November15
By Adam Ferrier, Founding Partner and Global Head of Behavioural Science
I was in the fortunate position to host Mia Freedman at a dinner with 20 of Australia’s top marketers. Mia is the ex-editor of Cosmopolitan and Cleo, and now co-founder (with her husband Jason Lavigne) of Mamamia, one of Australia’s most popular blogs. Mia was imparting her knowledge about how to create, foster and monitise an online community. She is successfully following that process now with Mamamia, one of Australia’s true new media success stories. Mamamia is the 6th read online site in the lifestyle/women’s category in Australia and has a very clearly defined and engaged community – other AB women. What can brands learn from her experience? As I was listening to her speak I was actually thinking ‘not much’, until she showed a photo of herself.
The photo Mia showed was of her eating cereal whilst in the shower, looking disheveled, stressed and comical. This photo was juxtaposed with the images of her on the magazine covers she’s graced and curated in her previous life. It was the moment the audience truly warmed to her and understood what she was trying to achieve with Mamamia – a blog built around the authenticity of women trying to cope with, accept, balance, and maximise their lives. When Mia showed the untouched photo of herself in the shower (from the shoulders up), looking frazzled she truly connected with her audience.
This is the learning. Brands still think they are in the high gloss world of image creation, whilst the new world order is authenticity, and ‘reality’. Brands are to busy trying to portray themselves in a ‘perfect’ light, free of blemishes – whist the reality is often much more endearing.
Within the entertainment world we’ve caught onto this already; TV drama is being superseded with reality TV, movies have increasingly made way for documentaries, and even journalists are sharing column inches with their rawer blogger brethren.
So why is it that ‘brands’, especially the ones you’re likely to find in a supermarket or car yard, are so slow to realise that a bright glossy image is not what people want anymore? Why do shiny smiles on loveable rug rats, tugging at to-young-looking mums still appear in commercials when they’ve been banished from the content? Why does the packaging of most brands look so artificial and ‘manufactured? Why is it that so many brand manufacturers just don’t get that we are sick of living in a manufactured and overly contrived world.
This, so called ‘emotive’, high gloss, image led advertising has resulted in not brand creation, but brand disintegration. It has created what we call ‘donut brands’, that is, brands that are sugary and sweet, and look tempting, but there is nothing in the middle. No rationale to purchase, their reason for being has been lost in a sea of sickly sweet tone and personality. Built on carefully constructed values and personality they have a hole in the middle.
Social media is an opportunity to stop building image-led donut brands. It’s more than another channel for marketers to adopt too. Social media is a chance to change a brand’s behaviour, and how it relates to the world. Like Mia has found out, we can stop trying to construct an image in passive media, and start to live and act in an authentic way in social media that creates stronger relationships, builds stronger communities, and ultimately allows people to engage to a far deeper level than they would have in the old image-led brand building model. Brands now will be built on action not image.
The marketers in the room wrestled with the evidence of Mia’s talk, and wrestled with the relevance. It’s fine for a person to show their real side, but do consumers really want to know how their tinned hot dogs are actually made? This is the rub, how do we know when to change and go with the new model?
Doctors have a saying ‘Never be the first or the last to prescribe a new drug’. It’s interesting watching marketers grapple with the new rules, whilst others are happy talking reach and frequency and holding onto their media optimisation models.
So like Mia, the brands that win moving forward will understand the difference between legacy media and new media. They will build communities, and learn completely new ways to behave. Brands will be built on action not image.
