Even if your brand is not an active user of social media, your customers are

11/28/09 09:35 AM Filed in: Social Media

According to Paul Worthington “ In a conversation driven world, the real threat is not conversation itself, but commoditization. Unless customers have reason to talk, they won't. And a brand that generates little or no conversation will be killed by one that does. You can't spend your way to success. No matter how big your advertising budget, or how much equity your brand already has, an undifferentiated offer will be found out through the power of online conversation. The number of brands consumers have to choose from is exploding exponentially. For example, in just the past five years, trademarks in the technology space have risen from just under 100,000 to just over 500,000.

In a conversation driven world, you can't buy your way to success, instead you have to earn it. This new reality may come as a shocking surprise to many brands who, over time, have come to falsely equate advertising differentiation with brand differentiation. This means that as we undertake marketing and brand building in this world, we have to leave room for the consumer. Not just to consume, but to participate and contribute to the process. Contributing to the process? Hell we do that already with focus groups ! WRONG !

Focus groups are too often a waste of time and give marketers bad information. Even if you research a product to death 4 out of 5 still fail. Why? Because marketers don’t get consumers involved in the conversation and when they do they don’t know when to shut up and let consumers talk. Listening is an acquired skill that a lot of marketers lack.

Take for example Vonage the Internet phone company that is losing subscribers. Their current branding strategy consists of running spots on cable promoting the $24.99 price. As the branding expert on Twitter recently said to me “pricing is not a branding strategy”. If you Google Vonage sucks you’re going to find a lot of pissed off people who warn you about their bad experiences with Vonage. On top of that getting people to switch from a land line to Internet line is a change in comfort level from “always there and reliable” to using the Web which people feel at times can be unreliable. They are increasing marketing and customer service but I would argue that marketing should have been cut until customer service was rated as excellent by a company like JD Powers. Besides price what is the brand value?

I have been a big proponent of ensuring that social media strategies are aligned with brand and business objectives but that does not mean that brands should not be listening and getting consumers to talk and spread the word about a great product or customer service. Social media is not a fad and will not pass, it will continue to evolve so brands had better get their feet wet now as part of an integrated brand strategy !