Over fifteen years of teaching marketing and
distribution strategy classes at the Kellogg School of Management I’ve had the
great luxury of being at the forefront of new ideas and developments, and learning
much from some of the best MBA students in the marketing field. Here are four ideas we discussed in a course on Social Media I taught in early-2014: the need for brands
to focus on social currency, sharing, voice and data.
Social
Currency: Maximizing ROI On Consumer Attention
Social Currency is created when a good
user-choice experience gives consumers the option to explore content and watch
videos they want to see in contextually relevant places – when they want and
without interruption.
A great example of this is the Ron
Burgundy Dodge Durango campaign (here’s one of many ads).
By tying in the social equity of Ron Burgundy and the upcoming premiere
of Anchorman 2, Dodge was able to increase consumer engagement with the content
and product. According to this
Ad Age article, sales of the car rose 59% in the month of the campaign and
were up 50% for the year. Additionally, Dodge saw almost an 80% increase
in web traffic since the launch of the campaign. The campaign generated a
reach of 10 million views.
But while great content and a great
place to house the content are key, the ultimate payoff is achieving a
noticeable lift in brand perception and purchase behavior. With all the social
noise in the marketplace today, it’s important for a brand to move beyond
‘share of voice’ to ‘share of choice’. Achieving
dominant share of choice drives a critical mass of viewership.
Social
Sharing: Cars.Com Commercializes Reputation Reviews
Cars.com created its own unique social
media platform by connecting car shoppers with car dealerships and inventories,
and by helping consumers share reviews of Dealer performance and experiences. Cars.com
made itself the lead forum for auto industry reviews, and in doing so put
control back in the hands of the consumer.
The first step behind creating this
social platform was Reputation Management – in order to grow and sustain the
platform, Cars.com had to convince consumers that it was the best place to go
for reviews, while simultaneously convincing dealers that the new review forum
would benefit them in four key ways: dealers could listen and share feedback,
acknowledge feedback and correct issues, show customers a positive experience
and have them share it with others, and use positive reviews to reward their staff.
Cars.com was able to change a lagging perception (how dealers historically
treated people) into a leading indicator.
In the end, by creating a new platform
that helped Dealers manage their reputations online, Cars.com was able to amplify
its own visibility and position. From a commercial standpoint, Cars.com leverages
the value of it’s proprietary “Auto Intender” community – by engaging with consumers
during those times when it can be of most use.
Social
Voice: Taco Bell Creates Shareable Moments
Brands are moving quickly to assess how
to leverage new social commerce channels to build strong, distinct brand voices
by creating ‘Shareable Moments’. These are opportunities to cut through the
noise. They typically happen when brands don’t “talk at” consumers but instead
join the conversation and the community. Doing so strengthens the relationship
and trust between user and brand, helping to develop followers into advocates.
Taco Bell learned several lessons on
how to improve its digital communications and overall social presence.
•
Speak with consistency. Taco Bell’s personality, tone, language, and
content are constant and appealing to its consumer group target, millennial
males aged 15-25
• Deliver
brand-identifiable content. Taco Bell’s “You’re doing it wrong” tweet achieved
virality by making light of the correct way to eat a taco.
• Humanize
the brand. Taco Bell’s tone and content sound like a teenage buddy with its
funny, irreverent humor. This ultimately makes the brand more relatable to its
target consumers.
Social
Data: Marketing Technologists Capitalize On Data
Social should not be seen as a strategy
in itself but as a behavior that amplifies experiences. Marketing strategies
should tap into social behaviors, with data at the center of it and clear sense
of purpose. In addition to social, the strategy should include more traditional
media in a convergence of paid, owned and earned. Data should be used to fuel meaningful
customer experiences. Those in turn will create data, that can be measured and
used to iterate on existing or to activate new experiences. The more
experiences are shared, the more people join them, the more data is created. This
leads to a virtuous cycle of experience and data generation.
Hence, ‘Marketing Technologists’ are a
new generation of leaders equally skilled in storytelling and
measurement. They think like traditional marketers but are equally
comfortable with statistical analysis and database management.
There’s no doubt that social marketing
and commerce must still focus on the human element, where big data is just a
tool to enlighten our understanding of consumer behaviors and attitudes.
Nonetheless, the sheer volume of social data is staggering hundreds of millions
of social media sources and the need to make sense of sentiments, emotions and
behaviors is mind-blowing in its complexity. Today’s marketing
Technologists are becoming experts at processing, understanding and analyzing
unstructured data as a means to explain and predict human behavior.
Richard E. Wilson is managing director of the advisory firm Chicago Strategy Associates, and a former clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management and Director of the school’s Center for Global Marketing Practice. rick@chicagostrategy.com
