Social Marketing refers to marketing activities that involve everyone. When everyone is involved, there is group effect, and marketing will become automatic. This becomes reality in the time of mobile internet. In the old days, there also existed something similar to Social Marketing, we called it word-of-mouth. However, word-of-mouth was slow and space-constrained, how strongly and fast it could convey a piece of message basically depended on how much information the message carried. And the so-called Viral Marketing, has the potential to become social not because of the technology, but because it usually carries powerful information. So now let’s talk about some important points about Social Marketing:
1. Become the source
When everyone is reposting and commending on a piece of message, it means the advertising cost of it is decreasing, until it hits the bottom to become zero. Therefore, to become the source of information can help us to achieve possible Social Marketing Effect. The key is to become the source! Take the new office building of Apple for example, it has already become the star of the world even though it has not yet officially completed. If you search for any information about Apple Campus 2 on Google, you will be astonished to find that Google will give you 7160 thousand related search results. This tells us that to become the source, we need to go to the extreme and aim for perfectionism, to be the one and the only one! Meaningless and redundant information is everywhere, they can only give us nothing but distraction, what we need to create is information source that worth to be memorized, and only this kind of source will add value to our brands.
2. Seek for perfectionism
If we work on every touchpoint between brands and customers with perfectionism, we are closer to making these touchpoints into the information source we want. Only by seeking perfectionism can we make advertisement automatic. The key is to find the way towards perfectionism. Although some may argue that perfectionism goes hand in hand with stubbornness, or beliefs, we can still learn something from the people who seemed to own these spirits, such as Steve Jobs. If you pay close attention to the glass box at the door of the Apple’s flagship store at 5th Avenue, you will notice that the box, which was made by 90 pieces of glass, is now made by 15 pieces. To Steve Jobs, the fewer the joints, the better the simplicity. However hard it was to make this happen technically, Steve insisted and he at last decided to buy an entire glass factory in China to specifically work on this kind of giant piece of glass, which later became the glass we see today on the glass box. This kind of glass has challenged the limits in architecture. The glass it used in its Hangzhou store has reached 15 meters high, while in Hong Kong, 30 meters — all this has brought unimaginative difficulties to transportation, assembly and maintenance. But Steve Jobs believed that only by conquering these limits can we stand ahead in technology, and this is seeking for perfectionism. So, every Apple Store in the world is so impressive and magnificent, they have created huge social effect. The tables in Apple stores are all made in the U.S., Apple owns the patent for the shape and the symmetry design of their tables, in this way, Apple can protect them from being copied or imitated, so to persist in creating unique visual experience in every Apple store, and this is also seeking for perfectionism.
Products, words, behaviors can all trigger different effects, Donald Trump is a perfect example of gaining social popularity and making his own miracle through manipulating extreme opinions. Lady Gaga successfully attracted people’s attention and built up a rebellious fashion icon image by styling herself in an exaggerating way. In modern art, extreme performance art can often help artists to get the most public attention. An Chinese American Extreme performance artist from Taiwan, Tehching Hsieh, gives us a typical example of this, he exploited this method in his five One Year Performances and achieved incredible success. His five One Year Performances are: He spent a year living inside a wooden cage of 11.6 X 9 X 8 inches. During this period of time, he never talked, read, wrote, not even listened to the radio or watched TV. In the second year, he punched a time clock every hour on the hour. In the third year, he lived entirely outdoor without any access to any buildings, metros, trains, cars, planes, ships, caves or tents. In the fourth year, he and another artist, Linda Montano, tied themselves up together using an 8-inch long rope and lived through the year without touching each other. In the fifth year, Tehching Hsieh lived without talking, reading, or seeing anything artistry or going to art galleries and museums. These performances attracted great attention, but most importantly, they got people think about the reason for him to do this series of performance: Why did he do this? Tehching Hsieh’s five One Year Performances carried strong social effect and so drew a big social impact. How extreme performance art exploits perfectionism gives us much inspiration on how to make good social marketing.
3. Socialize the topics
In traditional marketing time, we focused on promotion and direct advertisement, this would make information itself lose its sparkle and died. If our topics don’t set out from products, but from human, and think in the context of humanity, to create more topics with social effect, we can attract participation. No matter we agree or disagree, it will lead our way of doing marketing to possess deeper socialization and become more automatic.The best example of this is the latest long-video ad of SK-II. The whole topic of the ad didn’t mention anything about the products, it only told us a story about “Leftover lady”, and this ad has triggered one million reposts and comments in social media within one day. P&G also started to think out of the box and has transformed its advertisement strategy from the conventional ones that centralized in products to dynamic strategy that focuses on modern life and humanity. They launched an ad about gender inequality in wages in America, and this sensitive topic has led to a heated “political”debate about gender inequality. It went viral in all social media and guess what product P&G was trying to sell in this ad, deodorant! P&G’s Always(known as“HUSHUBAO”in China) has filmed a series of ads named Like A Girl and launched in 2014, this series aimed to break the conventional image of what a girl should be like. It has been clicked in youtube for more than 60 million times. It didn’t mention Always’s product — tampons or pads in the entire ad. Coca cola made its content marketing strategy in 2012 to socialize its ad topics, after that, Coca cola has launched a great number of ads carrying social topics, and has achieved great success in both brand image and sales.
All prized works in Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity of 2016 showed social trait in their topics. The ad of Philips’s ventilator, which won the premium prize, didn’t sell anything directly but told the story of a choir, where everyone suffered from Respiratory Disease. The story was about how 18 members of the choir, who had severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) managed to get on the stage of Apollo Theater after hard work. The bronze prize went to Samsung’s touchable ink product for blind people. There are 2.85 billion blind people in the world and 90%of them are living with the lowest wages, they face high cost to print braille. Samsung took the challenge and solved this problem. A Japanese pharma company won the prize of Silver Lion, they told a story of an old lady who insisted in putting on lipstick every day before she went for the doctor. This story aimed to arouse our awareness of the importance of early treatment. And the “Leftover lady” story of SK-II has also won the prize of Silver Lion. We can learn from this festival that topic socialization has not been only a trend, but the main stream in global marketing.
4. Be the best in every way
Social Network is connected by countless dots, every person, every piece of information, every media can be a dot. In a time when everyone becomes information or media, if we can make the best of all the connections between customers and brands, we can win the most likes, reposts and comments and gradually these sum up to become what we call word of mouth. If we put in creativity to every connection, we can make viral marketing happen, and everything will become automatic. So, it’s fair to say that Social Marketing challenges the way we do marketing, it’s a Nietche’s way of marketing, it calls for extraordinary determination and willpower from business to be chase for the best in every way.
Excerpts from Liu Cheng’s “Rebranding”
