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Committing social media suicide by upsetting your most loyal fans is something of a trend. Netflix blazed a trail. And now it's Moleskine, maker of the "legendary" notebooks so beloved by the designers, following along.
With apparently no sense of a design community hot button issue, Moleskine thought it might be kind of cool to organize a competition to design a new logo. In other words, to crowdsource it. That's, to say the least, not going down too well with one-time Moleskine lovers, now turning into Moleskine haters. Here's a comment posted on Moleskine's Facebook page by Seth Johnson which is representative of the aggrieved point of view:
"Count me as another designer who has purchased and loved your products for years but feels slapped in the face by your shortsighted attempt to crowdsource a logo. No more will I be purchasing or using your products; no longer will I advocate for your brand."
Maria Raudva, in another post, points out that the inserts in each notebook say: "Moleskine notebooks are partners for the creative and imaginative professions of our time." She thinks the competition is more about plundering than partnering.
One way to measure your level of engagement with your customers is to see how much of their free time they spend with you on social media. Brands with strong customer relationships benefit from a steady stream of user-generated content that might be comments or videos or statements of their love and affection. That's probably what Moleskine hoped to tap into with its competition. But there's a big difference between giving up some of your free time and giving up some of your professional time for free.
Crowdsourcing has worked for some brands. It's worked well for Doritos who've used competitions to generate Super Bowl ads. I'm sure the professional community doesn't really like that competition either but they represent a miniscule part of the Doritos customer base. Not so with Moleskine, as it's finding out to its cost.
(If you are interested in a comprehensive perspective on rights of authorship in new media and how free contributions are leading to our collective impoverished future, read this interview with Jaron Lanier, published at Edge.)
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Shameless self-promotion alert! I'm going to be the presenter on the next Landor Brandfeed, talking about different ways CPG marketers can be successful in social media. Sign-up here to listen live (October 27th at 1pm Pacific) or go to landor.com/brandfeed sometime the following week to listen to a recording.
The presentation will be based on this article published earlier this year.
When it comes to aligning yourself with causes, how far is too far? And how far can individual brands of a product portfolio stray from the corporate family consensus?
Ben & Jerry's is testing the boundaries of both these questions with its support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a movement with the published aim of "fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process."
Such a move is on-brand for Ben & Jerry's to the extent that the company has always had a strong social component to its mission statement and already supports free trade, livable wages and community actions for social, environmental and economic justice. But, even for Ben & Jerry's, is associating and supporting a movement that is both anti-corporate and unpredictable in its future direction a step too far? Is this the sort of thing that an ice cream company should be doing?
And what about Unilever, the very type of large multinational corporation that the movement is protesting about? Can it really disassociate itself completely from what its 100%-owned company decides to do?
Ben & Jerry's has always been given a lot of leeway to do what it wants and it does have an independent board of directors. But is there no limit?
Perhaps it's a new kind of market research? You float an idea out there and see how customers and the punditry react. If, as in the case of the announcement of the breaking up of Netflix into two parts, the reaction is almost universally negative, you simply announce that you've changed your mind.
I thought that the idea of breaking Netflix up into separate dvd and streaming services was unnecessary and unfriendly to its customers. So, I'm glad to see that Netflix has reversed course (apart from the pricing aspect). It would have been much better, of course, if the company had managed to anticipate customer reaction and not make the break-up announcement in the first place. Maybe Netflix needs to recruit a devil's advocate?
My first post on MarketingDaily covers the perhaps surprising success of Reese's, Hershey's top-selling candy brand. Reese's made it onto Landor's 2011 list of Breakaway Brands, taking its place alongside Apple and Facebook and some other brands you'd more expect to be there.
So how did Reese's do it? Turns out it took a back-to-basics approach closely following the principles laid out in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, written by Al and Laura Ries. Does this mean that all brands should follow this same approach? Not necessarily. What has worked so well for Reese's may also work well for other CPG brands--but perhaps less likely to work for brands in other categories.
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So many brands jump in to social media without any idea of what they are going to say or how they're going to say it. The results aren't pretty--many companies give up and leave their accounts abandoned, others keep on going but you wish they would give up because it's embarrassing to see how badly they are doing.
Chris Brogan has a nice review of good, bad and the ugly examples of grocery brands on Twitter. One of the best, in his opinion, is Little Debbie who he says: " really tweets like a person and someone who cares." And that is the important point. If you are going to engage your audience via social media, you need to act like a human. You need to be empathetic, interesting and interested and capable of having a conversation about your brand without bragging, spamming or talking like you are a press release.
Ask yourself: What would a human do? And do that.
(My recent article on social media for CPG is here.)
