Social media's influence on branding and the rise of crowdculture
1.
2. BRANDING IN THE AGE
OF SOCIAL MEDIA
-Srilekha Das 164
-Subhobrata Sarkar 165
-Sugandha Banerjee 166
3. Digital Era
• In the era of Facebook and Youtube brand building has become a
challenging task.Almost all companies hired creative agencies
and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the
digital universe.The thought was: Social media would allow the
company to leapfrog traditional media and forge relationships
directly with customers.Telling great stories and connecting with
customers in real time was important.
• Companies made huge bets on branded content. Yet very few
brands were successful in generating meaningful consumer
interest online.
• In reality, social media made brands less significant.
• It gave rise to crowdculture, hence changing the rules of
branding.
(Video of Coca-cola journey)
4. Why Branded Content and
Sponsorships used to Work?
• Branded content- Blurs the line between marketing and entertainment,
provides content that increases brand value.
• In the early days, companies made their brands famous and infiltrated
culture, using short-form storytelling, cinematic tricks, songs, and
empathetic characters.
• E.g Frito-Lay’s “Frito Bandito” and
BMW pioneered the practice of
creating short films for the internet.
• Worked well as entertainment media
were oligopolies.
• Later on the rise of new technologies that
allowed audiences to opt out of ads- made it
much harder for brands to buy fame.
5. Rise of Crowdculture
• Brands only succeed when they appeal to the crowd-culture which is
a mass of digital natives ready and eager to share with their like-
minded acquaintances.
• Cultural innovation earlier flowed from the margins of society,
challenging mainstream norms and conventions, companies and
brands that once acted as intermediaries.
• Today, Social media binds together communities that once were
geographically isolated, greatly increasing the pace and intensity of
collaboration.Now that these once-remote communities are densely
networked, their cultural influence has become direct and
substantial. These new crowdcultures come in two groups:
Amplified subculture : incubate new ideologies and practices. E.g:
3-D printing, anime, bird-watching, homeschooling, barbecue,etc.
Turbocharged art worlds: break new ground in entertainment.
6. Turbocharged art worlds:
• In art worlds, artists (musicians, filmmakers, writers, designers,
cartoonists, and so on) gather in inspired collaborative competition:
They work together, learn from one another, play off ideas, and
push one another. The collective efforts of participants in these
“scenes” often generate major creative breakthroughs.
• Crowdculture has turbocharged art worlds, vastly increasing the
number of participants and the speed and quality of their
interactions.
• Now millions of new cultural entrepreneurs come together online
to hone their craft, exchange ideas, fine-tune their content, and
compete to produce hits. The new content is highly attuned to
audiences and production is cheap.The crowdculture members need
not wait for a year to get funding and distribution for their short
films.Social media comes to their rescue.
7. Beyond Branded Content
• In YouTube or Instagram, ranking of corporate brands are very
poor. Instead entertainers whom we’ve never heard of,
appear from nowhere.
• E.g.-YouTube’s greatest success by far is PewDiePie, a Swedish
youtuber who is the most subscribed individual on YouTube
with over 49 million subscribers.
• The power of
crowdculture made
him famous globally
8. Contd..
• Comparing PewDiePie, who makes inexpensive videos in
his house, to McDonald’s, one of the world’s biggest
spenders on social media, it is seen that McDonald’s has
204,000 YouTube subscribers, while PewDiePie has over
46 million subscribers.
• Dude Perfect , the brainchild of five college jocks from
Texas, make videos of trick shots and athletic feats, has
12 million subscribers.(DudePerfect).
• The problems companies face is structural. They excel at
coordinating and executing complex marketing programs
across multiple markets around the world. But they lack
cultural innovation.
9. Contd..
• Performers, athletes, sports teams are hugely
popular on social media.
• Celebrities dominate the social media.
• On YouTube & Twitter musicians like Rihanna,
One Direction, Katy Perry,Eminem, Justin
Bieber, and Taylor Swift and Sport stars like
Neymar, Kaka and Christiano Ronaldo have
built massive audiences.
• Teams such as FC Barcelona and Real Madrid
are far more popular than sports brands, Nike
and Adidas.
• Corporate companies are not able to gain
support of communities
10. Indian Vloggers
Scherezade Shroff, quit part
time modelling to become full
time vlogger on fashion and
beauty.She has 75187
subscribers in youtube.
12. Contd..
Nisha Madhulika, a 57 year
old housewife ,has emerged
as a winner in food
sector.She has 282,782
subscribers in youtube.
13. How One Brand Uses Celebrities to
Break Through
• Under Armour’s recent campaign “I Will What I Want”
shows how to combine celebrity sponsorships and
cultural branding to create content with impact.
• Under Armour originally became an iconic brand
because it innovated with ideology-using female
celebrities to push against gender
norms.(UnderArmour)
14. Cultural Branding
• Cultural branding is a
discipline that systematically
guides brand innovation:
pinpoint cultural
opportunities emerging in
society and build brand
strategies to leverage these
opportunities.
• Jack Daniel’s used this
approach to become on of
America’s leading premium
whiskey from a near
bankrupt regional distiller.
15. 5 steps of Cultural Branding
Chipotle – the fast casual Mexican food chain –
applied the 5 steps of cultural branding to
become one of America’s most compelling and
talked-about brands
• Map the cultural orthodoxy -- the brand
promotes an innovative ideology that breaks
with category conventions. To do that, it first
needs to identify which conventions to leapfrog
-- cultural orthodoxy.
16. Contd..
• Locate the cultural opportunity As time passes, disruptions in
society cause an orthodoxy to lose traction. Consumers begin
searching for alternatives, which opens up an opportunity for
innovative brands to push forward a new ideology in their
categories
• Target the crowdculture as social media took off, an influential
and diverse cluster of overlapping subcultures pushed hard
for food innovations. They included advocates of evolutionary
nutrition and paleo diets, sustainable ranchers, a new
generation of environmental activists, urban gardeners, and
farm-to-table restaurants. In short order, a massive cultural
movement had organized around the revival of preindustrial
foods. Chipotle succeeded because it jumped into this
crowdculture and took on its cause.
17. Contd..
• Diffuse the new ideology In 2011 Chipotle
launched Back to the Start, an animated film
with simple wooden figures. A second film, The
Scarecrow, parodied an industrial food company
that branded its products using natural farm
imagery. Chipotle painted an inspired vision of
America returning to bucolic agricultural and
food production traditions and reversing many
problems in the dominant food system.
Scarecrow Back to the start
18. Contd..
• Innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints
A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by
playing off particularly intriguing or contentious
issues that dominate the media discourse
related to an ideology. To thrive, Chipotle must
continue to lead on flashpoint issues with
products and communiqués
19. Competing for Crowdcultures
• By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowdcultures,
brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the
overstuffed media environment.
• Three brands—Dove, Axe, and Old Spice—have generated
tremendous consumer interest and identification in a
historically low-involvement category, one you would never
expect to get attention on social media. They succeeded by
championing distinctive gender ideologies around which
crowdcultures had formed.
21. Conclusion
Companies need to shift their focus
away from the platforms such as
Facebook, YouTube and Instagram
and toward the real locus of digital
power—crowdcultures
• Old Spice succeeded not with a
Facebook strategy but with a
strategy that leveraged the ironic
hipster aesthetic.
• Chipotle succeeded not with a
YouTube strategy but with
products and communications that
spoke to the preindustrial food
movement
