Brand Managers - Drive Passion Using Your Brand Essence

Brand Managers are perennially in search of ways to not only maintain their standing with their customers, but increase excitement and strengthen passion for their products.  I have found articles reiterating the importance of allowing insight gained from your customers to drive innovation; ideas introduced to me as a graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill IMC program.

In the beauty world, there is the tale of two entities. There are the main industry titans and the newcomers garnering lots of buzz with their unique perspective yet both are fighting to attract customers, old and new. The most important action for each is to build desire, a thought expressed by Revlon’s CMO Julia Goldin.  This desire for the newest shades, trends and products helps your brand remain relevant. This is the charge for your brand; build, create and sustain desire.

After listening to your customer, the next and most crucial step is what you do with what you've discovered.  Translate this newfound information into customer-friendly innovation improving the customer experience with the products as done by cosmetic titan, L'Oreal.

How do we create this elusive desire?  The aforementioned articles and my studies in IMC have guided me towards these three items to implement and achieve your desired results. Listen to what your customers are saying and uncover what they are not able to express directly.  This can be done in several ways but none more important than engaging via social media, which provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the ways customers interact and use your product.  Capitalize by listening to your brand community on sites where they interact with each other most; the major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Read comments left on YouTube video tutorials and gain a deeper understanding never before accessible.  Respond accordingly to customers needs and employ cutting-edge technology to create their desired iterations of products helping you retain and attract them.

In the cosmetics world with infinite possibilities for self-described "beauty junkies" companies are faced with the daunting task of differentiating their brand from competitors. Using the above actions will help your brand achieve the distinguishing qualities that build desire to draw your customer in and keep them coming back for more.

Jaclyn Bivins

@jaclynbivins

Jaclyn Bivins hails from Chicago, Illinois and is a graduate student at Northwestern University in Medill's Integrated Marketing Communications program. After graduation, she hopes to work in brand management and marketing strategy in the cosmetics and beauty industry. 

Learn To Target...Like CPG Does

As a graduate student in the Nortwestern Medill IMC program, I have been studying best target applications by social marketers. In the past decade, the lack of face-to-face interaction in the store had been a challenge for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) folks. But things started to change with the expansion of technology and tools. In the face of intensifying competition, digital channels will be critical in keeping your brands relevant to the consumer. To be specific, the CPG industry has been hit hard by the economy in recent years, and as a result, private labels are gaining more popularity. There is no better time than this for brands to start embracing social media as a form of trusted, earned media.

It is important to understand your competitors’ strategies (obviously leaning towards social and interactive now) in order to stay ahead of the pack. A research conducted by dunnhumby reveals that shoppers who already had a history of brand purchase are more effective in social media marketing. CPG firms would need to do more to take advantage of retail data by looking for shoppers with high frequency of purchase in their brands and locate them on social media platforms. Building authentic voices will help influence other consumers and eventually drive sales, creating a strong foundation for a profitable growth of the company.

The social marketing program will be heavily reliant on shopper marketing data. In addition to the frequency of purchase (most likely an indication of loyalty), CPG firms will need to target demographics profile while also  considering their customers’ social influence scores (e.g. Klout) in order to find the right advocates for the brand. My recommendations include:

1) Observe what people think about your product – finding what customers have been sharing online e.g. uploading product picture on Facebook wall, or writing reviews on the latest items they purchased on Amazon. This way, CPG marketers can monitor real-time user experiences and obtain feedbacks promptly. There is also a possibility of improving product design by finding what they might have missed out during product testing via observing discussions around the brand.

2) Improve in-store experience – letting some of the more socially-engaged customers do their job, for example, customers sharing experiences via their smartphones while also being able to research similar offerings online, or scanning the QR codes to deepen their purchase experience right in the aisle. 

3) Share what your customers care – posting the latest trends on social media. We can do extra research and analysis to find out what the consumers really want to stay ahead of the competition by, for example, observing the meals people prepared and shared on Pinterest to learn what they are looking for in the grocery stores in terms of convenience and creativity.

4) Activate the dialogue – creating a space where customers who have a history of purchases can tell their personal stories and share their expertise. We already know that word-of-mouth and personal recommendations are one of the biggest drivers to purchase in the CPG category.

Yet, the biggest mistake is to let the advocates run the program themselves. We need to provide guidelines and activities to keep these consumers engaged and motivated, hence the need to strike the right balance between over-monitoring and letting the social marketing program run itself.

Arisa Kulpiyavaja is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program. She is a marketer with a long passion in the consumer packaged goods industry, specializing in branding and marketing analytics. You can reach Arisa on http://www.linkedin.com/in/arisakulpiyavaja or follow her @arisaimc.

Creating Automatic Brand Advocates

How else would you know that your friend secretly likes to listen to European pop music while on the computer? Thanks to the Spotify app on Facebook, we can all know what our friends listen to, for better or for worse. And this is only the beginning of a wave of new apps that are a part of Facebook’s Open Graph development. This allows apps to share real time information about a user’s activity without having to ask for permission every time.

Source: http://mashable.com/2011/11/08/music-apps-facebook-open-graph/

As a current Integrated Marketing Communications student at Northwestern, I have seen the many ways companies often try to artificially get word of mouth and how those attempts all fall flat. Brands have flocked to Facebook looking to find ways to get their customers to discuss and share their products. As many have found, it is a lot harder than just creating a Facebook page. So now the idea is: if our customers won’t talk to their friends about our brand, we will do it for them. By placing in the news feed that so and so listened to this song, companies can let a person’s actions speak. The reasoning behind this is that we as potential customers are more likely to try a product if we know our friends use it. A use is much more powerful than a like.

So far, this strategy has proven to be quite successful. In the past six weeks, songs have been shared 1.5 billion times on Facebook (Mashable). More developers are sure to take notice as this application can be extended to numerous categories. But there is certain to be some backlash. Users who are not aware of what they have agreed to may not exactly want all their friends to know every little thing they are doing. You may be a brand advocate and not even know it. There is also the risk of filling up people’s news feeds like what happened when everyone started playing Farmville. This will only further the debate over privacy and Facebook, but we have repeatedly seen that users are definitely willing to give away a little information for free perks.

Alex Greenwald, Graduate IMC Northwestern, @agreenw

Where can you find better Brand Advocates?

In the search for brand advocates, the usage of social media sites is the hot topic for most marketers. It is seen as a great way to directly connect with customers and to get them to start talking about your brand and recommending it to their friends. This is the ideal situation however, and marketers find that it is much harder to create true brand advocates. Corporate-Eye conducted a survey and found that the number one reason people ‘like’ a company’s Facebook page is to receive discounts and promotions. This doesn’t really scream brand advocacy, but a new social media is trying to put a new twist on the brand-user experience.

Unthink.com is introducing the idea of having each user choose a brand in which to “sponsor” their profile page. In exchange, the user owns all of his or her data. Although it is still in its infancy and has not fully been planned out, it will be interesting to see exactly how integrated the idea of a brand sponsor will be. It does offer a huge opportunity for people to be true brand advocates by picking a brand that is really important to them. This could be a much more authentic and engaging way for users to interact with brands which should prove to be much more effective. As a marketer, this is definitely something to keep an eye on to see if this either gains any traction or has an influence on other social media sites. As social media marketing continues to get more advanced and moves beyond number of 'likes' or friends, level of engagement will be something to look at.

Unthink does not stand much of a chance competing directly with giants like Facebook, but just getting a fraction of those users could be seen as a success (CNN). Their business model is based on providing a better tool for these brands while providing users with the protections they are demanding. Every once in a while we hear of the next Facebook, and it is the users who ultimately decide if it is worthy. It appears that Google+ has fizzled, because people weren’t willing to try something new that their friends weren’t already on (UWIRE). A site isn’t very social if you have no one to talk to, and Unthink must certainly be aware of this.

Alex Greenwald, Graduate Northwestern IMC, @agreenw