Welcome one and all. Today’s article will be more in line with digital marketing strategy and relies heavily on today’s shifting consumer mentalities and behaviors. It is without a doubt that any marketer worth their dollar has recognized the value of digital and social communications in the fostering and developing of customer loyalty and how word of mouth (WOM) can build and destroy a brand at record speeds. But first, let’s talk about what loyalty means in today’s interconnected world.
Redefining Customer Loyalty
Brand loyalty has always been a mission, a necessary prevailer that allows brands to grow, increase awareness, and dominate markets. Our old definition of loyalty was attributed to repurchase, which is crucial for products and services with small life cycles (i.e CPG products), but was drastically underperforming for companies’ in long life cycle categories. But things have radically shifted in consumer habits and psychographics since that definition became widely recognized. In our social world, advertisers have lost their authority, and now consumers rely on their peers to get informed. Growing distrust in brands has altered the way company’s need to engage their customers and focus their marketing spend (check out my article “The Sale Never Ends: Why After Purchase Interaction Might Have A Higher ROI Than Market Spend On New Clients” – coming soon).
In order to gain authority, brands need consumers to advocate on their behalf. Therefore, the new definition of loyalty has extended to include consumer brand ambassadorship titling these consumers as brand advocates. A loyal customer is no longer just a customer who continues to purchase your product/service but actively recommends it to others.
The Consumer Becomes the Salesperson
In order to foster these types of communications, brands have shifted to Communal Marketing. The best way to do this is by offering value additive content and organically propositioning consumers to create engagement on their behalf; the content is called User Generated Content (UGC). This concept is known as Consumer Generated Marketing, and it is a valuable way to hack into personalized networks of consumers with strong trust associations. This content can come in a multitude of different forms and can be brought on by many different challenges, engagements, and prompts. However, UGC mining needs to be done carefully and with great intent.
Companies have capitalized on this style of marketing and used it to dominate the competition. Some have used it simply for brand awareness, like Walmart’s #SavingsShuffel on Tik Tok (Read Marketing Dives article on the campaign here). Others have used it to further their brand’s image and reinvent themselves. At the root, Communal and Consumer-Generated Marketing is about getting consumers to relate and talk about your brand in a way that puts loyalists at the forefront, signaling increased trust and peer approval.
Similarly, brands can use this technique to create loyalty. Consumers have become moral entities, purchasing on belief. That is why brands have become far more socially conscious and morally directive with their images. This trend in brand redefining is based on the fundamentals of Human Centric Marketing (Check out my article titled “A face, A Message, And A Feeling: Brands Movement to Human-Centric Marketing – Coming Soon). In this manner, brands use this technique to demonstrate they care by starting a conversation. Putting their brand at the center of a debated topic assigns a position and demonstrates a mission. Unilever’s Dove has one of the most successful campaigns using the conversation model to build brand loyalists. Every student studying marketing, advertising, or PR has studied Dove’s #RealBeauty campaign. It is the gold standard for viral Communal Marketing. If you are unaware of their campaign, click here for an article by Medium content writer SharadhaR. Dove’s campaign garnered billions of impressions and nearly just as many billions in increased revenue, all by starting a conversation about women’s beauty standards and doubling down with a chain of PR and marketing stunts. Dove positioned itself as a brand with a message.
The Cons of Consumer Control
Now, where does this double-sided coin come into play? The whole point of this article is to demonstrate the good and the bad of Communal Marketing. So you’ve been waiting for the second shoe to drop, and here it is: putting your image in the hands of consumers puts your brand at the mercy of the public. Far more easily, a brand can be shaken by negative sentiment and reverse advocates then capitalized on by positive ambassadorship.
Advertising to consumers is in the control of the marketers, the message can be refined, the conversation is controlled, the consumer’s perception is monitored and adjusted to be as beneficial as possible for the brand. When you position your brand as a conversation starter, it can quickly get away from the intended message and stray into no man’s land… if not further. One wrong statement could create negative associations, brand destroyers (consumers out to destroy your brand) could gain momentum overpowering and degrading the support of your brand activists, and unlike most other marketing campaigns, there is no deleting, no stopping, no apologizing. Once the conversation begins, it snowballs, building audiences, coverage, and impressions.
The point of these types of conversations is for wild growth, and it can just as easily spell doom for your brand as it can put you on a pedestal. Take H&M’s debacle in 2018. With growing tensions surrounding racial inequalities and the place of people of color in advertising, H&M posted a photo that spread like wildfire. Their “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” sweatshirt was worn by an African American child, and quickly H&M was labeled racist. Irrelevant of intention, H&M lost a ton of business and was unable to gain public opinion back for quite a while. Click here for an analysis by The Arthur W. Page Center.
To drill down to the bedrock of this article, Communal Marketing and Conversations Starting can be a useful tool in building brand recognition, offering moral direction, and building a loyal following, but it comes with risks. As a brand manager or strategist, you need to think about the surrounding context of your growth and what tangential markets and topics you might side step into. However, no matter the research done prior, there is always unforeseeable issues with any campaign, if you are willing to roll the dice and put in the effort and your brand is ready to deal with the potential for negative publicity, or are in desperate need of reinvigorating, this tactic might just be your best choice. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Sincerely,
Noah Newman
noahbnewman.com 