Change has become inevitable in today’s business scenario. The Internet was the new industrial revolution, bringing with it not only technological change but one that was societal and epic in scope. Access to information combined with global supply and demand is reshaping established conventions and destroying old world definitions. Social media has forever changed the way businesses market their products/services, leading to newer ways of engaging customers and thereby increasing brand exposure in unimaginable ways. The social web and mobile technologies have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop, information is shared and influence takes hold. People now use social technology to help shape the world’s events and culture. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, citizens of all nations are more empowered than ever before. Connected individuals have rallied crowds, created a vast audience and toppled political establishments by communicating their message through social networks.

Now is the time of crowd culture and the new benchmark is how it has influenced the way companies are branded. Crowd culture is defined as diverse, widespread groups of people who join together in support of, or even opposition to, a brand. It is a creation of the digital age that produces digital communities and sub-cultures. Marketers, whether for big or small businesses and even social media, must be proficient in their techniques to grab the attention of these crowds when working at building a following. Branded content has now become an outdated concept. The popular advertisement campaigns like Nike’s “Just Do It” became famous by entertaining the audience. These campaigns also worked because the entertainment media comprised oligopolies, limiting cultural competition. Only a few television networks and movie companies distributed content, so consumer marketing companies could buy their way to success by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favourite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. For decades, we were accustomed to fast food chains sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos bringing us golf and tennis competitions and youth brands underwriting bands and festivals. Technology revolutionised the whole concept and allowed people to opt out of ads and for the first time, advertisers had to compete with real entertainment. Companies innovated by creating entertainment content, such as BMW’s short movies for the internet in the hope of gathering a huge audience around their brands. However, branded content could not withstand its latest competition, not from other media houses, but from the crowd itself.

Despite the billions spent on creating content, only three brands are in the YouTube Top 500. McDonald’s has 204,000 YouTube subscribers and  PewDiePie has 41 million subscribers. Even Red Bull, considered the biggest branded content success stories with a $2 billion annual branded content budget, only has 4.9 million subscribers, way behind dozens of crowd culture start-ups with production budgets under $100,000. Dude Perfect, started by five Texas university athletes who make videos of trick shots and goofy athletic feats, has eight million subscribers, three million more than Red Bull. It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Very few people want it in their feed. In fact, many brands are struggling to unlock the apparent value of social media. A recent analysis conducted by Tania Yuki, founder of social content analytics firm Shareablee, finds that of 65 billion actions prompted by posts made by US brands across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, only seven per cent involved sharing the brand’s content. Douglas Holt, the famous branding expert, suggests that people actually want to follow people, not brands. A look at any social media shows that ranking and brands come a distant second to celebrities: Cristiano Ronaldo, Shakira or Vin Diesel on Facebook, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Barrack Obama on Twitter, or Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian on Instagram.

Holt also draws our attention to a different type of celebrity, focussing on e-sports, names that most of us have only heard casually like PewDiePie, VanossGaming and CaptainSparklez. These gamers and gaming commentators attract millions of followers on YouTube, dwarfing the efforts of major brands and at a fraction of the cost. Brands should take inspiration from digital micro-cultures like e-sports, identifying the ideology that underlies their passion and leveraging it online to sustain their own cultural relevance. So how does social media play a role in the rise of crowd culture? It is all the more path-breaking as it has the ability to bind together geographically isolated communities, in the process greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration and thereby making their cultural influence more direct and substantial. These new crowd cultures come into two types: Subcultures, which incubate new ideologies and practices; and art worlds, which break new ground on entertainment. First, social media has democratised and expanded sub culture. Previously, people had to gather physically with limited ways to communicate on niche topics, maybe magazines or newsletters, or small meetings. Now there are crowd cultures around virtually every topic — ice cream, bacon, poker, tarot reading et al and these groups are worldwide, allowing people to interact and share ideas, products, practices, news and aesthetics, and most importantly bypass the mass-culture gatekeepers. Social media has made cultural innovators and early adopters the same. Second, producing innovative popular entertainment requires a distinctive mode of organisation, that sociologists describe as an art world where artists gather in collaborative competition, and learn from one another by working together and pushing each other.

Given the emergence of crowd culture, marketers can use the concept of “cultural branding” to become successful in social media. The first step is to understand what is currently considered ‘common sense’ and map the cultural orthodoxy. In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with category conventions. The second step is to locate the cultural opportunity. Over time, cultural orthodoxy begins to lose traction as people understand alternatives. Before social media, the influence of these alternatives would have been marginal, as the mainstream controlled the conversation.

Social media, however, allows the crowd to convert a niche conversation into mainstream beliefs. One example would be travel, where for generations people thought about certain destinations (Florida, London, the Bahamas) as the places to vacation. Then with people sharing pictures and stories of the Maldives, Patagonia, Seychelles, et al, the travel industry changed dramatically. Thus, people were not only open but looking for alternatives to traditional destinations. Third, make an idea meaningful to as many people as possible. A brand idea also needs to have a potential scale. If a brand becomes too associated with a specific sub culture, it can become defined and limited by that association. Take the example of Toyota’s Scion brand in the US. Designed to appeal to a younger, anti-establishment audience, Scion was marketed through tactics like the creation of its own record label, guerrilla marketing and sponsorship, including the infamous Slayer car. The problem was that while Scion may have become well-known within the heavy metal crowd, more mainstream buyers did not know about it at all. Attempts to remedy this came too late. Later, Toyota declared Scion dead.

Fourth, once you understand the cultural opportunity, target the crowd culture. If it is adventure travel, build an offering or a company around it. Fifth, rather than just creating branded content, create entertainment that leverages the identified cultural opportunity. The entertainment does not need to be great, it needs to tap into the vein of the crowd culture. And finally, innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints. A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by playing off particularly intriguing or contentious issues that dominate social media conversations related to an ideology. That’s what Ben & Jerry’s does in championing its sustainable business philosophy. The company uses new product introductions to show its ideology on a range of political issues.

In pursuit of relevance, most brands chase trends. But this is a commodity approach to branding as thousands are doing exactly the same thing with the same generic list of trends. Thus, consumers do not pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowd cultures, brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment. The key is rather than trying to force a story on a captive audience, you need to build a story and product that is consistent with the desires of the social media crowd.

(The writer is Assistant Professor, Amity University)

Writer & Courtesy: The Pioneer

Change has become inevitable in today’s business scenario. The Internet was the new industrial revolution, bringing with it not only technological change but one that was societal and epic in scope. Access to information combined with global supply and demand is reshaping established conventions and destroying old world definitions. Social media has forever changed the way businesses market their products/services, leading to newer ways of engaging customers and thereby increasing brand exposure in unimaginable ways. The social web and mobile technologies have accelerated the rate at which relationships develop, information is shared and influence takes hold. People now use social technology to help shape the world’s events and culture. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, citizens of all nations are more empowered than ever before. Connected individuals have rallied crowds, created a vast audience and toppled political establishments by communicating their message through social networks.

Now is the time of crowd culture and the new benchmark is how it has influenced the way companies are branded. Crowd culture is defined as diverse, widespread groups of people who join together in support of, or even opposition to, a brand. It is a creation of the digital age that produces digital communities and sub-cultures. Marketers, whether for big or small businesses and even social media, must be proficient in their techniques to grab the attention of these crowds when working at building a following. Branded content has now become an outdated concept. The popular advertisement campaigns like Nike’s “Just Do It” became famous by entertaining the audience. These campaigns also worked because the entertainment media comprised oligopolies, limiting cultural competition. Only a few television networks and movie companies distributed content, so consumer marketing companies could buy their way to success by paying to place their brands in this tightly controlled cultural arena.

Brands also infiltrated culture by sponsoring TV shows and events, attaching themselves to successful content. Since fans had limited access to their favourite entertainers, brands could act as intermediaries. For decades, we were accustomed to fast food chains sponsoring new blockbuster films, luxury autos bringing us golf and tennis competitions and youth brands underwriting bands and festivals. Technology revolutionised the whole concept and allowed people to opt out of ads and for the first time, advertisers had to compete with real entertainment. Companies innovated by creating entertainment content, such as BMW’s short movies for the internet in the hope of gathering a huge audience around their brands. However, branded content could not withstand its latest competition, not from other media houses, but from the crowd itself.

Despite the billions spent on creating content, only three brands are in the YouTube Top 500. McDonald’s has 204,000 YouTube subscribers and  PewDiePie has 41 million subscribers. Even Red Bull, considered the biggest branded content success stories with a $2 billion annual branded content budget, only has 4.9 million subscribers, way behind dozens of crowd culture start-ups with production budgets under $100,000. Dude Perfect, started by five Texas university athletes who make videos of trick shots and goofy athletic feats, has eight million subscribers, three million more than Red Bull. It turns out that consumers have little interest in the content that brands churn out. Very few people want it in their feed. In fact, many brands are struggling to unlock the apparent value of social media. A recent analysis conducted by Tania Yuki, founder of social content analytics firm Shareablee, finds that of 65 billion actions prompted by posts made by US brands across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, only seven per cent involved sharing the brand’s content. Douglas Holt, the famous branding expert, suggests that people actually want to follow people, not brands. A look at any social media shows that ranking and brands come a distant second to celebrities: Cristiano Ronaldo, Shakira or Vin Diesel on Facebook, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Barrack Obama on Twitter, or Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian on Instagram.

Holt also draws our attention to a different type of celebrity, focussing on e-sports, names that most of us have only heard casually like PewDiePie, VanossGaming and CaptainSparklez. These gamers and gaming commentators attract millions of followers on YouTube, dwarfing the efforts of major brands and at a fraction of the cost. Brands should take inspiration from digital micro-cultures like e-sports, identifying the ideology that underlies their passion and leveraging it online to sustain their own cultural relevance. So how does social media play a role in the rise of crowd culture? It is all the more path-breaking as it has the ability to bind together geographically isolated communities, in the process greatly increasing the pace and intensity of collaboration and thereby making their cultural influence more direct and substantial. These new crowd cultures come into two types: Subcultures, which incubate new ideologies and practices; and art worlds, which break new ground on entertainment. First, social media has democratised and expanded sub culture. Previously, people had to gather physically with limited ways to communicate on niche topics, maybe magazines or newsletters, or small meetings. Now there are crowd cultures around virtually every topic — ice cream, bacon, poker, tarot reading et al and these groups are worldwide, allowing people to interact and share ideas, products, practices, news and aesthetics, and most importantly bypass the mass-culture gatekeepers. Social media has made cultural innovators and early adopters the same. Second, producing innovative popular entertainment requires a distinctive mode of organisation, that sociologists describe as an art world where artists gather in collaborative competition, and learn from one another by working together and pushing each other.

Given the emergence of crowd culture, marketers can use the concept of “cultural branding” to become successful in social media. The first step is to understand what is currently considered ‘common sense’ and map the cultural orthodoxy. In cultural branding, the brand promotes an innovative ideology that breaks with category conventions. The second step is to locate the cultural opportunity. Over time, cultural orthodoxy begins to lose traction as people understand alternatives. Before social media, the influence of these alternatives would have been marginal, as the mainstream controlled the conversation.

Social media, however, allows the crowd to convert a niche conversation into mainstream beliefs. One example would be travel, where for generations people thought about certain destinations (Florida, London, the Bahamas) as the places to vacation. Then with people sharing pictures and stories of the Maldives, Patagonia, Seychelles, et al, the travel industry changed dramatically. Thus, people were not only open but looking for alternatives to traditional destinations. Third, make an idea meaningful to as many people as possible. A brand idea also needs to have a potential scale. If a brand becomes too associated with a specific sub culture, it can become defined and limited by that association. Take the example of Toyota’s Scion brand in the US. Designed to appeal to a younger, anti-establishment audience, Scion was marketed through tactics like the creation of its own record label, guerrilla marketing and sponsorship, including the infamous Slayer car. The problem was that while Scion may have become well-known within the heavy metal crowd, more mainstream buyers did not know about it at all. Attempts to remedy this came too late. Later, Toyota declared Scion dead.

Fourth, once you understand the cultural opportunity, target the crowd culture. If it is adventure travel, build an offering or a company around it. Fifth, rather than just creating branded content, create entertainment that leverages the identified cultural opportunity. The entertainment does not need to be great, it needs to tap into the vein of the crowd culture. And finally, innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints. A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by playing off particularly intriguing or contentious issues that dominate social media conversations related to an ideology. That’s what Ben & Jerry’s does in championing its sustainable business philosophy. The company uses new product introductions to show its ideology on a range of political issues.

In pursuit of relevance, most brands chase trends. But this is a commodity approach to branding as thousands are doing exactly the same thing with the same generic list of trends. Thus, consumers do not pay attention. By targeting novel ideologies flowing out of crowd cultures, brands can assert a point of view that stands out in the overstuffed media environment. The key is rather than trying to force a story on a captive audience, you need to build a story and product that is consistent with the desires of the social media crowd.

(The writer is Assistant Professor, Amity University)

Writer & Courtesy: The Pioneer