social network platform, namely Facebook (www.facebook.com).

The Facebook guide will serve for inexperienced and novice marketers to avoid the contemporary pitfalls on Facebook and to seize and obtain most possible “bang for your buck”.

The Facebook guide

The focus of this guide will be on Facebook as it is the largest, and the most utilized platform, in addition Facebook is subject to increasing utilization from users (Bayer 2014). Furthermore, consumers on Facebook who becomes fans/followers tend to be more loyal; more open for information, visit the brand store more and generate (e)VOM (Vries, Gensler & Leeflang 2012). Having underlined the importance of the platform the Facebook guide will now proceed to examine a number of considerations a marketer will have to be aware off when interacting with future fans and followers.

Understanding Facebook

The first step of the Facebook guide is to develop an understanding how Facebook functions. With Facebooks new algorithm brands can no longer rely on somewhat random fans or followers (Pedersen 2014). The new fan or follower must now live up to a complex range of criteria, which will make Facebook rate the fan/follower interested in your brands material. In short, although your fan-base may be 10.000, only 1.000 may actually see your post, as Facebook estimates the rest to be uninterested in your post (Pedersen 2014). This Facebook guide therefore suggests and underlines the importance of intense focus on content that will intrigue your brands loyal fans/followers (Magid 2014).  Furthermore, the algorithm also emphasizes the importance of shares, likes and comments of your post. By having your fan/follower base share, like and comment on your post Facebook will perceive your post as more important and relevant and hereby increase the posts range. This fact becomes particular interesting when taking Metcalfe’s law into consideration. Metcalfe’s law suggest that the value of a social network increases in proportion to the square of its connections (Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011).

Adding ‘likes’ to your post

In accordance with quantitative research the number of likes on your post can be affected by the vividness of the post (Vries, Gensler & Leeflang 2012). By submitting content in the form of an embedded video (Magid 2014) or more participation oriented material, such as a contest. Another mean of attracting ‘likes’ to your post is by making it more attractive, by trying to get positive comments on the post (Caballero 2014).

Adding ‘comments’ to your post

An effective method of comment generation can be by taking advantage of the intuitive human, simply by posting a question many are drawn to provide an answer. Regardless whether the post reply is positive or negative the amount of post interest is believed to rise (Vries, Gensler & Leeflang 2012). In addition, it is advised that the marketer remains in sight for the fan/follower, and encourages and acknowledges the fan/follower with incentive, whether it be a ‘thanks’ or a ‘giftcard’ (Sandes & Urdan 2013).

Content control

An important aspect of this Facebook guide is how to manage your post content. Without a prober post content management one can rapidly experience hijacking or harsh critique (Singh & Sonneburg 2012). In layman terms a notion of ‘tension’ between marketer and fan/follower is suggested, wherein personal, internal and external tension exist (Singh & Sonneburg 2012). The essential outcome is to aspire a captivating brand by continuous re-assessing bonds of tension, and utilizing more types of tension simultaneously. In example this entails providing excitement, provocation and challenging the fan/followers perception, hence adding to the cultural exchange (Deighton & Kornfeld 2009).

Aber dabei….

Ironically, what makes your post more attractive to ‘likes’ consequently decreases the attractiveness in relation to ‘comments’ and vice versa. As such the marketer must be aware when designed posts, will the post be ‘like’ or ‘comment’ oriented? Perhaps a combination between the two can work? Regardless of choice the marketer must be conscious about the potential a well designed post has, raising the correct question, attracting your brands core fans/followers and seeing your message spread like rings in the water. Moreover this process allows for collection of data and increased understanding of your audience (Chrisodoulides 2009, Hanna, Rohm & Crittenden 2011).  Conversely the marketer most also be aware that receiving negative comments is not necessarily equal to failure or misunderstanding of this Facebook guide. Through negative comments much can be learned about thoughts, desires and feelings about your brand. It is therefore paramount that negative comments are not perceived as a failure or irrelevant and annoying noise, but rather as a chance to learn and collaborate with your fans/followers (Vries, Gensler & Leeflang 2012). It is only a failure if you fail to learn from it! Moreover, marketers whom decide to apply facebook must also consider that the platform is relatively often subject to algorithm alteration, which explicitly manifests itself as re-strategizing for marketers. Thus it is a media that requires continuous care and attention to remain valid.

Conclusion

The consumer have been emancipated and given a voice on web 2.0. The marketer is now dependant on sharing, listening and collaborating with the consumer. An array of opportunities has arisen for the consumer, but also for the marketer. In effect these opportunities unfold upon platforms on web, and in this article the social networking platform Facebook was targeted due to its relevance, popularity and unique features for content. Through the Facebook guide it was concluded that an understanding of Facebook as a platform is paramount in order to launch a successful campaign. Moreover there was shed light upon the do’s and don’ts when marketers are aiming for ‘likes’, ‘comments’ and content control and the oxymoron it is to master all at once.  Lastly it was concluded that negative fan/follower ‘comments’ are opportunities for further learning about your consumers.

Reference list

Articles

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

Chrisodoulides, G. (2009), “Branding in the post-internet era”, Marketing Theory, 9, 141.

Deighton, J. and Kornfeld, L. (2009), “Interactivity's Unanticipated Consequences for Marketers and Marketing”, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 23, p. 4-10.

Hanna, R., Rohm, A. and Crittenden, V. (2011), “We’re all connected: the power of the social media ecosystem”, Business Horizons, 54, 265-273.

Papasolomou, I.  & Melanthiou, Y. (2013), “Social Media: Marketing Public Relations ‘New Best Friend”, Journal of Promotion Management, 18(3), 319-328.

Sandes, F.S. & A. T. Urdan (2013), ” Electronic Word-of-Mouth Impacts on Consumer Behavior: Exploratory and Experimental Studies”, Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 25(3), 181-197.

Seraj, M. (2012), We Create, We Connect, We Respect, Therefore We Are: Intellectual, Social, and Cultural Value in Online Communities, Journal of Interactive Marketing 26, 209–222. *

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

Vries, L. & S. Gensler & P. S.H. Leeflang, (2012),” Popularity of Brand Posts on Brand Fan Pages: An Investigation of the Effects of Social Media Marketing”, Journal of Interactive Marketing 26, 83–91.*

Weinberg, B.D. and Pehlivan, E. (2011), “Social spending: managing the social media mix”, Business Horizons, 54, 275-282.

Web pages 

Bayer, Jay. (2014). 3 ways to fight facebooks algorithm and customize your feed. Available: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/facebook/3-ways-to-fight-facebooks-algorithm-and-customize-your-feed/. Last accessed 13-02-2014.

Caballero , Luis. (2014). marketers make facebooks algorithm. Available: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/marketers-make-facebook-s-algorithm/291050/. Last accessed 13-02-2014.

Magid, Larry. (2014). Facebook tweaks newsfeed algorithm again .Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2014/01/21/facebook-tweaks-news-feed-algorithm-again/. Last accessed 12-02-2014.

Pedersen, Hedegaard Lars. (2014). Fusk med Facebook annoncer. Available: http://markedsforing.dk/artikler/digitalt/fusk-med-facebook-annoncer. Last accessed 14-02-2014.

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]
Available at: http://tech.fanpage.it/twitter-i-dati-finali-del-festival-di-sanremo/
[Accessed 10 February 2014].

Twitter, n.d. Twitter.com. [Online]
Available at: https://twitter.com/
[Accessed 10 February 2014].

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 2

December 29, 2014

Written by Onsurang Siripiyavatana

Case and discussion

To illustrate how heritage brands develop viral storytelling in the era of social media where the power of sharing and the perception of brand value are in the hands of consumers. The examples of Thai Life Insurance and Volkswagen will be analyzed from heritage perspective as well as consumer orientation.

Branding in social media era is not only about creativity but also facilitating conversations around the brand. From the heritage perspective, roots down to brand promise and brand essence, heritage brands have track records and many stories to introduce to the audience. Heritage brands have demonstrated successful relation to consumers in the past through its core values and heritage essence hence, it should be able to modify and re-tell the story given the current marketing landscape and the way to stand out in the crowd is to make the brand’s story go viral. In order to go viral, a brand must choose the right story to tell and craft around it, brands must know their targeted audience, learn what the consumers are care about most and do more of that. The new version of the heritage stories provide relevant factor that is consistent to the brand’s core and hence consistent heritage brand image that yield trust, caring and authentic impression to the targeted audience. Thai Life Insurance (TLI) is a heritage brand that is still much relevant today, the key behind this is to take simple product and to promote it by relating the most relevant human emotion to the product. TLI exploited sensitive human emotions and develop extremely effective marketing tool, namely advertisement campaign. The emotional ads have made the brand memorable and placed securely on top of the mind of the consumers.  Take the “Silence of Love” advertisement campaign for example, without directly mentioning about the insurance product, the story of the commercial states: the kids are sometimes ashamed of their parents, but it is their parents who care for them no matter what. The overall tone of the ad is sad and touching which provoke all the positive emotions full of caring, love, family bonding and honesty are then translated into more down-to-earth message: if you care about them, insure them. The “Silence of Love” ad is not the first in the series of TLI emotional advertisement campaign, but it definitely creates a consistent message, and adds to consistent brand story and relevant brand image through the co-creation with the consumers who were impressed by the message delivered. The company made the ads public by broadcasting it through Thai television channels as well as in YouTube. The first channel of distribution is costly but it opens to wider audience and definitely worth it, amongst the crowd of television ads “Silence of Love” gains much attention from audience and creates a viral offline word of mouth impact. In parallel, the company makes the ads available in YouTube to create online viral with a potential to reach endless consumers since they are much more likely to view an advertisement if it is communicated to them from someone they know and not a company.

The language spoken in the ads was Thai, the company later provide English subtitle to enhance the understanding and hence emotional engagement of international audience.

<img src=”Siripiyavatana_image1.jpg” alt=”Silence of Love Thai Life Insurance Advertisement”>

Figure 1) Silence of Love-Thai life insurance commercial (Thailifechannel, 2011)

As a result “Silence of Love” becomes viral because TLI does it right by understanding the culture and know what the consumers want and how to approach it for example Thai audience have the characteristics of sympathetic, sensitive, like to chit chat, social media addict and easy going. The brand works hard to give people something they are willing to talk about, something they can relate to. The series of emotional ads is a catalyst and the tool that the brand use to consciously and continually bake word of mouth into its product. The company gives consumers a reason to talk about its product part of its culture, not just marketing.

Heritage brands on the other side of the world also work hard to understand consumer and find the relevant in brand storytelling. Rules, regulations and restrictions of international marketplace are different, let alone the consumer diversity. A successful marketing story of the brand from one country may not even gain recognition in another country for example Dove’s real beauty campaign was a viral success in the US but the same campaign fails to market in China (Chiu, C., Ip, C. and Silverman, A. 2012). That’s why social media marketers have to be creative and specific, matter to one person first, speak to that person. Volkswagen’s The Fun Theory is a good story of viral success in social media. Volkswagen launches a campaign through The Fun Theory website with the slogan “Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better”. The brand invited creative people to come up with their ways of making everyday activity more fun.  The Fun Theory campaign is brand’s storytelling tactic that relates to consumers in a given current marketplace and brand’s core messages of being innovative, offering enduring value and responsible (Volkswagen, 2012). One of The Fun Theory award is “The speed camera lottery” the idea behind this is to get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do, this idea was made a reality in Stockholm, Sweden. The Speed Camera Lottery device would photograph all drivers passing beneath it. A portion of the subsequent fines levied against speeders would be pooled in a lottery, with a random winner periodically drawn from the group of speed-limit adherents. The result of this campaign is impressive, according to Volkswagen, average speed before the installation of the Speed Camera Lottery sign on a multilane street was 32 kilometers per hour. That figure dropped to 25 kilometers per hour during a three-day test, despite the device’s inability to issue financial penalties.  The short films documenting the projects went viral and it invokes positive brand association in relation to the audience. By making boring thing such as obeying the traffic rules fun and instead of getting punishment for disobeying the rule, people get rewards by obeying the rules. The idea not only reflects upon brand heritage and story but also score high in the relevant scale of contemporary marketplace. The consumers are engaged in the campaign from sending their ideas in for the competition and the trials is seen as a little excitement added to consumers’ everyday lives without provoking frustration to the pedestrian. The brand uses an excuse of promoting safety for positive brand associations and gain awareness. The Fun Theory is a storytelling strategy that embraces the heritage and stays relevant in the consumers’ minds in the current era of social media. The continual success of the campaign endures the heritage for tomorrow.

<img src=”Siripiyavatana_image2.jpg” alt=”The Speed Camera Lottery The Fun Theory by Volkswagen”>

Figure 2) The Speed Camera Lottery- The Fun Theory by Volkswagen (Rolighetsteorin, 2010)

Conclusion

Heritage brands have developed the brand story over a period of time, the time required for the consumers to absorb and digest the story. However in an ever changing marketing landscape of social media era, the ability to adapt and fit in poses a challenge on heritage brands to stay relevant in consumers’ minds. They key to relate to consumers while maintaining brand’s heritage is to understand consumers and focusing effort to change how people feel before trying to change what they do. As illustrated by Thai life insurance case, telling simple emotional stories work well in relating the brand’s heritage to consumers. The brands deal with customer-centric orientation in an emergence of social media and act as facilitators. Storytelling facilitates conversation amongst customer community and it is brand’s job to give people a story that they are willing to talk about. By this method, consumers become co-creators of the brands as they influence the transmission of messages by getting involved in the viewing, commenting and sharing through social media or even directly helping to create a story, as illustrated by Volkswagen’s The Fun Theory where consumers get involved in the process from the beginning to submit their ideas, take part in trials and sharing the story.

More specifically, while keeping to the heritage, brands have to invite consumers into the branding process in order to stay relevant and this can be achieved by telling a consistent series of compelling story, stories that keep going viral. The businesses that succeed outrageously are not just founded on ideas that are shared in a split second; they are grounded in what matters to their customers throughout the long heritage. The track record and relationship between a brand and its consumers are parts of the heritage that they co-created and stay relevant until now. The key for an enduring heritage is to make giving people a reason to talk about your products and services part of brand’s culture, not just marketing.

References

Aaker, D. A. (1996). Building Strong Brands. New York NY: The Free Press.

Aaker, D. A. (2004). Leveraging the corporate brand. California Management Review, 46(3), 6–18.

Barwise, P. & Meehan, S. (2010) The One Thing You Must Get Right When Building a Brand, Harvard Business Review, December 2010

Cambridge University Press (2011). Cambridge Business English Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chiu, C., Ip, C and Silverman, A. (2012), “Understanding social media in China”, McKinsey Quarterly, 2, 78-81.

Fournier, S. & Avery, J. (2011) The uninvited brand, Business Horizons (2011) 54, 193—207

Hamm, J. (2013). Why Agencies and Brands Need to Embrace True Storytelling Branded content is not the same thing. Adweek Magazine, [online] Available at: < http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/why-agencies-and-brands-need-embrace-true-storytelling-152534> [Accessed 10 February 2014]

Jiwa, B. (2013). Fortune cookie principle. Perth: The Story of Telling Press

Liebrenz-Himes, M., Shamma, H., & Dyer R.F. (2007). Heritage Brands- Treasured Inheritance Or ‘Over the Hill’. Charm, 2007.

Merchant, A., Rose G.M. (2013). Effects of advertising-evoked vicarious nostalgia on brand heritage, Journal of Business Research, 66 (12), p.2619-2625

Moser, M. (2003). United We Brand. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Rolighetsteorin, (2010). The Speed Camera Lottery, The Fun Theory. [video online] Available at: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iynzHWwJXaA#t=106> [Accessed 13 February 2014]

Seybold, P. B. (2001). The Customer Revolution. New York, NY: Crown Publishing Group.

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

Thailifechannel, (2011). Silence of Love (Official English Subtitle), TVC Thai Life Insurance. [video online] Available at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZMX6H6YY1M> [Accessed 13 February 2014]

Trusov, M., Bucklin, R.E., & Pauwels, K. (2009). Effects of Word-of-Mouth Versus Traditional Marketing: Findings from an Internet Social Networking Site. Journal of Marketing, 73(5), 90-102.

Urde, M., Balmer, J., & Greyser, S. (2007) Corporate brands with a heritage, Brand Management, Vol. 15, No. 1, 4–19 September 2007

Vargo, Stephen L. and Lusch, Robert F. (2004) Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing, Journal of Marketing 68(1), p. 1–17

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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

Cases, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, London, Los Angeles, New delhi and Singapore, Vol 14(1).

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

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)

Forbes, Renzo Rosso’s profile. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/profile/renzo-rosso/ [accessed 3/2/2014]

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

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.

J. Howe, 2006 the rise of Crowdsourcing. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html [accessed 10/02/2014]

Joseph, Seb, (2008) Brands delve deeper into crowdsourcing, Marketing Week, Vol. 35 Issue 48

Kapferer, J.N. (2004), The new strategic brand management (3rd ed.), Kogan Page, London, U.K.

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)

Tadajewski, M. and Saren, M. (2009). Rethinking the emergence of relationship marketing. Journal of Macromarketing, 29(2).

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

Urban, L.G. (2004). The emerging era of customer advocacy. Sloan Management Review, 45(2)

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

NATIVE ADVERTISING, THE NEXT BIG THING? Part 2

December 15, 2014

Written By Thomas Roos

Part 2: Native Advertising Discussed 

Part one of this paper discussed the rise of native advertising and how it is a result of paradigm shifts in consumer culture as a whole, as well as of developments within the online marketing field. This part will further elaborate on how native advertising is practiced and eventually discuss native advertising in terms of its success, and its limitations. To conclude with I raise the question that I could not answer in this paper, but should be of interest of anyone that has genuine interest in the field of internet marketing and branding. 

Empirical data analysis: Native advertising.

The consumer annoyance and scepticism towards advertisements, advertisers and capitalist practices in general as described in part 1 have forced online marketers in a new direction: native marketing. Native advertising, as explained in this infographic about native advertising by Wasserman (2012), is the creation of high-quality content by brands which is placed “…into the organic experience of a given platform.’’ Perhaps a simpler definition of the concept was given by Keers (2013), on the Content Marketing Association blog: “…instead of a simple, same-everywhere ad, it is targeted content, sitting alongside the publisher's content, but produced by brands themselves.”

The essence of native advertising is that it answers the consumers’ demand for valuable content from brands, whether they are the targeted audience or not. Holt (2002) argues that in the post-postmodern paradigm, consumers will judge brands and their ads on how they add value to people when they are not customers. Samuel Johnson once said: “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.’’, and this research provided reason to believe that the same mantra will define brand perception in the post-postmodern internet era. Native advertisements make a clear step into that direction, which is perhaps the reason why they work so well.

A second important strategic advantage of native advertising is that it offers value to both brands and publishers, as well as to different platforms. As Miller, the CEO of The Guardian Media Group (in this case: the platform) puts it: "There's an opportunity to work with advertisers on creating content that meets the editorial aspirations of ourselves and meets their need to get to consumers." {C}(Jackson, 2014){C}. What is being created is thus ‘branded content’ instead of simple advertisements.

{C}{C}{C}To illustrate this, an example is provided that came up during the empirical research online. The picture below shows a BuzzFeed article, and on the surface it seems like another entertaining BuzzFeed article (click on the image to view the full page). Who posted it? It was posted by Captain Morgan, and looking at the marked text in the description, its purpose is not just to entertain you{C} (Muniz & Schau, 2011){C}; it is there to educate consumers about the man behind the rum. On the side, we can find more ‘sponsored content’ from Captain Morgan. Evidently, the success of one such native ad is to create content that 1) enhances brand equity, 2) adds to the publisher’s / platform’s value, and most importantly; 3) is valuable for the audience that needs to be engaged.  

Figure 1 : Native Advertising in practice; Captain Morgan offering valuable content on Buzzfeed.

Native Marketing explained

Buzzfeed, Forbes, The Atlantic, Facebook, The New Yorker, etc; they all have developed a version of native advertising, called ‘sponsored content’, of which the above is an example. Buzzfeed runs completely on the gains from native advertising; not only do they encourage advertisers to settle in between the website contributors, (the regular visitors), but they also offer help to potential and existing advertisers to create content that is likely to be shared often by BuzzFeed users.

An overview of the main players in the native advertising field is provided in this map of native advertising platforms, and was taken from a 2013 article (Berry, 2013), and therefore not completely up to date. However, it accurately shows the division between different native advertising channels. Please note that more players joined this landscape since the map was made, however, the main players have remained more or less the same (Berry, 2013):

• Sponsored Posts and Articles: Facebook and BuzzFeed (and newspapers)
• Sponsored Video: YouTube and ShareThrough
• Sponsored Images: Imgur and TripleLift
• Sponsored Playlists: Pandora (mainly U.S) and Spotify (mainly Europe)
• Sponsored Links: Disqus and Zemanta (many more have emerged)
• Sponsored Listings: Uncrate and Yelp

Discussion.

In a study that was published on February 12th 2014, The Media Briefing (Taylor, 2014) investigated the traffic around these native ads and provided this study with interesting data collected from 689 BuzzFeed native ads posted by 51 companies.

The results (average ad shares per social platform) are astonishing:

• 263 Facebook shares
• 36 Tweets
• 7 Google ‘plus one’s’
• 44 Pins
  
• 2 Linkedin shares

Additional outcomes of the study:

• Native advertising on BuzzFeed is likely to result in 4241 total social media interactions.
• Spotify’s native ad wins: 8530 Facebook shares, resulting in almost 50.000 Facebook interactions, including likes and comments.

According to The Media Briefing (2014), it can therefore be argued that BuzzFeed’s native advertising strategy is a tremendous success simply because advertisers love the idea that consumers will share an ad on their social network platforms. Why? It turns out that the earlier-mentioned Word of Mouth is of vital importance for gaining trustworthiness, and therefore is much more likely to lead to an increase in sales (see table 1 below). “That these services enable only the sharing of content on the Web is not important here. What is important is that they allow simultaneous sharing in reality.” (Akar & Topcu, 2011, p.39).

A 2012 study conducted by The Nielsen Company (2013) indicated advertising in the form of word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family continued to be the strongest factor triggering action among 84% of 29.000 global respondents from 58 countries (table on the next page).

Table 1: Nielsen Global Survey of Trust in Advertising, Questionnaire 1-2013 (Nielsen, 2013)

Native Marketing explained

A brief Critique and suggestions for research.

Some critique is being raised about native advertising as a new form of online advertising.  Listed below are the most commonly raised issues:

• Many platforms may not have the capacity to handle the growing amount of native advertising, even though they say they can (Kantrowitz, 2013).
• It is generally hard to tell whether native advertising is more successful than conventional banner methods, as they are used at different scales.
• Joe McCambley, who helped creating the first banner ad, says that native advertising might destroy journalism, as “You are gambling with the contract you have with your readers,” and “How do I know who made the content I am looking at and what the value of the information is?” (Carr, 2013).
• There are ethical questions being raised about the extent to which for instance The New Yorker is fooling their audience and breaching the contract of offering valuable and trustworthy content.

The scope of this paper leaves no room for discussion of the above, therefore it is suggested that further research should be done towards the limitations of native advertising, in terms of scalability as well as in terms of ethical issues.

 

Conclusion.

Web 2.0 has made a significant impact on the power relations between brands and their audience, and native advertising is one answer to this paradigm shift. Online advertisers now find themselves on thin ice, as the “…web-based power struggles between marketer and consumer brand authors challenge accepted branding truths and paradigms: where short-term brands can trump long-term icons, where marketing looks more like public relations, where brand building gives way to brand protection, and brand value is driven by risk, not returns.” (Fournier & Avery, 2011, p.193). This paper confirms that advertisers will always be looking for better ways to reach their audiences, and that those who are most adaptive to change will always be upfront.

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NATIVE ADVERTISING, THE NEXT BIG THING? Part 1

December 11, 2014

Written By Thomas Roos

Part 1: How Web 2.0 gave consumers endless power

An introduction to native advertising.

Native advertising is a new phenomenon within the online advertising field and by some people is referred to as the new disruptive online advertising strategy (Salmon, 2013). Native advertising has received wide-spread attention within the online marketing field, especially among content marketers, but seem to be poorly understood by too many stakeholders. (The average monthly Google searches of the term ‘native advertising’ has gone from 800 January 2013 to 4000 in 2014.) Native advertising includes ads that ‘blend in’ with the content that surrounds them, but are actually branded and paid for. Evidently, the success of one such native ad is to create content that 1) enhances brand equity, 2) adds to the publisher’s / platform’s value, and most importantly; 3) is valuable for the audience that needs to be engaged.

The nature of this paper and the reason for writing.

This article will merely reflect upon my interpretations of the information that was collected and processed, and it is written to provide deeper understanding of native advertising. But most importantly; it tries to identify native advertising’s place in the existing marketing paradigm and to relate it to current movements within consumer culture.

After reflecting back upon the recent paradigm shifts in society and in internet marketing that are relevant to the rise of native advertising practices, I will display the findings from a literature search, highlighting authors that made future predictions in regards to the development of (internet) marketing and advertising. In the second part, the empirical data resulting from an explorative study using netnographic methods and secondary data sources will be analysed and discussed. After illustrating the essence of native advertising and how native advertising has developed to what it is now, I will provide the reader with an argument that explains the success of native advertising for brands. The paper will conclude with a discussion of native advertising and how its success might be predicting the future form of advertising in Web 3.0

Consumer resistance to online advertising.

Online advertisements are everywhere. It seems that there is no way to escape them, even though we were fairly quick to adapt our cognitive efforts to the overwhelming amount of stimuli; nowadays 90% of the banners is selected out by our brain and does not even reach our conscious mind (Benway, 1998) (Burke et al., 2005) (Buscher et al., 2010).

Digital advertisements have become more and more intrusive, some colourful, some beautifully simple; but they all annoy us to a certain degree. Certainly, advertisers and marketing agents have become better and better at drawing the online wanderer’s attention along the way, using a variety of methods (Winer, 2009, p.110).

‘’The early part of the 21st century has witnessed an explosion in new media utilized by marketing managers to reach their customers’’ (Winer, 2009, p.119). Not solely through visual attractions, no, a fine-tuned mix of audio-visual materials is often used to facilitate a desperate call for attention. Think of the time you were listening to your favourite playlist on Spotify, rudely being interrupted by an audio advertisement in your native language, along with a screen-size billboard popping up on your screen. Think of the times you were distracted by extravagant banners on the side of the news article you were trying to read. Think of that, and you’re thinking of the post-modern internet era, an era of ‘advertising deficit disorder’ (Rubleski, 2008).

A simple, but effective way to deal with these annoying banners and ads, is simply to install so-called ad-blocking plug-ins such as Adblock, that claims to have been downloaded over 200 million times (Palant, 2014). When companies started blocking Adblock users with software called Adblockblock, activists invented Adblockblockblock to avoid that (Smith, 2013), indicating an endless cat and mouse play.

Literature study: Are we witnessing the maturation of Web 2.0?

Even though the past decade has shown us numerous examples of brands that successfully drew the attention of their target audience, it seems like the ‘traditional ways’ of online marketing (Winer, 2009, p.110) are getting out of fashion. More specialized online marketing such as interactive methods have emerged in the past years, indicating a possible maturation of the online marketing paradigm as we know it (Wind, 2008) (Varadarajan & Yadav, 2009, p.20). 

This maturation of internet marketing goes along with shift in society as a whole. The paradigm shifts that have taken place in consumer culture naturally have their effect on marketing. In the current postmodern consumer culture, brands are used primarily for identity building projects. A growing body of literature from a more consumer culture perspective deals with how advertisements are perceived by consumers nowadays. Slightly older, but still very relevant contributions to this body of literature were made by Mick and Buhl (1992) and by Ritson and Elliot (1999). The former argue that ads function considerably as carriers of social meanings and are actively being used for identity building and creation. The latter argue that ‘’advertising can form the basis of for a wide variety of social interactions’’ (p.273). Firat and Venkatesh (1995) argue, - in their rather elaborative description of the postmodern condition of consumer society-, that “...it is not to brands that consumers will be loyal, but to images and symbols...’’ (p.251). Deighton and Kornfeld (2009, p.9) therefore argue that of their five possible strategies for interaction with online consumers, the one that facilitates people’s identity projects and that contributes to a collective sense-making will be the most successful.

{C}{C}{C}{C}In Why do brands cause trouble? (2002), Holt predicted a paradigm shift from postmodernism to what he calls ‘post-postmodernism’. He provides evidence for the impact that contemporary anti-branding movements will have on marketing as whole, and based upon the exploratory research that was conducted, this paper suggests that these predictions are to a large extend applicable to the online marketing paradigm as well. The recent changes in consumer attitude towards brands show that branding has become a fine art and is now subject to growing consumer scepticism of brands, producers and capitalist systems in general (Holt, 2002) (Barwise & Meehan, 2010). The well-awake and self-educated brand critics that we used to call consumers are now questioning the authenticity of each branded article, advertisement, blog or other content they come across. Advertising online is subject to a changing power balance between producer and consumer, and brands will be valued as long as they allow interaction from both sides and can be used to create meaning (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). As Christodoulides (2009) argued already 4 years ago: “Post-internet branding is about facilitating conversations around the brand” (p.142).

The empowerment of the consumer is enhanced in the numerous user-generated content (UGC) platforms: “…whether the news is good or bad, they will tell everyone.” (Levine et al., 2001). Recent examples of consumer empowerment include single Youtube videos posted by one single individual, resulting in substantial losses (or gains) in brand equity when going viral, and proving why Word Of Mouth (WOM) is one of the strongest means through which a brand can gain exposure. Later on WOM will be discussed further. 

Consumers have turned to UGC to inform themselves and others about brands and products, rather than listening to companies (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010, p.180). Now the companies seem to have their answer: settle in between the audience through native advertising.

Part 2 of this paper will take the above into consideration when discussing empirical examples of native advertising as an answer to this changing power balance, as well as its successes and limitations. It will offer visual aid while explaining the essence of native advertising.