In the land of "dark social," cultural relevance matters
Public communications platforms like Twitter and Facebook have given such a high degree of visibility to specific ways of talking about brands that, whenever a new study comes along and reveals the ways brands are not being discussed in public, it becomes Big News.
An Atlantic article last week discussed the shadowy place where referrer traffic is untraceable, because the traffic comes from links passed around in private rather than from other websites. Since so many different exchanges (emails, Gchats, Skype conversations, mysterious diaries found in parking lots) can generate this sort of “direct” traffic, it’s incredibly difficult to measure.
The article even states that, across a broad aggregate of online magazines and other media sites, almost 69% of the social referrals came from these untraceable sources.
And while it’s important to highlight the forms of online communication that take place outside the public eye, this new piece of data mostly reiterates a truth many marketers have already heard but which nonetheless gets muffled amid all the talk of social media engagement.
Napkin Labs recently found that only 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook page via likes, comments, polls and other means, while a study conducted a year beforehand found something similar:
Being a fan, for the most part, is a rather passive activity. A whopping 77% of consumers said they interact with brands on Facebook primarily through reading posts and updates from the brands.
A measly 17% of respondents said they interact with brands by sharing experiences and news stories with others about the brand, and only 13% of respondents said they post updates about brands that they Like.
In fact, giving disproportionate attention to a form of engagement only a minority of folks practice is quite a common theme. Martin Weigel summarizes the issue in an excellent blog post, in which he writes:
The visible consumer is easy to find. Visible and vocal, they are the people lining up waiting for the new Apple Store to open. Waiting overnight to be the first to buy the latest iteration of Call of Duty. Or Harry Potter. Sporting Harley Davidson tattoos, and signing up as fans on Facebook. The visible consumer is well, visible. They don't require that much effort to find and spot.
But uncritically extrapolating from the visible consumer or placing a disproportionate emphasis on the visible consumer warps our understanding. And blinds us from seeing and understanding the consumers who really matter.
It’s easy to direct most of our focus to the discussions taking place on public platforms, where a brand’s most devout enthusiasts lay out their opinions and attitudes for all to see. But this obscures the vast number of conversations happening in private, conversations in which folks attach a whole range of meanings to the brands they discuss without any of it wafting toward marketers’ ears.
But the fact that we lack direct access to these interactions needn’t discourage us. Instead, it’s a call to make brands culturally relevant, to hone our communication strategies so they resonate with the large swathes of people whose thoughts and behaviors we can’t monitor in real time. Here are a few ways to do this:
First, make it easy to figure out where the brand fits culturally, so it’s just as easy for me to talk about that brand with my friends.
When I say “fits culturally,” I mean the brand should make clear what causes they support and what values, milieus, and communities, they associate with.
J Crew, for example, has embedded itself so thoroughly in the heritage Americana aesthetic that the company comes to mind every time someone dares to say the phrase “timeless and classic.”
Brands like Stonyfield, Chipotle, and Patagonia use owned and paid media to advocate for real environmental change.
And Whole Foods taps into the foodie values of the upper middle class to establish itself as the official grocer of the American yuppie.
Associating the brand with a clear cultural milieu is important because, while I know very few people who will repeat to their friends a brand’s tag line or key soundbites, plenty of folks who will mention a brand if it solidifies their own connection to a particular identity or cultural space.
In other words, because these brands’ cultural associations are so pronounced, I know exactly how I’m positioning myself when I talk about them with my friends. And if drawing attention to a particular brand associates me with a desirable identity or community, I’m much more likely to mention that brand in conversation (or walk around carrying Whole Foods bags like the man above).
I hear way too many folks, whether in interviews or trade publications, draw a line between “lifestyle brands” and “functional brands,” where a toiletries company shouldn’t try to embed itself in a cultural space because, well, it makes toiletries. But if you really want people to discuss your deodorant, tying that product to a desirable identity (look at Old Spice or even Axe!) is a good way to start.
Second, find a point of view that taps into the desires of large swathes of people.
In the blog post from Martin Weigel I mentioned above, two of the brands he cites for their zealous niche audiences are Apple and Harley. And yet both brands reached the heights they did because their messaging grasped the ideological core of broad cultural movements, touching upon concerns that lots of people shared.
Apple best summarized its ideological connections in its 1998 “Think Different” campaign, but since then the majority of its communications have championed the same themes of nonconformity and creativity, along with the idea of using these traits to make life simpler and more fulfilling. Arguably, Apple’s embededness in such a consistent set of values accounts for the uproar that ignited when the company released its “Genius” ads last July, where the cultural cues of past campaigns had been replaced by something far more banal.
Harley Davidson, as its 2011 “Cages” spot makes clear, taps into the theme of escape from hum drum mediocrity. The image of the tough-guy rider doesn’t just deepen the brand’s appeal among a niche audience. It becomes a symbol for a much more widely-held set of desires.
Lastly, make sure your communications strategy actually aligns with your business practices and internal culture.
Many brands have a campaign or two where they embed themselves in a cultural space, and that’s about it. Visit their website, and they become another dull brand drawing attention to the same dull set of rational benefits as all their competitors.
On the other hand, brands that do have a cohesive communications strategy fall apart when their business practices diverge wildly from the ways they present themselves. No example is clearer than BP, which carried all the visual symbols of a ‘green company,’ and yet, well, you know the rest.
Ideally, the brand’s external presence should spring from values and practices within the company. That way, even with employees using social media to broadcast their own thoughts, and even with customers interacting with the brand offline in ways social media managers will never hear about, there is far less a chance of image clashing with reality.
In the end, the fact that only a fraction of conversations about brands reach the ears of marketers shouldn't be a cause for alarm. Instead, it's a reason to take a deeper look at how brands resonate with the values of audiences from many different communities. How (or even whether) they incorporate that brand into their identities. And how we can use that information to adjust our communications strategy to motivate the broadest number of people even if they fall outside the reach of our social media presence.
