As principal of Brand Matters, I had the pleasure of developing and moderating a panel of branding and market research experts in the past month. The panelists included:
• Susan Abbott, President, Abbott Research
• Azim Alibhai, Vice President Media Director, Due North Communications
• Debbie Bolton, Director Strategy, Interbrand Canada
• Radha Curpen, Partner, Bennett Jones LLP
• Mike Gadd, President, Gadd Research
• Carolyn Ray, Vice President, Communications, National Public Relations
A wide range of topics were discussed with a focus on branding trends and client expectations. As you would expect, ‘social media’ played a large role in our discussion; however, since this was a peer-to-peer roundtable, the discussion played out a little differently from most. In the spirit of sharing with the CMA marketing community, in this post, Brand Matters shares a series of excerpts from our panel discussion.
Mike Gadd, Gadd Research
In terms of the market research world, there's massive change occurring at the moment; there's a move from traditional research to something that's quite different. We have clients that are interested in online communities, interested in neuroscience and interested in all kinds of new things. The fascinating thing is that clients are cautious but at the same time there appears to be an openness to innovation. In terms of branding, I think the key really is now the clients change the question from thirty years ago. The question then was "how effective is our marketing?". The question became predictive "how effective will our marketing be?" The key questions now are “who in depth are our most valued customers”, “why the affinity with our brand” and “what can be done to make the most valued customers our best advocates”?
Debbie Bolton, Interbrand
It’s interesting how much customers and stakeholders expect from brands now compared to twenty years ago, especially how they are conducting themselves as corporate citizens. It’s like the curtains have been drawn aside. Brands are being held to a whole lot of things that they weren’t necessarily as accountable for in the past such as environmental and employment practices and now social media allows everybody to have an opinion on their actions. Brand perceptions are not always influenced by the person who’s most credible, who knows the most, but by the person who is the most vocal and most active in getting their point of view out there.
Mike Gadd, Gadd Research
I think social media research is going to add, clients want to build communities, and they may want to build communities for research, they may want to build communities for all sorts of distance applications and there are products in place at the moment and the question is whether they’re good enough, those of us who they’re going to brand will see the brand from the perspective of the customer as well as the client and design them. We wonder you know, really how good those products really are at the moment and there actually good be some better ones.
Debbie Bolton, Interbrand
Everybody’s grappling with how they build social media into an integrated strategy or plan. I think many are treating it as tactical: “We have to get on Facebook” or “How are we going to deal with Twitter?” So they’re thinking about their social media tactics and then trying to back into a strategy. We worked with a client last year and knew social media was important but we really looked at how the strengths and weaknesses of how the various media worked together for overall communications. You need to strategically be going where your customers are. You can’t doubt social media potential because they’re there. But you have to be clear in terms of what your objectives are, what you’re trying to gain and how you fit all your communications together.
Azim Alibhai, Due North Communications
I don’t know if anybody subscribes to eMarketer, but the eMarketing newsletter that came out this morning was about ‘social media marketing integration years away’. And you know, what they’re saying is that companies that have been in the social media marketing space for more than three years are more likely to have a fully integrated business model, than those who have only been in for a short amount of time…So what does it really mean, it requires investment and time? And the ownership of that social media strategy can’t reside outside the company. It must reside with in the company. It’s always on.
Susan Abbott, Abbott Research
I think that with social media one of the differences [from traditional media] is that it is operational. It’s probably closer to PR as a marketing tactic in that sense. Whereas with traditional creative, you can create it, it goes out there and it has a limited life --flip the switch, you buy time, and off you go. And you can’t really do that with social media. It is sort of like the era of when the web started. You know, we saw those brochure websites, they were so hideous and now interactivity is key. One of the things I’ve been telling clients for a while is just start. Just start, because if you don’t start, it’s not getting easier.
Carolyn Ray, National PR
In communications, we’ve seen a huge shift from monologue to dialogue. For us, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to embrace dialogue in a new way. So much of what organizations used to do was to push information out and now it’s all about embracing all-way dialogue among many diverse stakeholders. However, we also need to ensure the right training and resources are in place to facilitate dialogue on an ongoing basis. We see many social media efforts that are still pushing out information but not facilitating two-way dialogue. Whether you’re trying to build communities, promote a product or service, or respond to customer service issues, you need to integrate social media into your overall communications strategy. Transparency is becoming more and more important to build and sustain brand value. If you’re not giving people a safe place to talk about your brand, you can be sure that it’s happening without you. And that can have some interesting, and potentially damaging, implications for your brand and your business.
Patricia McQuillan (Moderator), Brand Matters
Our panel discussion highlights several of the opportunities and challenges that social media has introduced to strategic brand building through market research and marketing communications. Marketers and market researchers have more tools at their disposal than ever before and clients are willing to try new things. It is almost like social media is democratizing brands. The increased transparency of brands and the ability of social media tools to broaden influence and engagement has effectively extended the reach and participation of brands.
As a reader of this blog, are these observations in line with your experience? We are interested in learning more about your experience. Let’s continue the dialogue...
Patricia McQuillan
Tags: social media
Posted in B2B | |
