So, the Old Spice man increased the sales of the product. Now we can renew the debate on the efficacy of social media on the bottom line. We obviously won’t ask for correlation data. 🙂 The other side effect is that every brand manager will now want to replicate it – especially the viral and the ROI. Quite like a poster child (in India) of an era gone by – Sunsilk’s GangofGirls, which at that point had made many a brand manager experimenting with digital media tell their agency “I want one too”. Damn virals work at meta levels!!
I recently read Kapil Ohri’s article on afaqs, on the site’s makeover – the shift from blogs and gangs to trends and forums and the ‘mandatory’ buttons – Facebook and Twitter. Its early days, so it’d be unfair to make a comment on the numbers, even if they were to be considered a parameter of success/ failure. But while, on buttons, I think YouTube videos would’ve been a help. More on that in a bit. A revamped GoG, and the Pantene vs Dove war for hairspace being fought offline and on blogs (Karthik, L Bhat) gives me enough food for thought.. and opinion.
Sunsilk Gang of Girls: GoG could have (like an industry person commented on the afaqs post) integrated Facebook in a much better way. Check out what Levi’s has done at their online store. Instead of separate registrations and profile, Facebook’s plugins could make life easier for the user and automatically bring in the ‘gangs’. It could get them to pull their own photos from Facebook for the ‘Makeover Machine’, suggest it to friends, and so on. Or build a Twitter app that uses the display picture. It could have perhaps thought bigger and had their ambassador (Priyanka Chopra?) interact with the users through her own identities on these platforms. Or used a location based tool like Foursquare (or FB Pages or later Google Places) to start building a resource for salons and tips at each place (think of a Burrp! for salons), maybe in sync with a YouTube channel for tips.
Pantene: Good Morning! They obviously missed a little thing when they didn’t pay attention to the pwnage of DNA at the hands of the Times Group during the former’s launch campaign in Mumbai back in 2005 (?), or the more recent Airtel- Reliance DTH fun. Not to mention the cliche that after a certain point, the only person who gets teased is the brand manager. Ok, I won’t overstate, but c’mon this is a real-time era AND they did walk into a Dovetailed ambush. Since the internet already has made them un-mysterious (thanks for that info, Karthik), maybe Pantene should have just added those FB page and Twitter links to their mass media communication, and solved the mystery immediately online. Mind you, thanks to our dismal internet penetration, they could still demystify it again on mass media, later, after perhaps, adding the content from their online and offline activities. (think non market research agency 80%) That way, there would’ve been at least some buffer against a Dove’s sneak attack. Arguable, but possible.
Dove: All of us should take the time and remember the controversy over the ‘campaign for real beauty’. But hey, they saw an opportunity and used it. Effects on long term goals are again arguable.
A little note on ‘low involvement’. I wrote about brands, content and new media platforms in the last post, in the context of the Old Spice campaign, and also mentioned the importance of ‘intent’ and setting objectives. Once the ‘why’ is done, the relevant crowd can be identified, along with the platforms and activation strategies – ‘(to) who’, where and what. (Read Rohit Awasthi’s comment on Karthik’s first post) When the ‘right’ content is pitched to the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time (and the ‘right’ platform too), very few categories are low involvement. (read Naina’s comment on that post) And that’s the beauty of the web in general, and the tools that social media have provided marketers. Old Spice could be seen as low involvement too, until they did this campaign.
But having mostly seen communication as advertising (except arguably PR), creating content for social platforms is in itself quite a challenge for brand managers. Even if they were to view ‘social’ as ‘media’, it requires a complete realignment of how media and content strategy is done, mostly because the mechanics of distribution are completely different. At a fundamental level, brands are dependent on users of platforms to create a buzz, and money doesn’t always work. At this point, tools can help with the ‘time’ (including location and other contexts) and ‘people’ (interest), and the way it works, if the ‘content’ is done right, people will get other people.
Therefore brand managers need to make a more diligent effort. The fragmentation of traditional media does not seem to have made much of an impact on the costs involved in using them as distribution channels. So when ‘social media’ presents ‘free’ channels, brand managers see a value proposition and jump right in with a TVC and or/other weapons of mass mediocrity. Brands, I believe, need to invest a bit more on who they’re trying to reach, and then invest some more on building content and designing networks and constructs (irrespective of platform) that will drive the crowd to interact with the content and share it more. Content and people that will drive more connections, and help meet everyone’s objectives.
But yes, until Augmented Reality allows me to scan a shampoo and tell me how many of my friends liked it, and think I should use it, (though my hair won’t last that long 😐 ) lets keep playing all the shampoo games we can play. 🙂 And while on using social platforms purely with a sales objective, I’m reminded of how Grandma uses her laptop. (vid below) Can it be used for those purposes? Of course! But is that its best case use? We can argue 😉
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg6emajJmEo
until next time, sometimes brand strategies can be real poo!!
Having exhausted a weekend (some of it), 2 blog posts and much of my breath on this, let me just add that ascertaining low involvement/engagement will only help in arriving at the message. Old spice was not talking breathlessly about how super it’s product was; instead, it used it’s product merely as a backdrop to talk about something that people enjoy(ed).
A seemingly high involvement/engagement product need not do this explicitly and can talk directly about it’s products.
Simple thumb rule…if you think/know people take your products seriously, talk about the product. If they don’t, talk about the people who use your products/product category.
Like i said, i think all factors play an important part – who, where, when and what. Involvement is extremely subjective and contextual. Shampoo is extremely low involvement for me, justifiably :), but seemingly not so for say, Naina.
So I’m not sure if its really as simple as that thumb rule, because ‘people’ are the differentiators on social platforms. eg. Hippo talks about itself, the people who talk about it AND hunger, depending on context.
Agree about context when it comes to arriving at low/high involvement.
On this topic, however, it’d help if brand managers assume it based on larger numbers and common sense. Shampoos like Pantene, Clinic or Head and Shoulders are almost on a similar price levels and have very similar chemicals listed on their bottles 🙂 The benefits they offer are advertising-perpetrated and cannot be decisively proven by anyone – it is hence highly personal. So, when Head & Shoulders says it removed dandruff, we believe it as much as we believe Clinic All Clear!
On Hippo, aren’t they using topical humor in a specific lingo as the leverage, while plugging Hippo and hunger occasionally? If it was all about Hippo alone and hunger (which is an advertising-created message and can only go so far), they could not have come so far!
Hmm, so should Pantene or any of the others consider theirs a low involvement category? Isn’t that precisely what must have made Pantene do a ‘hype’ as opposed to a ‘value’ campaign? But if they had understood that involvement was subjective, they might have done things differently, especially in their use of social platforms?
My point about Hippo was regarding the thumb rule. In what might not be seen as a ‘taken seriously’ category, it doesn’t stick to ‘people using the product’, it talks product, utility value, people, topical things and adds a tone to it.
since the comments seem to have taken the debate to high and low involvement, here’s a thought. those who break the clutter stand a greater chance to stay ahead in the race. can social media not allow opportunities to actually create high involvement for these supposedly low involvement products? doesnt it present an opportunity to brand managers, which i am assuming is also a point manu was trying to make. i havent studied the shampoo market, but for me head & shoulders is still number one in the anti-dandruff category. it may not be a fact but a consumer’s perception. clearly others are trying to gnaw into that market/mind share..now.. isnt there an opportunity for H&S to make it high involvement through social media to create brand loyalty and at the same time not lose out on that anti-dandruff edge therefore reiterate that product benefit? i would like to believe yes.
Precisely. Rather than lump a category into one level of involvement, i think social platforms allow brands to find and empower the people highly involved in their category to experience the brand and spread the word, and thereby (many a time) increase the levels of involvement of the people in their network….
Aiyo…that’s what I’m saying also 🙂
If the ‘assumption’ is that a product is in an interchangeable product category (meaning, relatively low involvement in selection), it could help if the brand plans engagement tactics away from the product’s seemingly low involvement topic and use other, people-centric themes…and hence make it high-involvement by message.
It’s a thumb rule to help in planning what topics may work better – paste/chewing gum…we don’t talk about the experience as much as a brand manager wants us to. So, talk of oral hygiene (convincingly). Mosquito liquid – we don’t debate on it’s efficacy as much as the brands wants us to – so, talk of mosquito breeding season, malaria-related help etc.