Marketing in the Age of Social Media
Brand building in the age of Facebook and YouTube has become increasingly difficult. This was not what was expected. A decade ago, many companies believed they were entering the golden age of branding and marketing. To position their brands in the digital universe, they turned to creative agencies and thousands of technology specialists. Words like viral, talked-about, stickiness, and form factor became the common language of branding efforts. But despite all the hype, these tactics did not work very well.
Companies invested heavily in what came to be called brand-owned content as part of their strategy. The idea was this: social media would help your company gain recognition faster than traditional media and enable you to build direct relationships with customers. If you told customers great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a meeting place for consumer communities. Businesses spent billions to bring this vision to life. However, very few brands were able to generate the meaningful customer engagement they sought online. In reality, social media made brands less important. So what went wrong in this whole process?
To solve this puzzle, we must remember that brands only succeed when they create impact in the cultural arena. And brand building is essentially the set of efforts to uncover this cultural alignment. Digital technologies did not just create new social networks; they also significantly changed the way culture operates. Digital communities have become an active and important factor in cultural renewal. I call this approach crowd culture. Crowd culture is changing the rules of brand building, determining which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowd culture well, we can better understand why brand-owned content strategies have not delivered as expected and which alternative brand approaches social media has brought to the fore.
Why Did Brand-Owned Content and Sponsorship Work in the Past?
Although the pioneers of this field claim that brand-owned content is a new and important issue, it is actually nothing more than the packaging of an approach from the mass media world as a digital concept. In the early days of this era, companies leveraged the approaches of the popular entertainment world to make their brands more famous. They tried to attract their target audiences using short storytelling, cinematic tactics, songs, and empathetic characters. Alka-Seltzer's "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing," Frito Lay's "Frito Bandito," and the films in which Farrah Fawcett slathered Joe Namath with Noxema slyly infiltrated popular culture and entertained the masses.
This early form of brand-building content worked because entertainment-oriented media was an oligopoly and cultural competition was limited. In the United States, three television networks created programs for 30 weeks and ran reruns the rest of the time. Films were only shown in local cinemas, and competition in the magazine world was limited to grocery store magazine racks. Consumer-facing brands could buy fame and recognition by spending money in this tightly controlled cultural arena.
Another way for brands to influence culture was to associate themselves with successful content, that is, to sponsor programs and events. Because fans had very limited access to their idols, brands could position themselves as intermediaries that could provide this access. Over the decades, we have seen fast food chains sponsor new films, luxury car brands support golf and tennis tournaments, and youth-oriented brands back music groups and festivals.
With the introduction of new technologies that allowed audiences to avoid advertising (on television, DVD, and later on the internet), buying fame became even more difficult. Now brands had to compete directly with real entertainment. So companies took control. BMW pioneered the creation of short films on the internet. In a short time, companies turned to famous film directors (such as Michael Bay, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson, David Lynch) and began using more special effects and larger production budgets.
These early-period (and pre-social-media) digital efforts reinforced the belief that companies would gather more interested people around their brands when they delivered Hollywood-quality creativity at internet speed. Thus, a great rush to brand-owned content began. However, the pioneers of this field were not paying attention to a new type of competition. And this time, the competition came not from large media companies, but from the masses themselves.
The Rise of Crowd Culture
Traditionally, cultural innovation originates from various segments of society. These include marginalized communities and artistic circles that challenge social movements, norms, and traditions. Companies and mass media served as intermediaries and reflected these new ideas to the mass market. But social media changed everything.
Social media connects communities that were once geographically separated and tremendously increases the intensity of collaboration. These communities, which were once distant from each other, are now intensely interconnected, and their cultural influence on each other is direct and pronounced. These new crowd culture structures can be addressed in two dimensions: subcultures that house new ideologies and practices, and artistic worlds that open new horizons in entertainment.
Empowered Subcultures. Today, it is possible to see an element of crowd culture emerging on almost any topic: espresso, the death of the American Dream, Victorian novels, artistic furniture, Libertarianism, new urban life, 3D printers, animation, birdwatching, homeschooling, barbecue. In the old days, these subculture builders would come together and have very limited means of communication: magazines and later Usenet groups and meetings.
Social media spread and democratized these subcultures. With a few clicks, you can enter the center of any subculture. The interactions of the members of this subculture come to life uniquely through the web, physical spaces, and traditional media. Members who come together pioneer new products, applications, and aesthetic understandings, and bypass the gatekeepers of mass culture. With the rise of crowd culture, cultural innovators and the markets where they first make their impact are becoming one and the same.
Very fast art worlds. Producing innovative and popular entertainment requires a very different organizational model: sociologists call this an art world. Artists from art worlds (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers, cartoonists, and others) inspire and compete with each other. They work together, support each other, experiment with ideas, and encourage each other. With increased participation in such collaborative development efforts, creative and groundbreaking advances emerge. In the period before the development of social media, mass culture industries (film, television, print media, fashion) were able to progress by appropriating or repackaging each other's innovative practices.
Crowd culture has added great speed to the art world, dramatically increased the number of participants, and elevated the quality of interactions. You no longer need to be part of a local environment, and you no longer have to work a year to find funding for your short film or to convince a distributor. Today, millions of small cultural entrepreneurs come together online to showcase their art, share their ideas, refine their content, and compete with major productions. The net effect is that rapid cultural prototyping (instantly receiving the market's opinions on new ideas, listening to criticism, and working on the piece accordingly to make it more effective) is becoming the new center. In this process, new talents and formats emerge. This new content, which touches every point of pop culture, can capture target audiences more effectively and can be produced at more affordable costs. These art-world-oriented crowd cultures are also the main reason why brand-owned content has not been effective enough.
Beyond Brand-Owned Content
Although companies have pinned their hopes on brand-owned content over the past decade, the evidence clearly shows that they need to question this approach. Looking at subscriber-count metrics on platforms like YouTube or Instagram, corporate brands do not appear to be ahead. There are only three corporate brands in the YouTube 500. Instead, influencers you have never heard of and whose origins are unknown to you occupy the top of the list.
By far the most successful name on YouTube, PewDiePie, lives in Sweden and shares videos in which he provides funny voiceovers on footage of computer games he plays. By January 2016, he had nearly 11 million views, and his YouTube channel had over 41 million subscribers.
How is this possible? In fact, the story is rooted in the youth culture shaped around computer games. When this audience entered social media, it became a force. The subculture of playing computer games for entertainment, once dominant in South Korea, reached global proportions and created a vast sports audience of nearly 100 million fans, known as E-Sports. (Amazon recently acquired Twitch, an E-Sports network, for $970 million.)
In E-Sports, broadcasters add new lines to computer games. PewDiePie and his friends follow such a path to create a new genre of comedy. Other players such as VanossGaming (#19 on YouTube with 15.6 million subscribers), elrubiousOMG (#20 with 15.6 million subscribers), CaptainSparklez (#60 with 9 million subscribers), and Ali-A (#94 with 7.4 million subscribers) can also be counted among the influential names of this tribe. Crowd culture is created by media platforms that disseminate this kind of content and by fans who come together on these platforms to critique this content, amplifying some and neutralizing others. Just as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Patti Smith were stars of the analog era's street art world, PewDiePie is the star of this digital art world. The difference, however, is that the power of crowd culture can bring this name to global fame in a record-short time.
Comedy with computer games is just one of hundreds of new genres created by crowd culture. These new genres are poised to fill every entertainment gap, from giving fashion advice to young girls, to new foods, to teenage fandom information. Compare PewDiePie, who produces dirt-cheap videos in his own home, with McDonald's, which manages one of the world's largest social media budgets. McDonald's channel (ranked 94th) has 204,000 YouTube subscribers. PewDiePie is at a point 200 times more popular than this brand, at a cost incomparable with that money.
Or take Red Bull, one of the most successful players in the brand-owned content world. The brand had become a new media hub for producing content related to extreme and alternative sports. Although Red Bull spends $2 billion of its annual marketing budget on brand-owned content, its YouTube channel (ranked 184th with 4.9 million subscribers) lags behind the channels of dozens of crowd-culture-based startups with budgets under $100,000. Indeed, Dude Perfect (ranked 81st with 8 million subscribers), one of five Scottish young men producing videos about incredible shots or funny athletic moves, has achieved much better results.
Another striking example is Coca-Cola. In 2011, the company grandly announced its new marketing strategy called Liquid&Linked. At the core of this strategy was a shift from "excellence in creativity" (the old mass media approach) to "excellence in content" (brand-owned content on social media). Coke's Jonathan Mildenhall said Coke would produce "the world's most engaging content" and would "capture a large share of popular culture" with this content. Sales were expected to double by 2020.
A year later, Coca-Cola made its first big move and transformed its static corporate website into a digital magazine called Coca-Cola Journey. The magazine covered almost every topic in pop culture, from sports to food, sustainability to travel. It seemed like the ideal application of brand-owned content.
Journey has been online for three years, but it cannot be said to be very widely viewed. It is not among the 10,000 most visited sites in the US or the 20,000 most visited sites in the world. Similarly, the company's YouTube channel has 676,000 subscribers (ranked 2,749).
It appears that consumers are not very interested in content created by brands. The number of people who want to share this content in their own spaces is quite low. Many regard it as a kind of brand spam. After realizing this, Facebook began charging companies that wanted to send "sponsored" content to people's feeds.
The problem companies face is not about creativity, but is much more structural. Large companies design their marketing campaigns as the antithesis of the art world. I call these brand bureaucracies. These companies have the ability to coordinate and execute complex marketing programs across multiple markets. However, this model can pave the way for mediocrity when it comes to cultural innovation.
Brand Sponsors Are Being Sidelined
Many entertainment elements such as performing artists, athletes, sports teams, films, television programs, and computer games are quite popular on social media. You can see that almost all platforms are occupied by the most famous people. It is clear that musicians Rihanna, One Direction, Katy Perry, Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Taylor Swift attract huge audiences on YouTube. On Twitter, alongside these artists, we see other celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, Oprah, Bill Gates, and the Pope have influence. Fans follow posts from athletes like Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Neymar, and Kaka; from FC Barcelona and Real Madrid (which are far more popular than the two leading sports equipment brands, Nike and Adidas). The situation is not very different on Instagram.
These celebrities form the hyper-connected communities that experts in the field have long claimed social media would deliver. But these communities are not open to use by companies and their brands. In fact, this is not very surprising: a person's interaction with a figure they admire is not the same as their interaction with a car rental brand or fruit juice brand. A tactic that works for Shakira may backfire for Crest or Clorox. It would be somewhat foolish to think that consumers would want to talk about Corona or Coors in the same way they talk about the talents of Ronaldo and Messi.
Social media gives fans the chance to form rich communities around the figures they admire and to communicate directly with them through tweets, pins, and shares. Sports teams hire brand ambassadors to reach fans in real time during matches, and as soon as the match ends, players begin posting photos and gossip from the locker room. Alongside general platforms, new media sites such as Vevo, SoundCloud, and Apple Music also enhance the possibility of direct communication.
Of course, celebrity figures are happy to take sponsors' money, but the cultural benefit brands expect is decreasing every day.
Cultural Brand Building
Although crowd culture is reducing the effectiveness of brand-owned content and sponsorship, it is bringing to the fore an alternative effort I call cultural marketing. (See the "Building Icons with Cultural Marketing" box.) The major rise of Mexican food chain Chipotle between 2011 and 2013 (the period before the recent food poisoning allegations) demonstrates the power of this approach.
Chipotle made good use of a tremendous cultural opportunity put forward by a movement that began with the criticism of the industrial food culture dominant in America in the social media environment and was initially seen as marginal. The food chain joined this movement as one of the leading advocates of this crowd-culture ideology. Chipotle became one of America's most attractive and talked-about brands by using cultural brand building. (Recent food issues have damaged the brand's perception.) Fundamentally, Chipotle succeeded in five principles:
1. Identify cultural orthodoxies. In cultural brand building, the brand puts forward an innovative ideology that will break down traditional category understandings. To do this, you must first identify what I call cultural orthodoxies, the traditional structures that will provide the springboard for the brand. The industrial food ideology in America was invented by food marketing companies in the early 20th century. Americans believed that with exciting scientific developments (such as margarine, instant coffee, Tang), standard production processes, and their oversight by the FDA, they would have access to delicious and healthy foods. These orthodoxies were the dominant understanding in the fast food category until McDonald's emerged in the 1960s.
2. Identify cultural opportunities. Over time, changes in society cause orthodoxies to erode. Consumers begin to seek alternatives, allowing innovative brands to seize the necessary opportunities to spread their own ideologies.
The breaking point in the industrial food field came in 2001. Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation challenged this approach. This was followed by Morgan Spurlock's 2004 film Super Size Me and Michael Pollan's influential 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma. These critiques attracted serious attention from the upper class. They paved the way for serious discussion of industrial food and the momentum gained by Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe's, and a series of upscale food companies. The same transformation also affected other countries where industrial food ideology was widespread. For example, in the UK, famous chefs Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall played similar roles.
Before the social media era, these works could not have moved beyond a small and closed audience. Today, however, crowd cultures pick up these critiques, amplify them, and make industrial food a mainstream concern. Sugar-containing processed foods, preservatives, rBGH in milk, bisphenol A leaching from plastics, GMOs, and many other topics continue to spread at internet speed. Images of meat-like objects have gone viral. Parents worry about the foods they feed their children. Crowd culture took an elite concern and brought it to a national scale and turned it into a public challenge.
3. Target the crowd culture. Those challenging the industrial food ideology are not new; they had been saying this for nearly 40 years, but they were generally pushed aside as marginal views. A small audience had formed around organic farming and natural foods, and they patronized markets formed by cooperatives and farmers. With the spread of social media, innovative ideas in the food field also began to come to the fore. These included advocates of evolutionary nutrition and Paleolithic diets, sustainable farmers, a new generation of environmental activists, urban farmers, and farm-to-table restaurants. In short, an enormous cultural mobilization began to form around the norms of the pre-industrial food era. Chipotle succeeded because it joined this crowd culture and positioned it as a reason for existence.
4. Spread a new ideology. Chipotle produced two films to support the pre-industrial food ideology. Back to the Start, released in 2011, was an animated film with simple line figures. In the film, an old-style farm gradually turns into a parodic hyper-industrial facility: pigs are stacked like sardines inside concrete buildings, then injected with chemicals in the production facility that cause them to balloon, and in the next stage are turned into cubes and loaded onto trucks. The farmer is concerned about this scene and decides to convert his farm back to its old pastoral form.
The second film, The Scarecrow, was a parody of an industrial food company that markets its products as if they were natural. This company is actually a place where animals are injected with drugs and mistreated. It produces foods labeled "100% beef-like" that children eat with delight, thinking they are real. A scarecrow working in this factory is unhappy with what he sees and gets an idea. He takes some vegetables grown in his own garden and opens a small shop in the city where he uses them to make food. The shop is just like Chipotle.
The films were released with a small media budget and immediately offered on social media platforms. Both films were tremendously effective, viewed tens of millions of times, made a big splash in the media, and helped increase sales and profitability. Both films won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
Chipotle's films were cited as among the most successful examples of brand-owned content, which was not true. These films worked because they went beyond mere entertainment. Both films had strong artistic qualities, but there were thousands of equally successful and artistic films that had failed to create impact. The story of the films was not very original either; this theme had been worked on many times in the last 10 years. The films exploded on social media because they became myths of the crowd culture that idealized the pre-industrial food era. Chipotle put forth an inspiring vision for America's return to its natural farming and food traditions and for overcoming many of the problems in the widespread food system.
The bad boy of the pre-industrial food era was fast food. For this reason, it appealed to the masses that a fast food chain claimed this story. Chipotle was waging war against meat-like substances! Moreover, boutique and local foods were expensive, but people could escape these concerns thanks to a $7 burrito at Chipotle. Because the films played on the concerns that dominated crowd culture, they did not need to compete in the entertainment field.
5. Continuous innovation using cultural sensitivities. A brand can sustain its cultural impact by playing on topics that rely on an ideology and feature prominently in the media. Ben & Jerry's acted in exactly this way when it brought its sustainable business model philosophy to the fore. As the brand launched new products to the market, it subtly mocked the Reagan administration's stance on issues such as nuclear weapons, the destruction of rainforests, and the war on drugs.
To succeed, Chipotle must continue to control the live wires of its products and communications structures. The company is not very successful from this perspective. The films broadcast on the Hulu platform did not create enough impact on social media because it chose to imitate its old films rather than touch on new sensitivities. Subsequently, Chipotle entered a new topic and began advocating for non-GMO foods. Although the validity of this claim has been questioned (after all, Chipotle sells meat from animals fed GMO corn and offers beverages containing GMO sweeteners), GMOs were a relatively weaker sensitivity. They were more popular among activist consumers, and many brands had already moved past this. The brand's efforts failed to mobilize crowd culture. Other sensitive issues such as sugary beverages and industrial plant structures attract much more attention and have not yet been resolved by food companies.
Advocating for an ideology in the mass market is a double-edged sword. The brand must do what it says or be pushed out of the game.
Chipotle is a large-scale and growing company with industrial processes, not a small taco shop. The company that stands against industrial food offers easily perishable foods, which is also a big risk. A while ago, the brand's reputation was severely damaged due to an E. coli outbreak and another virus incident that was heavily covered in the media. Chipotle will not be able to regain customer trust through advertising or public relations activities. Instead, the company must convince the masses that it continues to strongly defend foods outside of industrial food and once again ensure that the masses become advocates of the brand.
Competition for Crowd Cultures
Companies that want to do the right brand work on social media must target crowd cultures. Today, many brands trying to align with cultures are following trends. But this is an ordinary approach to brand building. Hundreds of companies look at the same trend lists and do the same things. It is normal that customers do not show much interest. Brands must target unique ideologies in the cultural structure of crowds and capture perspectives that will make themselves noticed in the overcrowded media world.
Consider the personal care category. The Dove, Axe, and Old Spice brands captured tremendous customer interest and made a lot of noise in a classic category where it was thought that people would not show much interest on social media. The success of these brands stems from their embrace of gender ideologies formed by crowd culture.
Axe plays on the young male audience. In the 1990s, feminists criticizing patriarchal culture were supported by academics at American universities. These critiques triggered a backlash by questioning "politically correct" gender politics. Men were under pressure and needed to reclaim their traditional masculinity. A rebellion movement began in the UK and then in the US, and a structure called "lad" culture emerged. New magazines like Maxim, FHM, and Loaded brought back the Playboy era and began publishing lightly erotic features. This ideology had an effect on many young men. In the early 2000s, lad culture began to become an important crowd culture.
Axe (sold under the name Lynx in the UK and Ireland) had been sold in Europe and Latin America since the 1980s, but had become an outdated and secondary brand. This situation continued until the company stirred things up with its campaign called the "Axe Effect," which highlighted sexual fantasies that would not fit into political correctness. The campaign spread like wildfire on the internet and suddenly made Axe one of the leading advocates of lad culture.
Dove targeted the body-positive audience. Axe's aggressive position created a great opportunity for another brand to position itself on the "feminist" side of the picture. Dove was continuing its life as an old-fashioned brand in a category where marketers worked by considering beauty trends created by fashion designers and the media. In the 2000s, the trend of idealizing the female physique had peaked. Feminists who criticized skin-and-bones zero-size models began to make their voices heard in traditional media and social media. In the beauty field, marketing had taken on a form that alienated and distanced many women, when it should have been inspiring.
Dove's "Real Beauty Campaign" focused on the physiques of women in real life and embraced every kind of physical feature: young, old, wrinkled, thin, short. It encouraged women from all over the world to share photos of their bodies that were outside of beauty norms. Over the past decade, Dove has continued to champion other sensitivities and continued to keep the brand within the gender context.
Old Spice tapped into the hipster audience. The battle between the lad-empowering understanding and the body-positive women's movement paved the way for an untouched area in the personal care market. In the 2000s, a new hipster ideology began to emerge that defined the sophistication of young cosmopolitan adults. This audience blended the bohemian ideal of the past with a new sensibility, while also harboring irony within itself. The clothing styles reflecting this irony (quirky hats and odd-looking sweaters) and beards (waxed handlebar mustaches, full beards) had become widespread. Brooklyn was filled with people who looked like lumberjacks. This sensibility, supported by crowd culture, had begun to spread nationwide.
Old Spice began to focus on this hipster movement by mocking the masculine cliches of Axe and some other brands. In the campaign, a former American football player Isaiah Mustafa was displayed shirtless with the message "This is probably what your man could smell like." The film hit the hipster audience right on target. The extremely sexy male figure it put forward was actually being used to mock masculine attractiveness. The message was: If you can offer your woman incredible adventures, gold and diamonds, and impressive poses, and if you do all this with Old Spice, you too can be attractive.
All three brands became popular on social media because they had achieved cultural marketing, which is an approach beyond classical brand work. Each brand had captured a unique ideology of cultural sensitivities based on gender and sexuality among a large audience on social media. Each brand spread this ideology to large audiences. Such opportunities can only be seen with a cultural marketing approach. For this, research needs to be conducted to identify ideologies suitable for each category, and crowd cultures must be penetrated. It is not easy for companies relying on traditional segmentation models and trend reports to seize these opportunities.
IN THE LAST DECADE, COMPANIES have struggled to create brand models that work in the chaotic environment of social media. Despite many brands spending billions on major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, they have not been able to make their voices heard. Companies must shift their focus away from the platforms themselves and toward the crowd culture, which is the real power in the digital arena. Crowd culture offers brands more opportunities than ever before. Old Spice did not succeed because of its Facebook strategy; it succeeded because it used an ironic hipster aesthetic. Chipotle did not achieve success thanks to its YouTube strategy, but with its products and communications oriented toward the non-industrial food domain. Companies can win the battle of acting in alignment with culture by using cultural marketing work that allows them to tap into the power of the masses.
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