July 2012

BRANDGYM RESEARCH PAPER 6
By David Taylor Managing Partner

Can social media show you the money?

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Can social media show you the money?
About the research
The first part of the research was with over 100 senior marketing professionals across Europe, Africa, Asia, the USA and Latin America, covering a broad range of sectors. In addition, we did research with 1000 consumers each in the UK and USA, to compare their actual use of social media* with how marketers think they use it. Read on to see how wrong most marketers are! We have brought to life the findings with examples from our work on brandgym projects, and through interesting case studies we have come across in our blogging and book writing.
* To clarify, this study focuses on the creation of content using social media (e.g. Facebook pages, Twitter feeds) and not online advertising on social media sites.

In this, our 6th global survey, we ask “Can Social Media Show you the Money?”.

The brandgym partners

Introduction
Social media is a red-hot topic today. Social media is sexy, shiny and new. And it’s also a bit scary, with headlines screaming that the whole world of marketing is changing, and that ‘old’ media like TV advertising is dead. However, data on the brand and business building effects of social media is thin on the ground. We felt it was time to cut through the hype and hysteria around social media, to better understand the role it can play. We wanted to find out: “Can social media show you the money?” How social is your brand?: accepting the limitations of social media, what role can it play for your brand? What consumers really want: the real reasons for consumers using social media from brands are not what marketers think. Key platforms : Which social media channels to focus on, and why.

Hype
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

More Hype

In this paper we look at the following areas:
Why social media is hot: what are the key drivers of social media usage by marketing teams? The limitations of social media: why social media has a limited role and is far from replacing “old media”.

Even More Hype

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media is hot

Part 1: Why social
It’s what cool brands do:
The research confirms our belief that the key driver of social media usage by brands today is fashion, not facts. ‘Keeping up with trends’ was by far the main reason given by marketing directors for their use of social media. This scored much higher than any hard evidence, or even gut feel, on the business building effect of social media.

Main driver for companies’ use of social media
19%
Evidence of tangible business benefits

59%

21%

Gut feel on business benefits Keeping up with latest marketing trends

It’s good for business (we hope):

Given the lack of evidence, a surprisingly high 58% of marketing directors believed social media was a driver of business growth, although most of these saw it having a minor role (33%) rather than a major one (25%).

Role played by social media
9% 25%

Key driver of business growth

32%

Minor driver of business growth Helps with brand image No impact on brand or business

33%

Base your use of social media where possible on hard facts about what it can do for your business and brand.
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Action point: Cut through the hype and refuse to be a follower of fashion.

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Part 2: The limitations of social media
Sensationalist, scare-mongering messages about the demise of TV advertising and the rise of social media are popular headline-grabbers. In reality, social media has a limited role to play, and conventional media is far from dead.

Social media has limited reach
The key driver of brand growth is penetration: having as many people as possible using you at least once a year. Loyalty measures, such as frequency of purchase, are actually similar between brands in a given category. Therefore, the key to growth is reaching as many people as possible, especially light and non-users, to drive penetration . And this is where social media has serious limitations. Our consumer research shows that over 80% of people were already using a brand before they started interacting with it on social media, with less than 20% new users. This means social media has a limited role in driving penetration of your brand as you’re talking mainly to existing users. And if you think you can make them more loyal, you are fighting the facts of brand growth: loyalty levels across brands are similar in a given category. This means that trying to grow share by Increasing loyalty is a losing game.

Impact of social media on brand use

(% of people who say staying in touch with brands is important)

US

83%

17%

Already buying brand before using its social media Started buying brand after using its social media

GB

86%

14%

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

The limited reach of social media is shown by Coca-Cola. Its Facebook following of c.40 million fans seems huge. However, the following shows this is not quite true:

based on our research above, this means a potential

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Part 2: The limitations of social media
Advertising is far from dead
Advertising, especially on TV, is far from dead. “Old” media still has the central role to play for most brands, for several reasons: advertising has the reach you need to drive penetration. TV advertising has the highest ROI of any medium, according to econometric research by Thinkbox. And this ROI is actually up +22% in the last five years, owing to growing commercial TV viewing and lower costs. conventional advertising allows you to plan the size and targeting of your audience In contrast, social media is a lottery. Its impossible to predict how many people of what target will like your Facebook page or watch your YouTube video. most viral online success stories were originally driven by TV advertising. For example, Old Spice’s ‘ The man your man could smell like’ the most conventional form of ‘old’ media there is: a TV advert in the Superbowl.

What about word-of-mouth?
Word-of-mouth is often portrayed as a key reason for brands to be active on social media. In reality, 90% of word-of-mouth conversations about brands still take place offline, primarily face-to-face, according to research by Ed Keller and Brad Fay. As they say, ‘Online social networks are far from the Holy Grail of marketing. A far bigger and more powerful force is real world, faceto-face conversation’.

Action point: Ignore the hype about the demise of “old fashioned” marketing, it still has a key role to play for most brands. In reality, social media has a supporting role in amplifying your marketing, given its limited reach and the inability to plan the size and nature of the audience.
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Part 3: How social is your brand?
Accepting the limitations of social media, what role can it play for your brand? To start with, you need to get real about the role of brands in general in peoples’ day to day lives. Only 7% of UK people saw social media as being very important for staying in touch and interacting with (39%/50% in the UK/US). These results help explain why people like on average only 9 brands on Facebook, compared to an average of 200+ friends.

How social is your brand?

Use social media to stay in touch/interact with...
(% Very Important)
60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Friends/Family Hobbies Everyday products/services

Even within this minor role for brands, not all brands are equal. In the league table of brands liked on Facebook, consumer goods products come rock bottom (8%), in research by DDB. At the top were brands from media (55%), These results reflect the fact that most brands are just not that social. If social media is a virtual pub or cafe where conversations happen, would people talk about your brand? Would people want to read your brand’s weekly magazine, or watch its daily TV show? If your brand is closer to pasta sauce than Prada, then the answer is probably a resounding ‘no’.

50% 39%
GB US

16% 9% 7%

14%

Social media usage in P4Weeks
100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% TOT 16-64 16-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64

How young is your brand?

A further point to bear in mind is how important younger people are to your brand, given their higher usage of social media. If you are a brand like Axe, Nike or Levi’s where this a key audience, social media will play a bigger role.

GB USA

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Part 3: How social is your brand?
Can you sell online?
A final factor to determine the role social media can play for your brand is the link to selling more stuff. If online is a key sales channel for your brand, then social media can be a revenue driver, not just a communication medium. An example of a brand like this is The X-Factor, a reality TV singing contest, similar to Idols in other markets. The brand’s UK Facebook page had a whopping 3.7million fans and it helped generate online revenue by people buying iTunes tracks of the week’s songs and by encouraging mobile phone voting for who stays on the show. In contrast, for consumer goods brands the link to selling more of the core is much more in-direct. The best an FMCG brand can do is link to an online shopping site, but this is still a niche channel, accounting for only 3% of the grocery market. Beermat business plan: questions posed in this section. In this highly sophisticated media model, the total score is the % of your budget to spend on social media, as shown in the example on the right.
X-Factor / Idols TV show 8 How social /10? 5 How online /10? 7 How young /10? 20% TOTAL /30 = %Budget Lynx / Axe 6 1 9 16% Kellogg’s 2 1 2 5%

% of time/budget allocated to social media
70% 60% % Team

60% 47%

% Budget

The score for Kellogg’s is in line with our survey, with 2/3 saying they are allocating less than 5% of their budget or less to social media. The % of team time allocated is higher, with half allocating 5%+ to social media, confirming the labour-intensive nature of creating a stream of content.

50% 40%

32%
30% 20% 10%

17% 9% 3% 5% 7%
1-5% 5-10% 10-15%

13% 7%
15%+

0% 0%

Action point: Don’t spend more than 5-10% on Social Media, unless you are a social brand, selling online. Evaluate how social your brand is and the importance
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of online sales. For most everyday brands this will show that social media should take up no more

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Part 4: What consumers want
Consumers DON’T want a conversation with brands
Assuming you are going to allocate some time and money to social media, how best to use this? What do consumers want from your brand? Well, here Marketing directors seem to be out of touch. expectations about how involved consumers want to be in creating content themselves. In reality, a mere 5% of consumers said they used brands’ social media for this reason. In contrast, desire for useful information and deals is much higher than marketers think. This means you need a stream of distinctive, relevant content and attractive promotional offers to be active on social media.

Why consumers use social media from brands
41%

45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Useful, helpful info on brands Getting deals/ promotions Interesting, entertaining brand-created content 2-way “conversation” with brands

32% 29% 29% 25%
What Consumers Do (GB/US) What Marketers Think

27%

12% 5%

99% of consumers don’t interact

The low interest in 2-way dialogue is confirmed by data on the top 200 brands on Facebook, done interacting with it, based on the metric “People Talking About This” (total likes, posts, comments, tags, shares). In other words, 99% of people were on the brand’s Facebook page to consume content, not create it.

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Part 4: What consumers want
Content is king
Brands need to create a stream of distinctive, relevant content on social media, and this has several implications. First, this needs a new skill-set. You may need someone with writing or journalistic experience to lead the creation of brand content, either in your team or an agency partner. And, like a newsroom, you have to react on the spot to important events and consumer comments. Marks & Spencer work on a 2-hour response time to comments in social media, for example. Content creation, talent and speed were all seen as being difficult for over ½ of our marketing directors, topped only by the challenge of proving ROI. The key challenge for a newsroom is to have a stream of interesting, impactful news that can make headlines. This is where brands with large ranges of products and services, such as retailers, have an advantage of more to talk about than the limited offer of most product brands.

Social media challenges
100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30%

The Gatorade ‘newsroom’ monitoring social media in real time.

54% 18% 25% 13% 10% 49%

Extremely difficult Difficult

20% 10% 0%

37%

34%

39%

34%

Proving ROI

Right talent to create content

Creating relevant content linked to my brand

Quick response to consumers

Which social media channels to focus on

Action point: Content is king - hire an editor You need an editor to lead content creation: you may have to hire in or sub-contract to someone with writing or journalistic experience.
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Part 5: Which social media platform?
With a better understanding of what consumers want from social media, where should you focus your limited time and money? After all, social media enthusiasts like to scare us by showing an ever expanding plethora of platforms. Our marketing director survey confirmed our belief in a focus on Facebook and a supporting role for Twitter and YouTube. Brands’ own websites also came out as being extremely important. has by far the biggest audience (900 million) and give more ability for brands to create interesting content. The key challenge on Facebook is creating bite-sized bits of compelling content, given that 90% of people consume brand content as part of their ‘news feed’, not on the brand’s Facebook page as you might expect. You have to stand out amongst the news from a person’s c.200 friends to be seen. has a much smaller role to play, given its even more limited reach. It has fewer
Extremely important social media platforms: Marketing Directors

is a new-age helpline, most relevant for complex service brands, and following celebrity CEOs. For example, the CEO of US retailer Zappos, Tony Hseieh, has 2.4 million followers, almost 200 times the following of Zappos.com. Whilst every marketing director dreams of a YouTube sensation that ‘goes viral’, we suggest that viral success should be seen as a bonus to your conventional media plan, not the main objective. Firstly, the key drivers of virality seem to be sex, humour and “spectacle”, and these my not fit with your brand. And more importantly, YouTube success is a lottery. For every viral success, many more films fail to fly.

Action point: Focus your effort on the platform that has the biggest reach with your consumers For most brands that’s likely to be facebook.
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Part 6: Beyond social media
“What’s our digital strategy?” is the wrong question
For example, we worked with the Carling Black Label brand in South Africa on a digitally-empowered activation called “Be the Coach”. This allowed soccer fans to vote via mobile phones to actually pick the teams for a special cup match between South Africa’s top 2 teams, the Kaiser Chiefs and The Orlando Pirates. has helped improve brand imagery, most often used and volume. During the match fans could vote via SMS for the player they wanted to substitute. Other examples of digitally enabled brand activity include the Nike+ alliance with Apple that allows you to track your runs with your iPod or iPhone, and Gillette’s launch of an online subscription service for getting re-fill razor blades. Social media is only one aspect of the digital world brands operate in today. In fact, “What’s our digital strategy?” is the wrong question. A better question is “What’s our strategy for a digital world”, as this opens up opportunities beyond social media.

Action point: Think Conclusions beyond social media

Bigger opportunities may“Can sociallookingshow you social media to jury is still out. On the upside,ideas. In response to the question come by media beyond the money”, the other digitally empowered social media can amplify the rest of your marketing mix with limited extra budget, though you need to invest in people to create great content. However, you need to cut through the hype to understand exactly what role it can play, and avoid feeling pressurised to “just do it” to keep up with marketing fashion. Specifically: given its limited reach, social media is far from replacing “old media” and is rather there to amplify the rest of your mix. if your brand is closer to pasta sauce than Prada, social media should probably use less than 10% of your budget. most consumers want interesting content, not interaction, and you need a “new team” to create this. it has the biggest audience and opportunity for creating content. Twitter is tiny. And YouTube viral videos are a lottery. there may be other, bigger digitally-powered opportunities to build your brand and business.

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Brand Leadership Coaching
6 senior brand coaches helping companies gain and retain brand leadership. Turbo Marketing approach helps teams develop effective marketing plans including relevant social media and other digitally empowered opportunities: Use fresh insight fuel as inspiration Create a series of integrated “chapters” of your brand story Build brand properties to boost marketing effectiveness ‘Follow the money’ approach anchors plans on business issues Build team energy and alignment through a collaborative, cross-functional process Brand Vision to Action and Brand-led Innovation 6 books on brand leadership including the updated version of the brandgym, Amazon’s best-selling management book

track record with leading companies includes SAB Miller, Sainsbury’s, LVMH, Danone and Kraft.

David Taylor (Managing Partner) M: + 44 (0) 7789 202 564 E: david@thebrandgym.com Anne Charbonneau (Benelux/France) M: +31 611 64 34 07 E: anne@thebrandgym.com

David Nichols (Managing Partner) M: +44 (0) 7787 148 806 E: davidn@thebrandgym.com Silvina Moronta (Latin America) M: +54 (9) 3436612393 E: silvina@thebrandgym.com

Diego Kerner (Latin America) M: + 54 (9) 11 5 058 5900 E: diego@thebrandgym.com Prasad Narasimhan (Asia) M: +91 8951939090 E: prasad@thebrandgym.com

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