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Your customers want your brand as a friend

conversationsbdsolisCone, Omnicom Group’s strategy arm, released some data from a recent survey measuring brand trust.  This research claims that 93% of the 1092 Americans surveyed thought that companies should have a corporate presence on social media. It went further, citing 85% of those surveyed being open to interaction with companies within social media.  The demographic breakdown favored young males and weathly individuals, which can be a sweetspot for some marketed brands.

While networks like Facebook and Myspace may be old news for well polished marketing firms representing highly branded labels, this study is suggesting that the time may be right for more conservative consumer industries to follow suit.  If your company is consumer driven, tending towards younger male Americans or the affluent population, Cone is recommending you look at social media for your next marketing campaign.

It should be said that the study is a bit self serving, as Cone is a ‘strategy and communications agency’ with a presumed stake in the growth on online Brand Marketing.  That doesn’t make the results any less intriguing.  One of the best pull quotes I saw was this response from the surveyor to the question of what should Companies be doing in social networks:

Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)

People, it can be really simple.  Find out what the top ten customer questions are for sales, the top ten service calls for your product, wrap them up and build them into an interactive Facebook app.  Don’t just spit out one line information or a support number either, if the solution could be automated for the customer, take the added steps to do it.

Your customers don’t want you to be their Best Friend Forever.  But even one answer to a ‘Hey, can you help me with this’ will make you 10x more valuable than a crate of flying sheep.

photo attributed to b_d_solis @ Flickr CC

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What is a Brand?

Our recent discussions on branding (here and here) brought up an important topic – what is a brand? Sometimes business owners think a brand is just a logo or a marketing message, but I think it’s much more:

  • Visual – A brand usually has a visual representation in terms of a logo or graphic that is easily recognizable.  Brands can also be identified by a spokesperson or icon (for example, the energizer bunny). Sometimes there are also visual representations that have been created by customers instead of the company.
  • Auditory – Many brands have a signature theme song or jingle (think rhapsody in blue for united airlines, or the Intel chimes) which can bring to mind the company when heard outside of advertisements.
  • Verbal – Through marketing, sales, and customer service, a company creates verbal impressions of what the company stands for in various situations.
  • Emotional – Brands evoke an emotional response in customers (hopefully good emotions), which are influenced by their interactions with the brand (advertising, purchasing, customer service, other customers, etc.).
  • Communal – With the ease of communication available on the Internet, customers can easily share opinions, feelings, and experiences about your brand with or without your influence.
  • Instinctive – Closely tied with emotional and communal influences, customers have instinctual feelings and opinions about your brand even before they’ve interacted with your company, formed through advertising and information from other customers.
  • Evolutionary – Brands are constantly evolving through interaction and shared experiences of customers, non-customers and companies.  A company can try to influence the evolution, but is no longer in complete control of the brand.
  • Descriptive –  By combining the various interactions with a brand, an overall impression of what the company stands for is shared among customers and non-customers. A brand is descriptive of what a company, product, and/or service stands for, in terms of all the elements above (visual, auditory, verbal, emotional, etc.).

What else does a brand mean? What does your brand mean to you?  What do other brands mean?  Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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