The Social Media Eco-System For Brands

This is a repost of an article I wrote for Sprout. The wave of social media adoption is continuing to bring new brands online and as this trend unfolds the social media eco-system is changing to absorb the new participants. In this post, I’ll share a simple diagram that can help make sense of how the eco-system currently works and how it’s evolving. In the past I’ve written about how social media works its way into brands. In this post I’ll focus on those brands that have identified value in social media and are looking for ways to grow their investment. If you’re working for a brand and want to stay on the forefront of social media you’ve probably looked for a creative agency or a social media agency who can serve as a guide. It’s almost impossible to have an internal team lead this function because the landscape is changing so rapidly. Agencies have more experience, but even they struggle to keep up with the latest opportunities. At Sprout we’re seeing that traditional agencies rely on technology partners not only to help them understand what’s possible with social media but also to help them by building the campaigns. Sprout is a hybrid of a technology company and social media agency. We’re not alone in this approach. Many of our peers are also trying to combine these disciplines in order to deal with the challenges mentioned above. A differentiating factor is that Sprout began as a technology company with a solution for building engaging and social brand experiences. The rapid rate of change in the social media space has given us an advantage over creative agencies. Of course, after working with creative agencies we’ve learned a great deal about designing experiences and combine that knowledge with the detailed reporting, which our platform enables, to improve the performance of our projects. It’s important to understand how the creative/technology mix works at the agencies with whom you’re considering working. At Sprout, we use our platform to help brands power continuous conversations across the web, but we also use it to power campaigns that we develop in conjunction with agencies creative agencies. Further, we offer designers and agencies a way to subscribe to a base level of our platform through Sprout Builder. When the first wave of social media rolled in there was a greater separation between the creative agencies and the technology providers. For the next several years, we expect to see an increase in the number of integrated agencies, like Sprout, because they are better positioned to take advantage of rapidly evolving networks like Facebook. The left side of the diagram below reflects this trend:

sprout ecosystem

Today, it’s the technology platforms that serve as hubs within the eco-system, connecting brands and creative agencies with social networks and distribution partners like DoubleClick, Clearspring, and Gigya, There is also some consolidation taking place between the distributors and ad networks that will continue to drive down the cost of online advertising. Part of what will ultimately stabilize this devaluation is the integration of social content and connectivity into campaigns such that they become significantly more relevant. This is part of what we do at Sprout. Finally, if you’re interested in learning about how you can organize your internal team to work with service providers, check out Jeremiah Owyang’s post about how brand’s adopting social media should adopt a “hub and spoke” model. Think of it as an internal eco-system for brands. Thanks for reading and please post a note if you have any questions or comments!

The Creative Brief: Branding

Whether you’re starting a new venture, or need to upgrade your existing brand, the best place to start is to simply articulate what you’re looking for in a design brief. This post features a creative brief outline that has worked well for me in the past. Two quick notes before I jump in:

  1. It’s Only an Outline – The outline below is fairly straight forward and is designed as the starting point to a significant conversation about the creative work of branding. Filling in the outlines may require some serious soul searching for your organization, in combination with some exercises, but that’s not the focus of this post.
  2. It’s For You Too – The design brief is as much for you as it is for your creative team. In other words, starting a creative brief is about being prepared before engaging a creative team. It’ll save you time, communicate that you’re organized and professional, and raise the bar for the relationship. Once the conversation gets started your creative team with typically iterate, improve, and possibly re-articulate the brief based on additional questions and clarifications.

Also, a big thanks to Jon Scheuning over at Pentagram who got me thinking about this when he shared a creative brief outline that he uses with me last year.

Let’s Clarify Some Terms

People use the word “branding” to mean differnt things. This is what I mean:

  • Re-Brand – This is when a product or service that is sold under one brand switches it’s affiliation to a new brand. Often the goal here is to reposition the product or move upmarket.
  • Brand Refresh – This is when an existing brand has fallen out of date and requires reworking to update it to contemporary standards. Brand refresh can be a regular review process to evolve a brand to reflect market change.
  • Brand Re-Staging – This is similar to a brand refresh, but is more focused on altering the context and supporting brand elements associated with the brand in order to evolve it. For example a brand identity mark, or logo, may remain essentially the same while the supporting brand elements (pallet, patterns, secondary elements, backgrounds, etc) can change significantly.

Structure for The Brief

The creative brief anticipates a series of high level questions, so each section is positioned as an answer to a question. I’ve thrown in some sample answers to give you the gist of what good answers might look like. As a general rule, keep the language as active and as concise as possible.

What we want (what are your highest level goals?)

  • Develop our identity system to support our next stage of growth.
  • Make the system, and its associated assets, accessible, thus enabling consistent application.

How it will help our business (what are the expected business impacts of this project?)

  • Drive consistent brand experience across touch-points.
  • Build on existing brand equity and support line extension.

What we’ll get (what are the deliverables at the end of the project?)

  • A re-staged brand identity that
    • includes a broader visual vocabulary than the current system.
  • A style guide, including
    • a color palette set,
    • primary and secondary type faces,
    • imagery,
    • a series of exhibits and templates,
    • a selection of sample applications including _____, ______, ________.
    • a set of brand guidelines, to help our internal team apply the system across a variety of media.

Some Boundaries (are there any limits, or major specifications, that we must incorporate?)

  • The brand mark will be used extensively in rich media and must be able to support animation builds.

Who this is for (tell us about your target market?)

  • Our services are targeted to _______ audiences, here’s how they typically discover our brand, here’s how they perceive us now, etc.
  • Here are the markets we’d like to move into, here’s how we’d like to gain brand awareness in this area, etc

Make the right impression (how do you want people to respond to your brand?)

  • Our business is complicated and hard to explain, we want a brand that will support simpler communications.
  • Different communities interpret our brand differently, which causes problems. We’d want a brand that is perceived more consistently.
  • We want something that lets people know that we’re committed to doing well by doing good.

We’ll know it worked when (how will we know if it worked?)
To be successful, the restaged brand identity system should:

  • increase perceived value of our brand and recognition through internal surveying,
  • increase consistency across communications, and
  • win strong internal buy-in.

Who we are (can you summarize what your brand is about?)

Our company was founded in ______ by _______ with a strong record for ________.  We have grown into ________. As we grew, we developed a logo, and used it to put our stamp on identity materials across a variety of media. To this point, these materials have served our needs, in part because ________. Recently, we began  diversifying our practice from a traditional focus on ________, seeking clients who work in adjacent industries, serve market sectors and geographies in which our brand is relatively, or even completely, unknown.  To meet this challenge, we need a more ______, ______, and _______ brand identity system.


What We Do
(can you summarize your business?)
Our company is unique in_________. We also ________. Here is how we currently describe our services: [insert company boilerplate]

Our Personality (pick five words that summarize your ideal brand personality)

  • Smart
  • Frank
  • Frugal
  • Fit
  • Pragmatic

Our Values
 & Mission (summarize your values and mission)

  • Insert existing company boilerplate

How we fit in (summarize how you are positioned in the market place)

In our industry there are three kinds of service providers, those that are seen as ______, those that are seen as _________, and those that are seen as _________. Relative to these perceptions we are positioned as _________.

A list of companies that do what we do: (list the top ten companies you see as your primary competitors, and peers?)

  • Company
  • Company
  • Company
  • Company
  • Company
  • etc

Brand Rot

Brands grow from the inside out starting with the first innovators who are willing to try something new and moving on to early adopters, the  early majority, the late majority, and finally the laggards. What may not seem immediately obvious is that brands need to continue inspiring the innovators and the early adopters even after they’ve crossed into the larger adoption segments. I will explain why this is necessary to grow, or even to maintain existing, community. The first important because brands naturally lose some customers due to shedding.

Shedding

Brands naturally lose some customers due to shedding. Shedding occurs because of normal market fluctuations and because people’s circumstances change. For your community shedding is also a simpler and easier process than adopting. And simple math explains that if you’re shedding more than you’re adopting, your community will shrink. It is generally accepted that the cost of reducing shedding (attriction of community) is less than the cost of acquiring new customers (or supporting new adoption). That said, many companies focus on preventing shedding and neglect something that has more damaging and significant long-term costs, brand rot. It happens when companies forget about their core community after building a solid the late majority. While this might improve the experience of the main stream community for a while, and increase sales, it will eventually result in less engagement and greater shedding.

Rot

Unlike shedding, which happens at the periphery of your brand, rotting takes place at core. Products and services are constantly changing to reflect changes in the market environment. With change comes the need to learn about new features, interactions, and experiences a brand offers. It’s the core community that understands the legacy of development for the product/service best and who are positioned to share it with the next circle of the community/influence. If you stop paying attention to your core community, you won’t be able promote the perfusion of new stuff to your community. This is especially important if you’re extending existing lines, or introducing new ones.

Two Models

First, let’s look at a standard representation of community adoption. What I find a little misleading about this curve is that you might think that the x-axis represents time. In which case, it’s hard to capture the idea that it’s possible to continually grow from this inside out. In other words, once you’re through the early adoption segment you can focus entirely on the early majority.

diffusionofinnovation

Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model

Which I why I created a representation of my own:

Brand-Rot

With this representation, I’ve tried to show how brands grow from the inside, while still preserving the information about the size of each segment of adopters. Here the size of the circle represents the size of the adoption segment (in the chart above the area under the curve does this). I’ve alse added shading to indicate the emotional engement the segment has with the brand. On the left is a representation of a healthy brand and on the right there is an example of an unhealthy brand. In the healthy example, the arrows show a flow of community moving outward from each segment to replace loss at the periphery due to shedding. In the example on the right, however, the center communities have been neglected and are no longer emotionally engaged with the brand. This results in a lack of movement from innovators to early adopters, and from early adopters to the early majority, thus the arrows have been removed.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your feedback.

Three Steps To Brand Love

People seem to fall in love with brands for three reasons that work together:

  1. Desire: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sums it up best; a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, which organizes basic needs such as food and shelter at the base of a pyramid and aspirational needs (self-actualization) at the top.*  No matter what level of the pyramid your product or service works on, it has to fullfil a need in order for people to fall in love with it. I actually think the word “desire” is more accurate than “need”, but either way a motivational force is essential because it’s pretty hard to make people fall in love if they don’t want to.
  2. Trust: In the diagram below, the brand experience stairway illustrates how brands build trust through interactions and over time. I’ve written about this in my post Where Marketers Are Today, but the gist of it is that satisfying customers’ desires/needs/motivations repeatedly leads to beneficial behavioral patterns and ultimately to trust. Actually, you can even go beyond trust to loyalty, but the underlying idea is that people don’t fall in love without establishing a behavioral pattern.
  3. Emotional Connection: First off, falling in love is not rational, does not obey economic theory, and is not simply based on a Pavlovian satisfaction of needs. Second, there are degrees of being in love, and you can fall out of love if you don’t acknowledge/appreciate the sentiment.  It’s really a cocktail of satisfaction, behavioral pattern, and disposition. In other words, you can do everything right and some people just won’t ever fall in love with you. It’s sad, I know, but there are lots of fish in the sea who will fall for your brand if you’ve got desire and trust. The trick to getting people to fall head over heals is to let them have what they love. Give them the brand.

behavior

*Chip Conley wrote an interesting book about how to apply Maslow’s hierarchy to business called Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Here’s a great video of him presenting on the topic:

Where Marketers Are Today

For those who have studied marketing, you’ll recall the 4 P’s:, Product, Price, Placement and Promotion. Today, however, three out of four of those P’s have often been usurped by other parts of the organization. Product is often managed by a research and development, or product development, group. Price is often set by the sales team, or in some cases by customers. Placement is within the purview of the distribution arm, which leaves marketers with Promotion.

Promotion is often interpreted by other departments as “making it pretty” or is at the service of the sales organization. To make matters worse, organizations are siloed so these different internal organs are not well coordinated or even on same page. With increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI metrics around Promotion, marketers are less empowered and less able to bring value to the organization.

At the same time, the context in which they are operating has become more complex. New technologies offer new communication channels, and has changed the dynamics of communication. Managing the marketing mix, and optimizing it, is increasingly complex. Many traditional marketers not only don’t get the new context, but are still trying to apply a broadcast framework when they need to adopt a conversational one. This reality has degraded marketing’s reputation within organizations. That said, we need marketing more than ever at this moment, and I believe it can bring significant value to companies.

First and foremost, marketing needs to be the voice of the customer within the company. In order to do this effectively, marketers must listen to customers and empathize with them. They must do this through dialogue and by building relationships. Relationships should start with a positive interactions which lead to a sense of consistency. This in turn leads to credibility, and hopefully a sense of authenticity. From there you can start building trust and loyalty. Finally, if you do everything right people will form an emotional connection with your brand that can last a lifetime. The rub is that it’s increasingly difficult to manage this process when organizations are siloed. This is the opportunity space for marketers. Here is a good representation of how relationships are built created by David Armano, whose Logic + Emotion blog is worth checking out …. the only thing I would add to this diagram is a measure of emotional connection that increases as you climb the stairs:

Relationship Stairway

Relationship Stairway

How can you do this when all you’ve got to work with is Promotion? You can’t. So how can marketers become empowered again and start building the relationships that drive business success? I think we have to start small and demonstrate the principles of what makes marketing powerful on a small scale. In the process, we need to repair relationships and open windows between siloes at the organizations we call home.

Optimization projects are often a good place to start, because they are seen as quality improvement rather than as new projects. A simple example might look at optimizing an online communications channel like a newsletter. If there is already something in place, work with the IT team to establish some baseline performance metrics. Talk with the sales team to understand what kinds of challenges they are facing and how the newsletter can support them. Identify some metrics that you could use to track the effect of potential changes. Talk with Human Resources to get access to the resources necessary to make changes, and to provide an incentive to participants. You might need to connect the Human Resources team with the IT team to create a system to track performance to compensation.

The next step is to start doing the work that only marketing can do. Go out and start talking to customers about what they want from the newsletter. You can conduct surveys, have in person interviews, talk with other industry experts, and more. You’ll obviously want to make sure that you can demonstrate that whatever tactical changes you are making tie back to your overall strategy as well. Take the intelligence and insights that you gather and represent them in your new design. If possible, include the stakeholders from other departments in the process to foster their investment in the results.

When the project gets implemented you’ll want to internally market your results back to the organization and to the customers. You’ve started building some relationships that you can take on to your next project, which will be bigger. In essence, internal marketing teams need to go up the same stairway they are trying to bring customers up.

UPDATE: Now you can listen to this post as a podcast:
[podcast]http://www.rolandsmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/where-marketers-are-today.mp3[/podcast]