26 August 2008 - 19:59Think Small, Win Big

What kills good innovative marketing campaigns before they even have a chance to go live? Often it’s misguided ideas about control and the place a brand really has in consumers’ lives.

We need to ask ourselves, each and every time we come up with another brilliant concept for social/viral/user-generated content/engagement campaigns — “what’s in it for them?”

“Them” are the consumers, the people who you hope to captivate. And unless your brand is truly an essential part of peoples’ lifestyles (think Apple Computers or Harley Davidson) the hard truth is that consumers really aren’t interested in devoting chunks of their own time to talking about your products, bragging about what they bought from you, playing a flash game centered on your brand, decorating their desktops with your logo, or participating in any other brand-centered activity … unless we provide them with a compelling reason to do so.

Don’t think you can fool consumers with social networking plans that pretend to be meeting places but are really intended to get people talking only about the glories of your product, blogs filled with nothing but company news (and carefully monitored comment systems), or widgets that enable people to interact only with a brand rather than with each other. It’s not going to work and if you build it they will not come.

It should come as no shock to anyone that consumers are more media-savvy these days, and they can see through a bogus marketing spiel in a second. But sometimes, in our enthusiasm for the brand, we can lose track of what exactly qualifies as a compelling reason. We focus on the brand and not the consumers’ needs. We want to believe that consumers will happily spend unpaid hours generating content/reviews/traffic for our websites. And occasionally we also forget that consumers are just as smart as us.

What constitutes a compelling reason to participate in a brand’s marketing efforts — and that’s exactly what we’re asking consumers to do when we talk about engaging them — is one of the places where old school marketing often collides hard with the new reality. Old school believes that marketing is all about the brand, so the brand must always be front and center. But any engagement campaign that’s centered only on discussing the brand will fail. Likewise, any campaign that offers people a confined and controlled experience, based on some misapprehension of what consumers are really interested in doing, will also fail. We have to run engagement marketing ideas through our own bullshit filters; is anyone really going to want this information, this offering, or this activity? What’s in it for them?

Successful engagement marketing must provide something of real value: entertainment, education, or an opportunity to connect with likeminded others. Effective engagement marketing is never myopically brand-centered; the most successful engagement campaigns happen when a company connects with consumers in the communities that surround the brand — that is, the lifestyles and/or values that define a brand.

For engagement marketing to work, you need to have a realistic view of how consumers perceive your brand and a plan to create authentic experiences that reflect those perceptions. Some brands simply aren’t cool or high-end and shouldn’t try to present themselves as such. Old-school marketing thinks it can radically shape consumers perceptions, new-school knows that it’s better to go with the flow, build on legitimate perceptions and turn potential weaknesses into strengths that really differentiate the brand.

Consumers can and do steer brand experiences these days, and engagement marketing is a two-way conversation. You can’t just create an interesting campaign; you also have to create opportunities for people to respond to your messaging; Companies that adhere to old school thought patterns think that consumer co-creation of a brand’s identity is a terrifying concept. Old school adherents want to control the conversation. But any engagement marketing attempt that doesn’t surrender the idea of control is doomed to fail. You can’t have a conversation if one person sets the agenda and determines what everyone else should say. And consumers are no longer willing to listen to a brand that is talking at them and telling them how they should think about a product or service. They want to have conversations and participate in the process. If brands’ don’t open the door to these conversations, people will take their involvement and interest elsewhere. And never forget there are plenty of other places for them to go.

Look at your engagement marketing plans with merciless eyes; are they too brand-centered? What real benefit are you offering to consumers if they participate? Have you built in opportunities for open conversation/response? How would you respond to this same content if it was offered by another brand? Don’t let old school attitudes and brand ego run roughshod over the engaging campaigns you need to develop to connect with today’s consumers.