Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture-a phenomenon I call crowdculture. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. To solve this puzzle, we need to remember that brands succeed when they break through in culture. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. But despite all the hoopla, such efforts have had very little payoff.Īs a central feature of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form factor became the lingua franca of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden age of branding. This is not how things were supposed to turn out. In the era of Facebook and YouTube, brand building has become a vexing challenge. But firms can’t identify the critical opportunities by relying on traditional segmentation and trend reports. Dove championed the other side of the divide, with campaigns that spoke to crowdculture concerns about unhealthy beauty standards for women.īrands succeed when they break through in culture, and crowdcultures are a great vehicle for doing that. Axe revived its brand by becoming an over-the-top cheerleader for the “lad” crowd that arose as a response to politically correct gender politics. Other good examples come from personal care. Chipotle did this successfully when it made two short films critiquing industrial food, tapping into a movement that began in the organic-farming subculture and blew up into a mainstream concern on social media.
In it, a brand sets itself apart by promoting a new ideology that springs from the crowd. While they diminish the impact of branded content, crowdcultures grease the wheels for an alternative approach, cultural branding. Consider that people making videos in their living rooms top the charts on YouTube, which few companies have managed to crack. Their members produce their own content-so well that companies simply can’t compete.
Crowdcultures are very prolific cultural innovators. It has united once-isolated communities into influential crowdcultures. What happened? The issue is, social media has transformed how culture works, in a way that weakens certain branding techniques. Hoping to attract huge audiences to their brands, they spent billions producing their own creative content. Marketers originally thought that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would let them bypass mainstream media and connect directly with customers. Social media was supposed to usher in a golden age of branding.
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