With the arrival of networked consumers have come huge amounts of user-generated content, shared conversations and the explosion of Big Data. As a result we now live in a new marketing ecosystem where the shape of brands is changing. At Face we see them more as social entities where the coating of the brand core is shrinking and the layer of earned and created media space is growing (see diagrammes). Even though it is still just as important for brands to carve out distinctive, emotional, enduring spaces that people can rally around, we need a more adaptive, continuous and real time research and marketing model to make this happen.

For researchers this is exciting because it means so much is up for grabs. With change comes opportunity; the opportunity to meet emerging client needs head on. One of these is how to ensure an idea has the best chance of success in the shared and created media space. It was a question that was at the heart of a recent project we did for a major ice cream brand. The brief was about launching the brand successfully in a social way in a new country with a discerning taste for ice cream. It allowed us to show how our new thinking delivers better results for brands craving success in the earned and created media space.

The 4Cs Proposition

There were four key stages to our approach that fed into each other namely, conversation, content, communities and conversion. Our model is powered by our philosophy of co-creation (doing things with not at) and technology (our social media insight tools). It is circular and iterative more of a loop or series of loops as we believe that the new marketing-cycle is no longer linear, planned over 3 years and populated with campaigns that have a beginning and an end. The role the consumer plays in each of these stages is crucial but I am just going to talk about the first two for now.

Conversation

This stage is all about identifying and understanding your key audiences within the context of the brand landscape in real time. By using Pulsar we have developed a more dynamic way to map audiences through the social web. This helped us to identify four key cohorts within the brand’s target audience. One of them we identified as the group most likely to embrace and propagate the social mission of the brand based on their passions, interests and behaviour. It was this cohort that we invited into the community and to co-create the creative platform that would best link the brand mission to content and conversations consumers were already engaged with. This stage highlights why brands need to stay on top of what’s truly important to audiences at any given time. It is less about isolated market research data and more about understanding your customers, in the moment. This requires a data processing and data analytics model that will allow a more real-time, agile and active approach to planning based on what people are doing and saying with each other as it happens.

Content

Co-creating with the right cohort of the target audience through an on-line community and face-to-face co-creation workshop allowed us to do two things very well. The first was the ability to generate a range of creative platforms rooted in genuine consumer insight that linked the brand mission to the target audience in a relevant and credible way. The second was the ability to generate hundreds of ideas within the umbrella of the creative platform that leveraged existing consumer content and enabled the brand to join current consumer conversations and activity in an engaging way. This stage showed that building platforms by co-creating with consumers is the best way to finding and sourcing potential areas of content that either already exist, could be created or added to that can inform a content strategy to support the given creative platform. Once this is in place consumers working together with the brand can populate the content areas with loads of ideas that have the potential to start lots of little “fires” some of which will take off and some of which will go out.  The involvement of consumers though means that brands will have worked out why they have permission to be in that consumer space as well as what role they can play there.

Curating diffusion

The work we did with this ice cream brand was a brilliant example of how to tackle the challenge of creating ideas that have legs in the shared/created media space. The role the audience plays in making this work is key and understanding there are many community cohorts within a target audience you can potentially co-create with and getting the right one to do this with is important if you want to be successful. This helps the brand to understand and identify those content areas within the creative expressions of the “Big Idea” that are already in play in the lives of consumers. The next stages namely Community and Conversion are all about curating “diffusion and monitoring what we call return on engagement. But more of this another time.