active cultures: linking value and digital marketing as told through yogurt
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Active Culture
sLinking Value and Digital
Marketing as Told Through Yogurt
by Steve Gottschling
Last May, Andrew Blakely repeated for us a tragic
story his boss had told him.
(you can read the whole thing here)
“This morning my yoghurt told me to find it on
Facebook. It didn’t tell me why, it just told me to find it. Why on Earth would I
want to find a yoghurt on Facebook? It’s a yoghurt!”
Up until that moment, the poor yogurt brand probably
thought they were doing everything right.
For starters, they understood the importance of engagement, of tapping into the new “empowered,
connected consumer.”
They knew the internet had changed the relationship
between brands and audiences, and they chose
to act.
But, as it turns out, simply being there
wasn’t enough. They lacked an
understanding of the ways their brand fit in their audience’s lives.
And the result was not just rejection but
complete bewilderment.
To Andrew’s boss, yogurt was a commodity with no
other meaning. He therefore had no reason to
engage with it online.
In the coming slides, we will show how brands can
successfully combine digital platforms with traditional
“passive” media to resonate with their
audience on a cultural level.
We will show how this sort of cultural resonance allows
even commodities like yogurt to weave
themselves into the stories consumers tell each other, the stories they tell about
themselves.
When everything goes according to plan, the audience
will not be scratching their heads,
wondering why they should ever engage
with your brand online.
It will make sense from the start.
Before we continue, it’s important to realize that the ingredients that
make for effective digital strategy are the same ones that helped traditional
“passive” media win over audiences for
years.
And the key ingredient is what Bernard and
Veronique Cova call Linking Value.
Source: Tribal Marketing: The Tribalisation of Society and its Impact in the Conduct of Marketing
In other words, good brands help audiences situate
themselves in their social landscape, to imagine themselves as part of
something bigger.
Modern identity is malleable, able to
be shifted and bended in an
entirely conscious way.
Every social interaction can be seen as an act of maintaining or
reshaping identity.
On the social web, this is more true than it ever has been before.
Participation in social spaces
online requires users to construct
digital selves from the ground
up.
With linking value, brands function as building blocks
in that process.
They connect our identity to ideologies, to broader
contexts, to communities of peers with similar
enthusiasms.
And the best part…
Most of this takes place inour imagination.
Although social interaction is key for identity building,
no one else needs to be present for us to change
the way we see ourselves.
I can be completely alone in my favorite chair and still imagine myself as part of the Go Green movement, as a LOMO enthusiast, as a modern health-conscious mother. The
list is endless.
This imaginary component is what makes passive
media like print or television a primary
provider of linking value.
We’re all familiar with the ability of passive media to
illustrate and dramatize benefits.
But its real power is to create linking value by imbuing
brands with cultural meaning.
Let’s see some examples.
(Click to see video)
Note the use of familiar symbols: the cubicles, the
muted colors, the clear social roles of the
characters, the business attire.
This TV spot uses these symbols to conflate AT&T’s Blackberry Torch with the middle-class white collar
milieu.
The Torch thus becomes a way for its audience to
identify with the values of that milieu and to imagine themselves as part of it.
Even though the Blackberry’s features can be found on many other smart phones, it is the
cultural associations that differentiate the Torch.
The Pepsi ads of the 1960s are a slightly more obvious
example.
Here, the source of the linking value is right in the
tag line.
Audiences are asked to imagine themselves as part of a broader “generation,” a spirit or a movement.
And now for a completely different kind of medium, observe the changes that
have taken place in McDonalds restaurants.
McDonalds recognized its audience had developed
epicurean aspirations– a taste for good design, comfortable public space, glimmers of the
upscale.
By overhauling its interior spaces, McDonalds created an
ideological bridge to the cultural context its audience
desired.
Why do we spend all this time with passive media?
Because effective digital engagement harnesses the same principles of “cultural
invocation.”
While passive media has the power to invoke imagined cultural membership, social media makes that membership more real (or at least makes it seem
that way).
Users can locate other users in the same
community rather than merely having to imagine
their existence.
But in the end, nothing has changed.
The real magic of social media, like passive media, is to give consumers a way to situate their identities within a larger cultural
context.
Now, let’s look at three yogurt brands that infuse their product with linking value, elevating it above mere commodity status.
First, let’s discuss Fage
Though Fage Greek Yogurt has received a brand tune up from both Ogilvy and Mullen since 2007, the
brand has always aligned itself with an upscale epicurean worldview.
(click any image to
see video)
Notice how this TV spot excises altogether rational
benefit descriptions.
No one even mentions what the product is.
Instead it presents a view of the world– a passion for beauty and aesthetics with
a slight bourgeois undertone.
To purchase Fage is to align yourself with a community
of aesthetes.
You can see this cultural association in past work as
well.
How does this meaning-making translate to the
digital space?
Currently, Fage’s Facebook page promotes
heavily its “Greek Getaway” contest.
By doing so, it performs a balancing act of advancing
the brand and inciting discussion.
The page presents themes of “getting the best from life,” of leisure with an
upscale bent.
It then asks users to participate.
Also worth noting are the Facebook updates that do not align with the themes expressed in the passive
media.
The brand creates engagement by asking its audience to discuss more
everyday topics like recipes and flavors, departing from its main brand message but still holding the community
together.
Now let’s talk about Stonyfield Farms
Digging up any sort of passive media campaign for Stonyfield is a challenge, as Stonyfield invests less than
half the amount its competitors invest in
traditional paid media.
Instead, the bulk of Stonyfield’s
marketing takes place on its
website, which then serves as a sort of factory for cultural
meaning.
More specifically, Stonyfield positions itself and its
audience as part of the same grassroots activist
movement.
In Stonyfield’s narrative, the brand and consumer don’t exist in separate
camps. Everyone is part of the same whole, the push
for sustainable living.
Indeed, almost all of Stonyfield’s marketing
efforts ask us to imagine “real live” people in order
to invoke feelings of bottom-up mobilization.
One example is Stonyfield’s invitations for users to submit content of their
own.
Stonyfield then posts the submissions, effectually
depicting an entire virtual community as it
participates in the brand narrative.
“Just Eat Organic” is the quintessential visual
representation of a brand community.
Users post videos of themselves following a
specific set of rules (in this case, shouting “just eat
organic”), and others can see the results.
With so many visible participants sharing the same ritual, a
feeling of solidarity emerges, an esprit de corps around organic
food.
Stonyfield achieved a similar effect with the Your Organic Moment campaign.
In place of videos are written anecdotes, but the idea is the same– a visual
representation of the community surrounding the
brand.
Stonyfield doesn’t just ask its audience to imagine a
cast of likeminded peers– it uses visuals to make that
community real.
And we haven’t even mentioned the interviews
with the farmers who supply Stonyfield’s milk.
(Click image to visit site)
Meanwhile, Stonyfield’s yogurt lids create a bridge
between this virtual community of activists and
“the real world.”
Stonyfield is certainly not the only brand to surround
itself with a virtual community.
But what sets the brand apart is the way these
tactics work toward one cohesive brand narrative.
Ultimately, Stonyfield’s digital efforts are about voices– rounding
up a small choir of different stories from the people connected with
the company and with the causes it
champions.
To purchase Stonyfield yogurt is to lend your voice to that choir, to become a
part of its grassroots environmental movement.
And, finally, Yoplait
What sets Yoplait apart from Fage and Stonyfield is the huge role that gender
plays in its brand narrative.
Featured in Yoplait’s passive media efforts are
not just descriptions of the yogurt itself but portrayals of what it means to be a
modern American woman.
Here are some TV spots to illustrate my point.
Click each image to see the spot.
First, note the use of movement in each ad.
There is always at least one character in fluid motion.
In the 2010 and 2011 ads, this motion is backed by an
equally locomotive soundtrack.
The ads’ constant motion helps imply something
larger than the individual– the 2008 ad whizzes
through one woman’s life from childhood to
motherhood, while the 2011 spot features
strangers passing the yogurt from one person to
another.
Next, note the use of rational statements of fact.
These explanations are then coupled with collective language like “we’re on the move
and we don’t want anything to slow us down.”
The collective language creates linking value by
implying a greater community of modern
health conscious women.
“We will not let a lack of calcium slow us down! We
will act together!”
Yoplait also creates linking value with its extensive line
of flavors, which many of the ads mention either
visually or verbally.
The following TV spot makes the flavors is chief focus (click the image to
view).
The ability of these flavors to spur community
engagement becomes much more clear when you visit Yoplait’s twitter page.
On Twitter, Yoplait spends almost all its time responding to individual
tweeters, often asking them to engage with the community by discussing their favorite flavors.
In this way, talking about flavor (especially identifying with a
certain one) becomes a way of identifying with the community as
a whole.
Ultimately, the flavors alone drum up respectable community engagement,
but what’s even more important is the way Yoplait uses passive media to align
itself with a desirable cultural identity, thereby creating more excitement around its digital spaces.
So what can we recommend to that ill-fated yogurt brand that tried to
court Andrew Blakely’s boss?
First, using only the popular digital touchpoints like
Facebook and Twitter is not enough to create meaning.
Brands need to find another way to connect themselves
to broader cultural contexts, whether through
traditional paid media or, as Stonyfield shows, through digital properties of their
own.
Second, companies should view
engagement on those social platforms as the reward, the result of consumers imbuing
their brand with greater meaning.
Only when a brand has become more than a commodity will users advocate it digitally.
Third, there is absolutely no better time than now to
understand what communities surround the
brand already, what meanings the brand has
already adopted.
After all, linking value is only useful when it
connects people to the community or ideology with which they genuinely want
to identify.
In the end, it’s tempting to see
digital media as an upgrade, a “next
step up” from traditional passive
media.
But this would be a mistake. Instead, we should look at both media as equally important in the
creation and dissemination of
meaning.
Thank You
by Steve Gottschling
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