Social Brand Planning

8/13/2019 Social Brand Planning

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John Stauffer,

E-mail: [email protected]

Social Brand PlanningReceived (in revised form): 15th December,2011

JOHN STAUFFERis the Regional Strategy Director with the 360° Digital Influence Group at Ogilvy, based in Hong Kong. Hisexperience is in the technology and B2B sectors, having recently developed and executed social media strategies forMalaysia’s largest teleco to Hong Kong’s largest financial firms. He is also the WPP lead for Ford’s social media work across nine markets in Asia. In Asia and in North America, John has developed social media training programmes fora variety of clients, both writing the curriculum as well as delivering the training across the enterprise, most recentlyworking on a social listening workshop for a clothing manufacturer’s product development team looking at usingsocial media in an effort to spot shifts in fashion trends. Before moving to Hong Kong, John was in Ogilvy’sWashington, DC office where he worked with clients such as DuPont, IBM, and Marriott hotels. In the USA, he wasa guest speaker at Johns Hopkins University,Georgetown University and the University of Maryland, speaking aboutthe role of social media in marketing and communications programmes. He has spoken on the topic of social mediaand word-of-mouth marketing at industry events across Asia with recent panels and presentations in Kuala Lumpur,Manila,Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh, Hong Kong,Tokyo, and Sydney. He contributes to the 360° Digital Influence Blog, FreshInfluence, as well as the Asia Digital Map, and serves as a regular host of a ‘Social Media for Executives’ training seriessponsored by The Wall Street Journal Asia.

AbstractFundamental shifts in the ways consumers use the web have ushered in a new opportunity for brand planners. Armed with insights derived from social media, planners are putting the consumer atthe heart of the brand’s positioning and the business. Planning’s role beyond marketing and communications; fast-moving cultural trends fuelled by the social web; and new sources of consumer insight have all contributed to a new definition of brand planning.A customer-centric approach toplanning, or Social Brand Planning, is critical if we are to transform successfully the data and behaviour

gleaned from social media into a competitive advantage for the business .

Keywordsbrand planning, social media, social brand planning

INTRODUCTIONWhy Social Brand Planning?For the first time since the inception of the web, social networks intercept moreinternet traffic than search engines. 1

Keyword-filtered search results are givingway to a form of ‘friend-filter ing’ throughour Facebook news feed. Analysts predictthat, again for the first time in the historyof the web, 2014 will see more web traf-

fic globally through mobile devices thanour desktop PCs. 2 The top ten largestbrands on Facebook — as measured byfan count — are digital metropolises withpopulations larger than any city on earth. 3

These communities are not without animpact on the business; recent research

suggests social media exposure, combinedwith paid and earned media, is directlylinked to sales. 4

Organisations are playing catch-up inthe face of these fundamental changes inonline behaviour. Budget allocation fore-casts signal a reshuffling of priorities.Forrester research suggests social mediawill see a 34 per cent compound annualgrowth from 2009 to 2014 as interactive

marketing spend climbs to 21 per cent of all advertising spend.

This is a major reconstitution in theway brands organise themselves andengage with consumers. It requires athoughtful approach to new a set of responsibilities for brand planners, one in

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which planners must adopt new ways of capturing insights derived in social media;measure and optimise market-facing pro-grams; and expand their scope to connectdecision makers across the organisation.

HOW SOCIAL MEDIA HAS CHANGEDBRAND PLANNINGPlanning’s role beyond marketingand communicationsRead through the latest marketing andcommunications award-winning case stud-

ies and you’ll be likely to uncover the win-ning formula. Business objectives are statedat the beginning, followed by the chal-lenges facing the brand (eg stiff comple-tion, low awareness,etc.).Then, the strategyis unveiled, followed by the impact of theprogramme with two to three metrics thatlinks back to the business objectives. Pointsare rarely awarded for a change in businessobjective once it has been set.

This linear process too often puts plan-ners far removed from the core functions of decision making within the business. Brand

planners sometimes find themselves at theend of a conveyer belt in which the businessmakes a decision, followed by a briefing tomarketing and communications teams whothen solicit planning and creative teams tobuild preference for the brand.

IPA President, Rory Sutherland, in apiece published in ‘A Master Class inBrand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King’, takes issue with the pre-tence of creativity and planning as asequential process:

‘Sutherland’s first law states that all creativepeople must submit their thinking for appraisal by more rational people.This doesnot apply the other way around. No oneengaged in the 3G auction thought to ask,what else you could do with the $16 bil-lion such as installing a public wifi in every

hamlet in Britain. No one spending $6billion on the Channel Tunnel Fast Linkasked whether $6 billion might improvethe lot of passengers if spent in some other way than by marginally accelerating thetrains. They already had their formulaethanks very much.’ 5

Planners and practitioners engaging onbehalf of a brand in social media often feelthis same frustration. The reasons behindnegative sentiment and even the cause of passionate brand advocates exist deep inthe heart of the organisation, far removedfrom the front lines of the brand’s com-munity managers.

The trouble with this linear planningprocess is that too often what starts outas an honest attempt at collaborationbetween the business and its customersoften devolves into one-way communica-tion.This is made more complex as socialmedia are at odds with the channel plan-ning mindset still used in many planningmodels. As a result, too many marketingand communications programmes in

social media are ‘social’ in name only, withthe vast majority of resources spent man-aging the flow from brand to consumer and little or no meaningful consumer insights affecting the way the businessoperates. Success is often limited to ahandful of pilot programme experimenta-tions that wither at the first sign of bitingcriticism. Most brands lack a process for ensuring a balanced mix of social media-led planning both downstream in tweaksto the execution, and upstream to thecentral functions of the business.

Forrester, in a recent examination of theimpact of brands in social networks poseda grim assessment:

‘[w]hile spending in Ad and Marketing onsocial networks is high, many of theseresources will be wasted. That’s because

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SOCIAL BRAND PLANNING

many brands will continue to broadcastone-way messages as they have done in thepast, while struggling to develop a two-waydialogue with their customers.’ 6

Planners must look beyond the familiar territory of their marketing teams to learnnew ways of doing their job.The customer service call centres, for example, haveformed and trained a core social responseteam, with Twitter handles manned 24/7. 7

This support, often initiated in social andthen resolved offline, gives brands the per-

mission to take on proactive branding pro-grams in social media. The communitymanager running the brand’s Facebookpage has a new suite of tools designed tospot, escalate and mitigate negativity in away that scales to social networks with fancounts in the six or seven figures. Thewebmaster for the corporate website seessocial media sites as the top referral intothe dot.com pages. He now has powerfulclues from the search terms that lead a user to the site and can now create contentdesigned to mirror search intent. 8 The

product development teams use socialmedia not to inform a marketing strategybut to spot early shifts in purchase behav-iour that affect literally the way productsare engineered. The clothing manufac-turer, for instance, who perceives an earlychange in the way men discuss the fit of their sport coats can link that social mediainsight to the tailors in the shop, scissors inhand. Communications teams know mon-itoring in social media is now a commod-ity and have moved to providing insightsinstead of links.These teams are plugging

the insights back into the core of the busi-ness in the hopes of reversing this tide.Thiseffort is also becoming in an internal func-tion rather than an agency assignment;one of the largest line items for SocialStrategists worldwide is investment ininternal soft costs in staff to manage with a

46 per cent increase in spending from2010 to 2011, compared with only a 15per cent increase in traditional agencysupport.

The Social Brand Planner, whether aformal title or simply a focus of anempowered brand manager, must work toformalise this consumer-centric approachacross the enterprise.

Two-speed optimisationIn ‘Chief Culture Officer ’, Grant

McCracken suggests cultural insights canbe tracked at two speeds. Insights intoslow culture require the endurance andfocus of brand planners to recognise howbehaviour that occurs below the surfaceand off the front pages affects purchasebehaviour at a profound level. Thisprocess, which hinges on deep bodies of cultural, demographic, and country-spe-cific research, is applied and confirmedthrough fresh rounds of focus-group test-ing and ethnographic studies. Fast culturehowever, fuelled by the ‘always on’ econ-

omy of social media, has given us a newspeed setting at which social brand plan-ners need to operate.

‘Fast culture has many origins and theCCO [Chief Culture Officer] must moni-tor them all. New cultural developmentscan come from the world of cuisine,spor ts,music, fashion, moviemaking . .. Chefs,point guards, engineers, indiebands.. .bloggers.. .any of these can prove adecisive influence. It’s a lot to monitor. Tomake matters trickier still, we can’t merelymonitor the most famous of these play-ers. . .it[’s] possible for obscure players topunt their influence in from themargin.. .’ 9

For businesses with social media at thecore of their planning process, thosemoments of fast culture are not the margins


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increase in stock price. 16 If that seems likea big spike, it is; no fast food company hasever seen such a boost. Of course, it tookreal commitment from the business,beyond its close tracking of social media,to engineer a better pizza. By bakingsocial media into its planning process andthe way it communicated the changehowever, Dominos was able to make theclaim of transformation authentically. Allfrom a programme based on fast-movinginsights derived in social media and putsquarely at the centre of the business.

This breed of research — onegrounded in the up-to-the-minute reali-ties of the marketplace — supplementsthe equally important traditional researchcommissioned by brands.

This research is the second, slow-cul-ture, but no less important speed of opti-misation. The experienced social brandplanner recognises the patterns in fast cul-ture and can predict, with some degree of confidence, which of those rapidly chang-ing trends are an early indicator for a shiftin deeper, slow-culture changes. The key

skill, of course, is to determine which of these fast-culture trends represent an earlyshift in more meaningful cultural insights.To do that, it is necessary to tap into our understanding of deep, slow moving cul-tural trends, as mapped and analysed byany number of traditional planningmodels combining qualitative and quanti-tative data (eg focus groups, purchasepaths, customer satisfaction surveys, etc).Itis only when married with traditionalresearch methods that social media canserve to inform the planning process. A

new trending topic on Twitter alone willnever a meaningful insight make.

This two-speed process does not stoponce brand communications hit the mar-ketplace. In fact, it is in social mediawhere brands can quickly test new inno-vations and closely monitor consumer

feedback in the spirit of failing fast. TimHartford, in ‘Adapt: How Success AlwaysStarts with Failure’ proposes three keysto the failing-fast process. 17 First, seek outnew ideas as a source of innovation.Hartford suggests the world is too com-plex to rely on experts for a single win-ning big project. Second, test those ideason a scale where failure is survivable.Branded communities, in which themajority of users have an interest in thesuccess of an organisation, serve as excel-lent laboratories for survivable failure.

Finally, constantly monitor these trials for feedback. All three of Hartford’s stepsin this process — seeking out new ideas,spaces for survivable failure, and closeobservation — are all within the avenuesof expertise for the social brand planner.

Empathy economyIn a recent gathering of planning execu-tives, Dr Nick Southgate spoke about therole of empathy in planning. He suggesteda simple yet powerful strategy, that plan-ners should identify their biases early onin order to break down some of the bar-riers to empathy that exist within brandsand agencies. In a telling example of thismovement toward empathy, Procter &Gamble’s CEO, Alan Lafley, embarked ona trip that took him to a tiny kitchen inCentral America. In the early 2000s,Lafley visited the homes of women tounderstand better how they used P&G’sproduct. In Venezuela, how empathy leadsto insight is witnessed:

‘For an hour, Mr.Lafley sat in the corner of Mrs. Rios’ kitchen, where bright yellowpaint peeled off the wall and listened to the

young mother. . .[Rios] produced 31 bot-tles of cream, lotion, shampoo and perfumeand placed them on the embroidered table-cloth. She has two lotion for her feet, one


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STAUFFER

for her body, one for her hands.. .it’s her entertainment, Mr. Lafley said.’ 18

He began to understand a new form of off-label use as his product line-up wascollected and laid out on the kitchentable.This is the currency of the empathyeconomy and organisations now have theability trade in this currency.

With the explosive growth of socialnetworks across the globe, a brand canpeek into the yellow walls and chippedpaint of its consumer’s life online, buildinga culture of empathy within the organisa-tion.Too often our planning research sani-tises the customer and serves up a clinicaldiagnosis. The Social Brand Planner ensures we anchor every step of the brandto real people in a way that puts the con-sumer mindset ahead of the brand’s posi-tioning. We must do so in the era of thesocial web; the very architecture of theweb was designed as a peer-to-peer, infor-mation-sharing model. 19 While thissounds obvious, consider the web’s historyalongside the converse history of brand-

ing.The changes brought on by the indus-trial revolution triggered a shift in the waypeople bought products.The local bazaars,markets, and shopkeepers gave way first tochartered organisations and then to cor-porations. This meant, for the first time,consumers did not personally know or interact with the producer of the goodsfrom whom he or she was buying.Branding was born in part to reproducethe feeling of familiarity consumers oncehad with product makers. Mass mediahelped to deliver a brand personality and

relationship with consumers through radioand television before the new product hitthe shelves.This model was built on brandsas fictionalised narratives, the MarlboroMan and Aunt Jemima.

These two histories are at odds with oneanother because the manufactured brand

personality is no longer applicable in apeer-to-peer, social web. In order for branding to be successful on the web,socialbrand planners will need to trade in a cur-rency of empathy as defined by one scholar as simply ‘a motivation oriented towardsthe other’. 20 This means brands serve thecommunities of which they are a part,facilitating connections around a sharedaffinity. Not surprisingly, the mostcommon current reason why users joinbranded communities is to receive promo-tions or discounts on products. While an

effective way to quickly grow in size, thesecampaigns do little to socialise the businessat its core. This incentivising is likely toproduce some undesirable side effects,namely the demotion of brand fans tomere contestants; a delusion of a commonaffinity (eg muscle-car fanatics) as freebiestrump true fandom; and finally a bubblecommunity in which fans unsubscribe or go dormant once the incentive is removed.

Instead, the most effective brand strate-gies in social media put the consumer backin a direct, non-fiction, conversation with

real people from within the company:employees spotting questions and trainedand empowered to help; a help-deskmanned by customer service reps onTwitter; a Facebook application that allowsairline passengers to book directly from thecommunity page and share that trip withselected friends. The hypothesis of theempathy economy suggests the brand itself should not be at the centre of our efforts.The brand positioning, rather, is an honestreflection of the beliefs, attitudes, andbehaviours of individuals. Businesses win

in the empathy economy through positiveword of mouth, earned by honestlydemonstrating the variety of ways in whichthey are becoming more social brands.

This is not easy. Research suggests thatat the individual level, empathy is oftenoutmatched by individual concerns, a


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‘fragile flower’ 21 easily destroyed by other personal motivations. At an organisationallevel, this is even tougher to preserve asshort-term profits often win out over long-term interests of consumers. Andeven that, sometimes, is okay, especially inpatent-driven, high-security industrieswhere a more social business does notequate to a better one.

It is the role of Social Brand Planner tosee this process through and it is this sortof analysis — uncovering real pockets of prospective or existing customers and the

empathy to know how these micro-seg-ments are likely to think — that is neededin this new era of planning.

CONCLUSIONA new job for plannersWhat all three of the major trends suggestis the need for the new role of an individ-ual tasked with making sense of theseshifts in planning. Enter the SocialPlanner: equal parts Anthropologist, and

Ombudsman, Change Agent.In order to achieve this,brands need toadopt a disciplined model of customer-orientated planning.This requires a socialbrand planner charged on three major fronts:

Applying insights from social media upstreaminto the major arteries of brand planning This means quantitative and qualitativedata from social media is used in early-phase brand planning: mapping out the

cultural tensions, sketching the audiencepersonas, tracking customer journeys,ensuring message testing endures realitychecks from social media, requiring somelevel of ratification.How : Develop a template research frame-work to guide each new assignment.

Social media can give powerful clues tothe health or instability of a brand or itspositioning. Important metrics to trackinclude:

Volume : both discussion for the brandand its competitors across all forms of social media, including networks andinfluencers;Sentiment : either through tools withcredible Sentiment Analysis or throughmanual scoring among a team of researchers. When using a paid tool,

look for accuracy approaching 60 per cent. It seems low for a machine butconsider that human analysts agree onlyabout 70 per cent of the time. 22 For thelatter, develop a simple scorecard tograde each post as positive, negative or neutral.Search: this can range from simple key-word-based volume assessmentsthrough to tools like Google trends or deeper Consumer Intent Modeling.Both are best tackled with a specifichypothesis in mind.This helps focus the

Social Brand Planner as he or she worksto prove or disprove the hypothesis withevery keyword.

Keep the above simple. If this fails it willalmost certainly be due to poor analysisand not due to a lack of data.

This is movement from a single data set(eg your brand was mentioned 3,500 timesthis month) to a more nuanced model thatnow allows planners to analyse socialmentions through the lens of an existingbrand plan.This can be done by categoris-

ing ‘desired attributes’, ‘message pillars’ — every organisation has its unique way of articulating this piece of its DNA. Figure 1shows a sample of categorical analysis inaction from a generic brand tracking sixmain drivers of conversations and the per cent of sentiment (blue vs gray) and the


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STAUFFER

sentiment score of those emotionally-charged posts (red vs green).

Applied to any existing brand-planningexercise, this sentiment analysis, coupled

with verbatims for illustration, is a quickway to build social into the planningprocess.

Building consensus on a cross-practicemeasurement model designed to yield arealistic and timely assessment ofmarketing and communications effortsDoing so means optimisation occurs themoment the programme hits the market-place and is not simply a buzzword on thefinal page of the campaign plan.

How :To do this, a new way of measur-ing success is needed.The value of effectivesocial planning will require a new set of performance-based metrics across manybusiness functions. Figure 2 shows a sampleinventory of what a social brand planner may track for any one programme.

Leading an enterprise-wide planning model that acknowledges consumers do not thinkof a brand in discrete categories ofmarketing, communications, public relations,

or advertising In turn, social media will shed light onchanges needed in far-flung corners of the enterprise.A hammer sees every prob-lem as a nail. Marcom teams risk viewingevery detractor as reason for more com-munications. Properly positioned withinthe enterprise, the social brand plannerscan determine if customer service, prod-uct development, or the sales teams arethe solution.

This idea is not new. The father of planning, Stephen King, called for such achange in 1988 at an event celebrating the20 th anniversary of the birth of planning:

‘Strategic brand design needs a managementstructure which is small, flexible and inter-active. It must involve, in an overlappingway, the key skills of Production/R&D, and


Figure 1 Sample social media sentiment by category

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consumers continue to outpace brands insocial media adoption, this social-in-name-only phenomena is no longer arecipe for poor performing marketingprograms, it is now a threat to health of the business.

References(1) Experian Hitwize UK measured by market

share visits, UK usage.(2) Morgan Stanley Research(3) http://statistics.allfacebook.com/pages(4) Kamal, I. and Carl,W. (2011) ‘A study of the

impact of exposure to social media on sales andbrand perception’, Ogilvy and ChatThreads.

(5) Lannon, J.and Baskin, M. (2008) ‘A Master Class in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King’, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.,Chichester.

(6) Owyang, L. (2011) ‘How Corporations ShouldPrioritize Social Business Budgets’,February.

(7) Case References: BestbuyTwelpforce(http://twitter.com/twelpforce), AMEX HelpDesk (http://twitter.com/americanexpress).

(8) SEOs report referring sources for small businesswebsites, 2010, eMarketer.

(9) McCracken, G.(2009) ‘Chief Culture Officer:How to Create a Living, BreathingCorporation’, Basic Books, Philadelphia, PA.

(10) McKinsey & Co. (2011) ‘Have You Tested Your Strategy Lately?’ McKinsey Quarterly, January.

(11) Adams, P. ([year?]) ‘The Real Life Social

Network’, available at: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2 (accessed 12th January, 2012).

(12) Christakis, N.and Fowler, J.H. (2010)‘Connected:The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks’, Little, Brown and Company,New York, NY.

(13) Dunbar, R. I. M. (1993),‘Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language inhumans’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences ,Vol. 16,No. 4, pp. 681–735.

(14) Granovetter, M. (1973) ‘The Strength of WeakTies’, American Journal of Sociology ,Vol.78, No. 6,pp. 1360–1380.

(15) Domino’s Pizza Turnaround:The true story of how Domino’s listened to its harshest cr iticsand made their best pizza ever’, available at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v AH5R56jILag (accessed 12th January, 2012).

(16) Gelles, D. and Rappeport,A. (2011) ‘Domino’seats humble pie to boost sales’, Financial Times ,6th May.

(17) Hartford,T. (2011) ‘Adapt:Why Success AlwaysStarts with Failure’, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,New York, NY.

(18) ‘P&G Chief’s Turnaround Recipe:Find OutWant Woman Want’ (2005) Wall Street Journal ,1st June.

(19) Berners-Lee,T.‘Frequently asked questions -Start of the web: Influences’,World Wide WebConsortium.

(20) Batson, C. D., Fultz,J. and Schoenrade, P. (1987)‘Distress and Empathy:Two QualitativelyDistinct Vicarious Emotions with DifferentMotivational Consequences’, Journal of Personality ,Vol.55, No. 1, pp. 19–39.

(21) Batson, et. al, Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology,Vol 45(3), Sep 1983.(22) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_ analysis


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Social Brand Planning

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