One Thing To Get Right When Brand Building

Brands should exploit new media’s possibilities to deliver on four basics:

1) offering and communicating a clear customer promise

2) building trust by delivering on that promise

3) Continuously improving on it

4)  Innovating beyond the familiar

 Virgin Atlantic does this by, for example, including travel tips from crew members on its Facebook page; communicating with customers on Twitter in rapidly changing situations; offering a taxi-sharing system to enhance its brand; and maintaining Vtravelled.com, a site where customers exchange information, stories, and advice.

As customers experiment with social media platforms, companies should try to gain customer insights rather than simply try to increase sales. In addition, capitalize on the media’s speed and reach while protecting the brand’s reputation, and carefully follow the unwritten rules of customer engagement online.

But, it’s wrong to think we’re entering a world in which traditional marketing activities, and brands themselves, will become irrelevant. In fact, the opposite is true. Social media creates urgency for companies to get the basics right, developing and reliably delivering on a compelling brand promise.

It has always been risky for companies to disappoint customers, at least over the long term. But today the scale and speed of social media can make falling short instantly painful.  companies that consistently deliver what they promise, benefit mightily when social media amplifies their reputation. The obvious danger is failing to keep pace with social media developments. But an equal, less obvious danger is getting distracted by them and losing sight of the fundamentals.

For years, we've engaged in assisting on marketing strategy with companies across industries; over the past 16 years we’ve focused on new media, and now on social media marketing. And we’ve been directly involved in successful new-media start-ups, including one specializing in customer advisory panels and online brand communities. Our conclusion? The companies that will succeed in this environment are exploiting the many opportunities presented by social media while keeping an unwavering eye on their brand promise, and they are judiciously revising the marketing playbook rather than trying to rewrite it.

Leverage Social Media

Most companies utilize social media as tools for engagement and collaboration.  Of course, social media can also boost brand awareness, trial, and ultimately sales, especially when a campaign goes viral. More important for most companies, however, is that through social media they can gain rich, unmediated customer insights, faster than ever before.

This represents a profound shift. Historically, market research was product- rather than customer-centric: Marketers asked questions about attitudes and behaviors relevant to their brands. More recently we have seen the rise of ethnographic research to help them understand how both a brand and its wider product category fit into people’s lives. Social networks take this a step further by providing powerful new ways to explore consumers’ lives and opinions.

Enhance the Playbook

Although any company’s decision about whether and how to use a new tool is situation-specific, all companies should incorporate social media into their marketing playbooks. But what’s the best approach? Our analysis of the strategies and performance of a diverse range of companies suggests that great brands share four fundamental qualities:

• They offer and communicate a clear, relevant customer promise.
• They build trust by delivering on that promise.
• They drive the market by continually improving the promise.
• They seek further advantage by innovating beyond the familiar.

These basics don’t sound like rocket science, but we’ve been surprised by how many companies still fail to get them right. Social media can be used to reinforce all four, even as they make them more urgent.

Trust.

Clearly, trust is mainly about operational execution—service delivery. But keeping customers informed when things go wrong can prevent a slip-up from becoming a trust-eroding PR disaster.

Continual improvement.

For most companies—the biggest social media opportunity lies in gathering insights to drive continual incremental improvements.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

But here’s our advice, based on the dozens of early successes and failures we’ve studied:

Don’t throw out your playbook.

Start with your brand promise and let it guide all your actions in social media. Don’t get distracted by the abundance of options.

Companies can and do sell things via social media, of course, but their real value at this stage lies in learning about customers. Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook have such tremendous reach that they provide detailed quantitative analyses of communication flows between consumers. Increasingly smart natural-language-processing technology will, over time, help marketers extract further insights from the content of those discussions. At the other extreme, company-sponsored online brand communities can generate immediately applicable insights from direct, smaller-scale interactions.

Strive to go viral, but protect the brand.

The few brands that have substantially improved sales by using social media have done so with communications that convey authenticity and relevance—and are so entertaining that they go viral.

Anything Goes

Engage, but follow the social rules.

Social media conversations about brands are usually unstructured or semistructured and moderated by the participants themselves, using unwritten rules. People join in freely because they enjoy and learn from the discussion. Your company can also join, and to some extent influence, the conversation—but only if you are accepted by the other participants. Those in the company who execute its social media strategy should naturally be at home with the culture and rules of each social network. But they must also be deeply knowledgeable about the company’s products and—most important—steeped in its brand and values.

A version of this article appeared in the December 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.