Ideas that drive engagement will drive marketing…but only if you can cleanly define your brand

by drm on February 24, 2010

We’ve been working on several fronts to better understand the value of engagement to business results.  Engagement — a term that has more definitions than you can count — is the underlying driver of most social media tool development, but creating engagement is more often a black art than a science.  (A constant frustration to those of us who are into replication and measuring.)

eMarketer shared some of an interview they did with Brian Cooper, creative director at the digital agency Dare, that looked at how advertising and marketing agencies need to adapt to leverage new tools and opportunities.

Advertising isn’t about  “advertising ideas,” Cooper says, but about developing ideas that can be told in any medium.  And, in the telling, the goal is to create a self-propagating energy.

The ideas we create here are much more about engagement and driving
participation. If you can get participation, you can build a
relationship, and from that you can create advocates for your brand.
And those people will tell other people, and they’ll become engaged.
You create a virtuous circle, which you can speed up and drive with
other advertising channels. You can use any medium to drive that
circle—whether it’s online, TV, press, PR or direct mail, for example.

The thrust of Cooper’s comments is deceptively simple, but devilishly complex.  To make an idea work across multiple platforms, and to drive engagement, you need to have a clear and basic statement about your brand.  It’s not just story telling anymore, as one observer points out.  As Tami McCarthy (yep…my wife) says in a recent post on BuzzCloud:

When you look to your communications experts and ask them, “Do we know
who we are?,” you need to feel confident that they are answering from a
deep understanding of your brand identity and that they aren’t just
rehashing your brand narrative.

That’s a lot more complicated than trying to toss a serving of engagement on a plate full of media-driven story telling.

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  • http://www.ubervu.com/conversations/www.viralhousingfix.com/2010/02/24/ideas-that-drive-engagement-will-drive-marketing-but-only-if-you-can-cleanly-define-your-brand/ uberVU – social comments

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    This post was mentioned on Twitter by danielrmccarthy: Ideas that drive engagement will drive marketing…but only if you can cleanly define your brand http://bit.ly/9KQAkC...

  • UrbaneWay

    Dan, Good Morning
    You pose a puzzling question. Can an advertiser ever “define the brand” for their client, or only ascertain what the brand is. Given our own internal experiences with grappling this question, and with an ever so small staff, we still have differing answers to the brand question, and there are only a half dozen or so of us in our small company.

    As an example, we used to argue internally that our Urbane Brand was luxury, mostly because folks were equating a high rental price to luxury. I would adamantly disagree, and tend to fall back to our “brand” is our behavior, which is sometimes diametrically different than what is portrayed. Once we got off of the “luxury” square, satisfying residents became much easier, as we better aligned expectations to our behavior and actions.

    Shift gears and put on the advertiser hat, the role of the advertiser becomes even more complex when, as an outside observer, and now with the advent of ratings and reviews, blogs and twitter and the Internet in general, a brands behavior is much more clear, at least as defined by the user, yet those observations may well be very different than what the client thinks their brand is.

    So as I write this, what comes up is, perhaps there is less of a challenge in creating engagement, and more of an issue with aligning what a companies brand is, verses what the client or business thinks it is.

    Funny that I needed to write a novel here to get back to your original point!

  • http://mikewhaling.com Mike Whaling

    Dan, it seems from Brian's quote that he is still primarily focused on broadcasting a message, with an expectation that people will find said message so interesting that they are compelled to engage and/or share it with their friends. I would argue that the easiest path to engagement is to engage first yourself. It's an approach that many traditional advertisers (and brands) are having a lot of trouble with, and it's just about impossible to replicate … but it also gives marketers ongoing opportunities to build a following and effectively communicate their brand narrative, albeit on a one-to-one basis (at least at first).

  • http://www.viralhousingfix.com danielrmccarthy

    Good point, Mike. I agree — when the starting point is combining the brand with the individual, and there's autonomy on the part of the individual, you get a powerful impact. I think that's one reason why using social media can be such an advantage for small businesses. What I find interesting about what Brian is trying to get at, and what Olivier Blanchard at The Brandbuilder also focuses on, is how larger, more structured organizations should approach social media tools. Few companies trust their story and their team enough to activate the entire organization without rules and controls. While the structure of marketing organizations is going to shift — just like they did with the advent of personal computing — I don't believe that they are going to get reinvented wholesale. So, the adoption of social media within these organizations is going to have to conform, in some way, with the preconceptions of senior management. At the core is protecting the brand identity, which, frequently, is accomplished by controlling the message and broadcasting it as widely as possible.

  • http://www.viralhousingfix.com danielrmccarthy

    Amazing how abstract the word brand gets, isn't it? First, it depends whether you're selling a product or service, or some combination of both. Then, you try to sort out how you're going to describe what you're selling, and what it is about what you sell that makes it special and different and worthwhile. Then you say that over and over. And then, if you're paying attention, you see what people are actually saying about you and try to work that back into what you're saying to make them pay attention. Brands should be highly organic, and that's where social media gets so powerful. But, organizations (or very few of them) put marketing at the center of their processes, and even fewer can turn on a dime.

  • http://www.viralhousingfix.com danielrmccarthy

    Good point, Mike. I agree — when the starting point is combining the brand with the individual, and there's autonomy on the part of the individual, you get a powerful impact. I think that's one reason why using social media can be such an advantage for small businesses. What I find interesting about what Brian is trying to get at, and what Olivier Blanchard at The Brandbuilder also focuses on, is how larger, more structured organizations should approach social media tools. Few companies trust their story and their team enough to activate the entire organization without rules and controls. While the structure of marketing organizations is going to shift — just like they did with the advent of personal computing — I don't believe that they are going to get reinvented wholesale. So, the adoption of social media within these organizations is going to have to conform, in some way, with the preconceptions of senior management. At the core is protecting the brand identity, which, frequently, is accomplished by controlling the message and broadcasting it as widely as possible.

  • http://www.viralhousingfix.com danielrmccarthy

    Amazing how abstract the word brand gets, isn't it? First, it depends whether you're selling a product or service, or some combination of both. Then, you try to sort out how you're going to describe what you're selling, and what it is about what you sell that makes it special and different and worthwhile. Then you say that over and over. And then, if you're paying attention, you see what people are actually saying about you and try to work that back into what you're saying to make them pay attention. Brands should be highly organic, and that's where social media gets so powerful. But, organizations (or very few of them) put marketing at the center of their processes, and even fewer can turn on a dime.