Building Brands - Of the Consumers, By the Consumers, For the Consumers

In July 2006, HUL (then HLL) launched India’s first community portal exclusively belonging to a brand – The Sunsilk “Gang of Girls”. The initiative was an instant success with the number of members crossing the half million mark within six months of launching. It was HUL’s attempt to revive the Sunsilk brand. Today with a member base of 7.5 lakh users (a mere 2.5 lakh users in four and a half years), the success of Sunsilk’s brand building exercise is debatable. But, what cannot be denied is HUL’s early recognition of a marketing channel – Conversational Marketing - that is moving towards becoming the trend for marketing and brand building in 2012.
The launch of Orkut in 2004 (later in India in 2006) and the rise of Facebook’s usage as everyday’s must activity, paved the way for a new kind of a marketing channel which we all know as “Social Media”. Today almost each brand has their own Facebook page which is “liked” by fans, where the brand gets promoted each time the target segment logs onto Facebook. But, not all brands have sufficiently leveraged the true value of social media. Social Media have been extensively used for advertising and sales promotion. So much so that the value of communities like Facebook to marketers has been questioned as to whether it is the right place to reach your consumer. The regular argument is the fact that Facebook advertisements have critically low Click-Through-Rates (CTR), implying that people use Facebook solely to socialize and not to search for anything, especially, not their brands or products. As against this are the high CTRs of search engines ads like in the case of Google Adwords; rightly so because a person visits Google to find something. However true the argument is, what the perpetuators of this argument fail to realise is that Facebook or