Interactive brands gain competitive advantage

18 February 2010 | By Morag Cuddeford-Jones

Italian clothing brand Benetton was famous for its marketing in the Eighties and Nineties. Its “shockvertising” images featuring hard-hitting photos of people dying of AIDS garnered headlines around the world.

Now the company is hoping to tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the times by using a competition for its fans to become the “face” of the brand, run through social media and augmented reality. This follows supermarket Iceland’s announcement that it will drop controversial celebrity Kerry Katona from its marketing strategy in favour of finding a real-life consumer to front the brand.

Benetton is inviting Facebook users to enter a competition called “It’s My Time” to become the star of the brand’s new commercials. Users create profiles of themselves on a dedicated Facebook fan site and other subscribers vote for their favourites. They can even see images in augmented reality (see box, page 23). The winning entries will appear in Benetton’s next ad campaign.

Erik Ravelo, creative director of Fabrica, Benetton’s in-house communication research centre, explains the idea originated as part of research undertaken for the brand’s quarterly magazine, Colors. Rather than developing all the content in house, the brand opened the pages up to global contributors, who sent in their own pictures, stories and ideas via the website.

This then evolved into the brand’s current competition. Ravelo claims: “Showing the democratic face of fashion has always been a key element in Benetton’s communication. The very positive feedback we had with the Colors initiative convinced us to go into more depth and conceive something unique.”

Using consumer input for campaigns is not unusual. If Henry Ford was selling cars today, he would never be able to use his famous phrase: “You can have the car in any colour as long as it’s black.” Instead, his Facebook fans would be voting on next season’s Model T colour.

“The true future of using social media will be to relax about how customers experience your brand in its beta phase and give consumers a platform to share problems”

Simon Tucker, Attention Seekers

The sheer volume of campaigns run as social network competitions suggests the competition-through-social-network route is now a mainstream marketing tool for many brands. Earlier this month, controversial fashion brand American Apparel launched a campaign to find the “butt” of the brand.

Entrants post pictures of their posterior – clad only in underwear – on the American Apparel website, where other visitors can rate them and leave comments. The brand reports that two winners will be “eligible to be our next butt model” and win $300 worth of AA items.

In a less risqué move, Wal-Mart has asked consumers to put themselves forward to be its new face for the L.e.i. own-brand jeans line. It offers, among other prizes, a $100,000 prize, along with a Teen Vogue internship. Consumers must submit a two-minute video proclaiming why they are suitable to be the face of the brand, and can interact with the competition through Facebook or Twitter.

It isn’t just clothing brands getting involved. Coca-Cola-owned Vitamin Water recently invited Facebook users in the US to develop a new flavoured drink in return for a $5,000 prize.

Matt Burgess, managing director for Peperami at Unilever, who ran a competition last year to find consumer-created ads for his brand, adds that using the public can be “cost-effective” as a marketing push, and also produce really interesting creative ideas. He says: “We envisage continuing this strategy.”

Because of the speed of turnaround and relative low cost involved in setting up networking pages, applications and blogs, social media has proved a particularly popular platform for corporate social responsibility activity.

US bank JP Morgan Chase recently concluded a charity funding project, again via Facebook, in which it invited subscribers to vote for 100 worthy recipients of a $5m pot, with the top-ranked charity receiving $1m. Fans of Chase Community Giving could nominate a charity, which could then rise through the ranks based on votes from other users.

However, the project provided a salutary lesson for other brands viewing social media as a channel for quick, cheap consumer interaction. In the final days of the initial vote, charities involving pro-choice organisations and marijuana lobbyists that had been doing well in the ranks suddenly disappeared from view. The voting leader board was also removed.

A spokesperson from JP Morgan Chase could not be reached as Marketing Week went to press, but in December 2009 Chase spokesman Joseph Evangelisti told the New York Times: “We have taken down individual charity counts with a couple of days left to build excitement among the broadest number of participants.”

This lack of transparency led critics to cry foul. Commentators felt that Chase had failed to put in place enough checks and balances to ensure that it retained the required level of control over its brand in the social media space.

Trevor Johnson, head of strategy and planning at Facebook for Europe, Middle East and Africa, cautions against brands viewing social networks as a quick, cheap marketing gimmick. “Social media should be seen in the context of the media mix as a whole. It is most effective in an enhancing, supporting role to other media. Like any campaign, it requires an element of planning mixed with the ability to react quickly,” he insists.

Simon Tucker, consultant at content agency Attention Seekers, notes that marketers will have to re-evaluate their illusions of brand control if they are to use the social media channel effectively. “Brands feel the need to engage with social media but the majority are not bringing the customer close to the centre of their operations,” he states.

He claims the current vogue for competitions is little more than marketing lip-service. “It must be much more of an open dialogue that doesn’t just feel like a gesture,” he adds.

Tucker suggests that this dialogue will lead to consumers having far greater influence over what brands stand for from the start and cites Google’s almost perpetual beta status as the embodiment of this.

He explains: “The company sits there with an open ear. Just now, the default position for most brands is to remain on the defensive. The true future of using social media will be to relax about how customers experience your brand in its beta phase and give consumers a platform to share problems. That is a much healthier dynamic.”