Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from "The Social Customer," the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.
The Few that Became Social Objects
Whether consumer brands ever aspired to become "social objects" for much of the last 100 years is questionable. Brands have always wanted to be talked about, but whether they wanted to be talked with is up for debate. I know plenty of marketing managers, VPs, EVPs, and CEOs who would prefer not to interact with their customers. Luxury brands, especially, pride themselves on being completely aloof-their appearance of not caring what their consumers have to say (or think) is part of their appeal. This cool and distant brand personality is actually part of their brand concept, and to surrender some of this to a socially influenced openness would dilute their brand equity.
After reading Ralph Lauren's biography, Genuine Authentic, one would be hard-pressed to imagine Lauren trying to tap the wisdom of his longtime consumers for advice on how their next men's fashion line should look-this "wisdom of the crowd" notion goes completely against the line of thinking of most consumer brands over the last 100 years, if not longer. And believe me, there are pundits and writers who vociferously cry out against the "wisdom of crowds"-you'd only need to read the first page or two of Andrew Keen's controversial The Cult of the Amateur to understand this sometimes cogent argument.
Consumer brands cut from the "I don't care" cloth have cast their brand concept and personality on the premise that they do not need to take advice from their consumers or become a part of the conversation. And they usually feel this way until times get tough, revenues drop, and market share begins to erode.
The common thread I hear from brands afraid to become social is that while they want to know what their customers are saying, they realize that they can use relatively inexpensive software (and their PR firm or demand generation agency) to figure this out for no more than about $100,000 per year. That's small change to a multinational or enterprise brand.
The entire notion of monitoring what consumers are saying about a brand is somewhat of a new thing as well. Until about 2007 full-scale assessment of what consumers were saying about a given brand was dependent on extrapolating conclusions from representative survey samples or performing a qualitative assessment. Until relatively recently it was almost technically impossible to monitor or detect changes in sentiment in what millions of consumers were saying (or feeling) about a given brand. Prior to the advent of the social Web, the University of Michigan launched American Customer Service Index (ACSI) surveys (1994), but customer satisfaction trends had been "flat as a pancake" since then.