- By David Dubois, Assistant Professor of Marketing, INSEAD -
“We must cultivate our garden.” – Candide, Voltaire, 1759
Voltaire today might find himself saying those words to companies in search of new social media success. Indeed, a common trait among many of the recent successful social media campaigns is companies’ ability to create and sustain an online culture around their brands – in other words, their ability to “cultivate their own garden”.
Culture is hard to pin down. It mainly consists of three main building blocks: a language that supports communication among community members (social base), a set of goals that community members aspire to (social engine), and a set of codified interactions or rituals based on shared symbols that guide actions (social glue). Key to success in social media arenas is engineering platforms where people interact with one another. This is a major opportunity for brands to create and sustain their own culture by creating a completely new online culture around their products.
The question is, how to do it?
This strategy typically involves undertaking three complementary actions:
First, companies must create a common language that consumers will use when talking about their products (social base). Some brands, like Old Spice Swagger, choose existing words close to their core value proposition and positioning. Given Old Spice’s product positioning aimed to communicate confidence in a playful way, the new product was named Swagger, and a number of playful activities were organised around the language chosen to talk about the brand. For instance, consumers could “swaggerize” themselves by registering on a website that would automatically generate (fake) stories about how they managed to save a baby dolphin in the ocean while stopping a fire in the country side or preventing two trains from colliding in their hometown. Another activity invited consumers to “swaggerize their wallet” by asking them to generate ads featuring the product. Thus, Old Spice’s choice of language was key in implementing a “swagger” culture, to reinforce the idea that the product is about confidence (http://socialtimes.com/how-old-spice-swaggerized-their-brand-and-men-everywhere_b18042).
Second, a winning campaign requires brands to clearly specify the common or individual goals that people will pursue within the campaign (social engine). Companies should carefully take into account individual motivations, as well as craft a goal that is both achievable, and respectful of both parties. For example, young executive Evan Guttman once crafted a message online to convince his audience to help retrieve a friend’s phone that she had left in the back seat of a taxi. The phone had been taken by the next taxi passenger who had later refused to return the phone when she had been tracked down. This anecdote narrated by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008) (http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/0143114948 ) showcased how Guttman cleverly portrayed the task as a communal endeavor rather than an individual one, publicly noting, “This is not a religious endeavor or a moral endeavor… this is a HUMANITY endeavor. I want these people SHAMED into realizing what they have done.” Key to his success, Guttman carefully avoided talking about money and instead talked about a sense of justice. Particular importance should be paid to 1) how easy the goal is for people to understand; 2) how easy the goal will be for consumers to modify (for example, by using it as a verb) and thus nurture the culture by producing new elements of language derived from the initial ones; and 3) how easy the goal will be to map new activities based on these elements of language.
Third, crafting a successful social media campaign entails imagining the set of codified interactions or rituals based on shared symbols on which people will develop and share content (social glue). For instance, as part of its seeding campaign the Ford Fiesta Movement, Ford imagined seven themes for which their chosen 100 influencers would have to build short videos featuring the car (http://chapter1.fiestamovement.com/missions/). Ford chose themes that were aligned with Ford Fiesta’s strength (its design, urban, fun and hip look). This triggered the development of hundreds of user-generated videos that set the stage for the product’s cultural grounding: in several of these videos, users went as far as drawing in a series of large mural paintings in metropolitan areas. Overall, when choosing the nature of interactions for a campaign, particular importance should be paid to 1) what types of activity should consumers engage in; 2) to what extent and how should community members be differentiated; and 3) how should community members be rewarded for engaging in the campaign? (publicly versus privately; monetary compensation versus non-monetary compensation, etc.)
Envisioning a social base, a social engine and a social glue to create a true culture is an arduous task, much more than merely echoing fashion or momentary trends. However, the benefits of such an approach loom significantly larger particularly in the long run, in the form of greater customer loyalty. You should not think twice about creating online engagement.
Marketers, cultivate your gardens!
Read the entire article in INSEAD Knowledge beginning February 7 (http://knowledge.insead.edu)
David Dubois is Assistant Professor of Marketing at INSEAD.
