Tagged: marketing

What #WaitroseReasons Reveals About Why People Talk About Brands

First published here on the FACE company blog on 9th October 2012

Did the #WaitroseReasons Twitter promotion snatch success from the jaws of disaster – or the other way around?

Three weeks on, marketers are still talking about it: it’s clearly made impact on one group at least! But to us, as social media researchers immersed in hundreds of comments every day about how people talk about brands, much of the analysis seems naïve, based on an overly superficial understanding of what people are doing when they talk on social media. A hint: they’re not really talking about your brand…

But before we explain why, a summary of the Waitrose kerfuffle:

On 17th September, @Waitrose asked their customers to share their reasons for shopping at Waitrose, using the hashtag #WaitroseReasons. They got a lot of responses – probably not in quite the style they expected… Instead of an outpouring of brand love and affirmation, Twitter became a torrent of snark:

waitrose

Oops. The runaway Twitter discussion produced a corresponding surge in digital industry & marketing press and blogs trying to make sense of the situation.

This followed a classic dialectic trajectory – first, the stern claims that “Waitrose was asking for trouble”, followed by enthusiastic rebuttals that all publicity is good publicity, and all ‘engagement’ is a sign of brand affection. But this hasn’t culminated in synthesis, but rather name-calling: specifically, Mark Ritson in Marketing Week arguing “Why marketers are socially stupid”. A bold claim: let’s examine it.

Ritson begins by making a very important point: situating Waitrose’s social media tactics in the context of their overall brand strategy:

“The ultimate purpose of Waitrose’s social media strategy is not to start conversations or increase the number of followers the brand has on Twitter. The purpose of Waitrose’s social media strategy is to build its brand and increase sales. Waitrose has had a successful strategy to do just that, built around two approaches – first, getting existing shoppers to shop more frequently at Waitrose and second, attracting new shoppers into the stores.”

This is really important, and not often enough done. We entirely agree – volumes of mentions or retweets are not a meaningful end in themselves, and social media metrics shouldn’t blind researchers or brands to the real goals.

What we disagree with is his next claim:

“But this campaign inadvertently positions the supermarket as posh, snobby, overpriced and reserved exclusively for the upper classes. That’s terrible news for Waitrose, because it has spent the past four years positioning its brand away from these stereotypes and towards a more accessible, value-based position to drive market share gains.

[…] Existing shoppers at Waitrose, the middle-class segment it targets, will feel sensitive and perhaps a little less enthusiastic about entering the store now, and store traffic will decline. Potential converts to Waitrose will have had their stereotypes confirmed and be less likely to consider the switch in future. Perhaps neither of these impacts will be huge, but they will be negative and they were self-inflicted.”

What’s Ritson’s thesis – that people will take the “butler” and child-called-Orlando comments literally, and conclude that Waitrose is not a place for people who don’t have these things? This is suggesting someone’s “socially stupid” – but not the marketer: the Waitrose shopper. Twitter might allow only 140-characters, but we argue there was a lot of social nuance encoded in those tweets.

Defining features of British humour and culture: self-deprecation. Sarcasm, irony. We refuse to take ourselves seriously, and we’re somewhat keen on a bit of understatement. As a result, every international guide to British culture puzzles over the way we never seem to say what we mean. “Your report was… quite good”, says your boss with a wince. Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely “scrubs up alright”.

“Put the papaya down, Orlando!” has to be read through this lens – understanding its meaning through considering what is implied, what is inverted, and the shared tacit knowledge that’s referenced. This includes:

  • Orlando is a slightly silly & pretentious name for a child – and giving children slightly silly & pretentious names is a middle-class social trend
  • Recognising this shows familiarity with this class, and suggests the speaker is of this background or close to it – so it’s also a self-deprecating joke (which aren’t aggressive but rather inclusive – inviting recognition)
  • Recognising buying exotic fruit like papayas as another signifier of middle-class identity…
  • …and moreover the behaviour of talking loudly about specialist foods in order to demonstrate and assert middle-classness
  • Using irony and sarcasm to show that you’re not “taken in” by the brand’s marketing – (you believe) you’re subverting it
  • And by the way, the kind of person who does all these things would typically shop in Waitrose.

In fact, this is what almost all the #WaitroseReasons tweets were doing: making observations that demonstrate the author’s familiarity with and membership of a specific segment of the more comfortably-off middle class.

It went big on Twitter, because it was a way for people to talk about their favourite topic: themselves. The discussion around the hashtag wasn’t really about Waitrose as a retailer so much as a way for people to start talking about that great British obsession, social class, and where we fit into the hierarchy. It was a discussion about belonging: people were collectively & collaboratively playing with the boundaries of belonging to the middle class.Waitrose was just a signifier – a particularly rich and meaningful one, a national treasure whose meanings are owned by its customers (not just its marketers).

In fact, it mightn’t be something marketers want to hear, but people don’t really want to have relationships with brands as such. If you think about it, it’s pretty weird – a passionate love affair with the nexus of meanings encapsulated in your shampoo bottle? No: as Mark Earls argues in ’Herd’ (and we discuss in Augmented Research), “We talk of the relationships consumers have with our brands as if they were primary, but consumers’ most valuable relationships are not with brands but with other consumers.”

#WaitroseReasons was a chance for people to demonstrate their social tribe allegiance and how witty & clever they could be – two very desirable social markers, hence the massive participation. It’s basically #MiddleClassProblems with a brand attached. Was this Waitrose’s strategy? It’s not clear. It certainly was Alan Sugar’s, though, who invited people to share #TheWayISeeIt for the launch of his book – gaining 390,000 tweets, celebrity involvement and major press coverage from giving people a chance to share who they were.

But what about Mark Ritson’s second point: that #WaitroseReasons was exclusionary, that it was sending too many people a message of “not for me”?

There’s a grain of truth in this. What Waitrose did was bold – it wasn’t an ‘everyman’ strategy but rather spurred discussion about group norms. As such, this is necessarily a “boundary policing” activity, one that defines who’s the “us” who share these norms, and by logical extension who’s the “them” who doesn’t. And yes, for some people kids called Orlando and fruit like papayas are pretty far from their lives.

But brands have to do this – they have to define their audiences and target markets, rather than hoping to be all things to all people. Waitrose is a middle-class brand, its locations, pricing, product range and marketing all make this clear. Its value strategy is merely about trying to appeal to a more budget-conscious middle class shopper who might have moved away – they were never staking their claim to Asda’s demographic. It’s about consolidating loyalty.

By participating in a discussion about social norms, then, Waitrose strengthens its identification with this middle-class group. By being able to “take a joke” and “keep their chin up” during a hazing ritual, Waitrose comes out of a social media pasting showing they can demonstrate English middle class values too.

And connecting social activity back to brand strategy, then hopefully we’ve made it clear that this isn’t just a win on awareness. No: it’s also a complex but powerful statement of identification – and thereby brand loyalty. And brand loyalty gets feet through the door and keeps the tills ringing.

Influencer marketing, peers and trust: two speculative stories

01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.

02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]

03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their credibility and realness:

“Broadly I define an ‘influencer’ as someone who follows their own path, is rooted in creativity, and is looking for new ways to change or redefine their world. Someone who is an ‘influencer’ not only has broad relationships but also has deep relationships. In short, they are building a community around shared beliefs, principles, and interest.”

Philip McKenzie, Managing Partner at FREE DMC and Founder of Influencer Conference: [source]

04. We trust our friends and family because we have known them a long time and feel emotionally close to them.

05. This means we believe that their recommendations will have our best interests at heart.

*

But what happens when brands come in and try to get a piece of the action?

1a. MediaCorp have identified Amelia as influential about Personal Personality Monitoring Devices (PPMDs). They send her their new product, SomaTech, in the hope that she will talk about it to her sphere of influence and generate increased purchases.

2a. As a personal branding expert, Amelia is savvy to influencer marketing. She knows she needs to deliver visibility if she’s to continue receiving shiny freebies, so she schedules a series of tweets about the product for the next week. Each is very proper, including the brandname, the hashtag the PR had sent, and exhorting retweets from her followerbase with one too many exclamation marks.

3a. Amelia has 4,000 followers on Twitter, but two-thirds are bots or other personal branding gurus (or both), and the rest she purchased at $2.50 – $4 per follower. [source]. Almost everything she tweets is automated from Oprah Winfrey’s Paper.li, but she does also auto-schedule interactions with her sockpuppet accounts to keep her Engagement score up. This helps keep the free shiny things flowing from the social media PRs

4a. Amelia’s tweets about the SomaTech are retweeted a respectable 30 times each, and along with Amelia’s 15 positive mentions of the product herself, MediaCorp are happy.

5a. However MediaCorp haven’t connected up their Twitter analytics with their store’s Google analytics or purchase data. If they did, they’d see Amelia only generated 20 clickthroughs and no purchases. This is because her highly automated copy-cat content is followed by almost no real, active human beings. (One of the bots did try to buy something but the transaction was declined as their card was registered in Zurich and their shipping address, Belarus.)

6a. Next week Amelia shoots a YouTube segment for MediaCorp’s competitor’s personality monitor, SimSoothe, who sent her not just a free device but $250 as well. The video gets trolled by 4-Chan and goes viral.

The kind of social media user who’s highly receptive to sharing brand promotions may not be generating content that real people value. Influence metrics are highly gameable and, if incentivised by freebies, attract game-players – not the “real people” marketers actually want.

*

1b. So MediaCorp improve their influencers algorithm and have another go:

2b. Bill’s a normal guy, albeit the linchpin of his group of friends. He’s a bit surprised to receive the free SomaTech device as he’d tumbld just the other day about PPMDs being a bit creepy. This had got a bunch of reblogs and sparked a bit of a debate.

3b. Bill’s not sure what to do with the SomaTech, but his mum raised him proper so he knows that if he receives a gift, he’s got to say thanks. So he writes a blog post as MediaCorp requested, which is auto-shared to his other social networks.

4b. Bill’s ex-boyfriend sees his post. He knows MediaCorp have been exploting child labour in the Philippines, and sees an opportunity to embarass Bill. “Since when were you such a slut that you did everything some big company told you to? I remember that time we were talking about….” An argument breaks out among their friends.

5b. “Mate, seriously? That time you suggested I should get those Blahphonic headphones? Was that you, or, you know, something you’d been told to say?” asks Cate. Bill feels really awkward – it’s the fifth time he’s been asked that question this week.

6b. Bill disables his Facebook account, Tumblr etc – making him an early adopter of the Going Analogue trend, and influencing three friends to follow. But as he no longer has a social media presence, his departure goes tragically un-curated.

If customers know that peer recommendations have been purchased by brands, many will stop trusting these friends’ recommendations. This is pretty corrosive to the friendship – and defeats the brand marketer’s purpose too.

*

So what if publicly disclosed “I did this because Brand X paid me” is individually toxic to personal credibility – but sneaky (non-disclosed) influencer marketing is socially toxic to friends’ trust?

Perhaps the only circumstances in which it works is celebrity influencer marketing – but only where there is no relationship of trust between celeb and fans. To participate in influencer marketing is to say, “I see my friendships as social capital, and I’ll exchange them for a fee”. Works fine for celebs who’re selling themselves (*kough, Kardashians*) but among almost every other social media user? Rather more double-edged.

What is Facebook worth?

The arguments about valuing Facebook et al at astronomical prices all rely on the fact that it will provide extremely pertinent consumer information for targeting advertising.

So we are basically saying that their chief commercial interest is as an ancillary service for real-world marketing, where real consumers part with real dollars to purchase real products and services.

So the ultimate value of Facebook is dependent on the health of consumer goods markets, which, in the west at least, are saturated as illusory credit-based *wealth* is now disproved as a means of replacing lost income due to mass unemployment and stagnating wages.

Comment by thrawnpop on Guardian article, Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble? by Dominic Rushe, 20 Feb 2011.

This.

Everyone’s like, “OMG, Facebook means we know so much more about our consumers – that’s got to be worth sofuckingmuch.”

They seem to be forgetting that “consumers” – aka people – don’t have limitless money to suddenly start buying loads more stuff. Better targeting may make more people buy the socially-marketed product, but only at the expense of not buying stuff they currently purchase.

It’s essentially zero sum.

In the UK and America, salaries are flat and inflation is over 5%. In real terms people are getting a bit poorer every year. What’s different is that this time, we know it – after a decade’s economic growth funded by consumer borrowing (funded by debt, not wealth), individuals – and lenders – have cottoned on that that gravy train has halted. With little in the way of savings and nervous in mood, now we spend what we earn. Which is decreasing.

Facebook marketing could be magic mind control juice, but all consumers could do would be to want more stuff, not buy it.

The only way Facebook can justify these valuations is if it manages to take essentially all advertising budgets for everything everywhere.

Size of the global advertising market: estimated to reach $500bn in 2012

Google: valued at $189bn

Facebook: $50bn

1. There is a New New Thing that trancends the Old Economics, and you cannot value It the Old Way. This Time It will Be Different

From the now-famous article, 10 steps to see if you’re in a bubble.

Fair & not so Lovely: when individual product branding fails

People have talked about the conflicting messages from Dove and Vaseline Fair & Lovely as being perfectly reasonable branding – Unilever tailoring its brands’ advertising so it addresses different beauty trends in two different markets.

It’s still a problem for Unilever, however, because those marketing campaigns haven’t stayed safely confined to their own markets – instead, Vaseline Fair & Lovely is getting a lot of coverage on the Anglo-American parts of the internet. A bunch of Westerners not liking the ads doesn’t just mean they’re not going to buy the Fair & Lovely product – obviously enough we were unlikely to do that anyway. Rather it does two things:

  1. Make Unilever look pretty nasty for preying on the caste-driven pressures on young people in India, where skintone can affect employability and marriage options;
  2. Makes the ‘niceness’ of Dove really, really visible as a BRAND, as nothing more than a branding trick.

It’s this latter that’s the main problem for Unilever. While anyone seeing the Dove adverts should be aware that, simply enough, they are adverts and therefore they’re trying to sell you something, the ads were good enough and played well enough off an anti-size-zero zeitgeist that they felt quite sincere. They did a really good job of making people like the brand and seeing it as something that’d make them feel good about themselves.

Awareness of what Unilever are doing in other markets, however, makes their brands in this one – i.e. Dove – look very hollow. The success of the Dove campaign was predicated on a kind of cognitive dissonance: consumers could only swallow what it was saying about ‘real women’ and self-acceptance if they didn’t think too hard about it being an advert designed to sell stuff. The Fair & Lovely marketing, though, shows the depths of manipulativeness that Unilever will sink to in order to sell their beauty products, and as such I would argue it’s damaging to other brands in the portfolio.

Maybe that’s the problem with individual product branding… In February my then-colleague Sue Burden said in Marketing Week that, “With the Individual product brand model, the benefits are mainly an absence of possible negatives – no great fear of negative news about a parent or sibling brand affecting them.”

This only works, though, if consumers don’t ‘join the the dots’ between individual brands (Dove; Vaseline Fair & Lovely) and the parent company (Unilever). As this episode would indicate, that can be quite an easy thing for consumers or the media to do – and as such it’s not a very strong advantage.

Notes on the end of privacy

1. Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on you. Anything you post to blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other websites will be stored in a cross-referenced database of your online activities, to be sold to marketers – and, frankly, whoever the hell wants it, for whatever the hell purpose – to track you down as an individual.

Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said online users have no clue that a comment they made on a blog is being added to a database for some unknown use.

“I don’t think users expect that,” he said, and if consumers think idle chatter and casual conversation can be used against them by institutions, it’s almost certain to create a backlash, according to Polonetsky. He said the Federal Trade Commission is right now re-examining the current privacy structure in the U.S.

But at the same time, he said consumers are always very comfortable with Amazon using data to recommend books they might like. “When users are in control of it, it’s a win-win — if they feel empowered.”

Do marketers realise that what they’re doing is sinister? The article linked above (on Mashable) discusses how credit card companies are looking at people’s social connections to sell them new products. So-so. But what about a US health insurer using this information to deny coverage to people who they can classify as ‘high risk’ because they live in areas or communities with poor health? Or anti-abortion terrorists using this information to harass women who’ve been asking questions about abortion? “I know who you are and I know where you live” – the dark side of personalisation is a flat-out threat.

What marketers behind this – e.g. Rapleaf.com with some 389 million people tracked – don’t want to acknowledge is consent. I’ve given Amazon lots of information about the books I’ve bought and the books I like, so not only have I opted into its recommendations process but it’s also quite transparent. The exact algorithm might remain a mystery, but I know the data-points it’s feeding into that sum, and I know what it’s going to try & do with that data, viz, recommend me books in the hope I might buy them.

But no-one’s opted-in to having their online social lives (Twitter, FB, blogs & the rest) mined for information like this. While web users are aware that what they say in these forums is public, I’d argue that we’re used to thinking about a human-scale definition of public which is now dangerously obsolete.

This human-scale public is what we’re used to walking down a city street. Sure, anyone might see us, but there are two crucial points: (i) whoever can see me, I can also see them, and (ii) in a crowd of strangers I am both in public and anonymous. I would argue that this is the kind of “public-ness” people instinctively imagine they have online.

E.g. if I make some comments on a message board of course I know that anyone else on that site (=city street) will be able to read it, but it’s unlikely anyone I know from elsewhere will come wandering by and see what I’ve been up to. Perhaps I’ve posted under a handle or pseudonym, so surely that’s anonymous vis-a-vis my real name. This, I argue, is how most people instinctively think about public comments they make on the internet: an effective anonymity by dint of scale.

But these aggregating and connecting web trackers aren’t human-scale. This is a new techno-scale public in which everything publicly visible will be seen (collected, aggregated, linked) rather than simply can. The balance of possibility has shifted, such that actually the online public isn’t anonymous any more – the internet’s still too big for a human acquaintance to happen across everything you’ve said elsewhere, but it’s easy for a crawler to grab it all.

As mentioned below, you don’t need to leave a comment with your name on it for a website to trace your identity. That question you had about redundancy? Assume your bank can find out. Sexual health? Your health insurer wants to know. This is the surveillance public, the online equivalent of urban CCTV with face recognition and car numberplate tracking. You’re still free to do anything… As long as you’re happy for anyone to know about it.

2. Introducing ubercookies, a technique for websites to uncover the exact identities of visitors by using Flash to probe their browser histories for identifiable patterns. This is made even easier by the social web.

3. What can I find out about you if I know your email address? Answer: a lot, including full name and location allowing for telephone number look-ups.

4. My hacker boyfriend close friend the security researcher recommends Mozilla add-on BetterPrivacy for blocking Flash cookies, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation / Tor add-on HTTPS everywhere which encrypts your communications with major websites.