Last week, I wrote about marketers putting social experience at the center of their integrated communications. I referred to Best Buy and Twelpforce. Just this weekend, I caught a flurry of Honda TV spots promoting a particular Honda Facebook experience.
One of the open questions for marketers: How should one go about identifying the right social experience?
Answer: Identify an imprinting experience that best highlights your brand’s differentiating attributes or benefits.
That’s a mouthful. Let’s unpack it. An “imprinting experience” is one that is likely to stick with a consumer. The best experiences therefore should be meaningful—they would help a consumer solve a problem or connect with others around a shared passion or challenge. (MLC Members: for help finding these opportunities for your brand, see our work on emotional differentiation and Shared Values)
So far, so good. But how do you choose amongst multiple social experience options?
Ultimately, you’d want to filter the list of potential experiences to choose one that best highlights your brand’s differentiators. If you can spur these kinds of social experiences for your consumers, you’re much more likely to create lasting advantage in the marketplace.
Let’s go back to Best Buy and Twelpforce. Against its prime competitors—Amazon and Walmart—Best Buy has a unique differentiator: an army of Blue Shirts who have a passion for electronics and are social media savvy. Perfect!
The experience that Best Buy would love to create for its target audience, then, is a strong service interaction with a Blue Shirt via Twelpforce. And Best Buy would want that interaction to help its customers solve a problem—maybe setting up a new home theater system or identifying a compatible backup mobile phone battery.
Why put a Twelpforce experience and not an in-store experience at the center of a communications strategy? In-store isn’t a bad idea, but think about the Twelpforce experience for a minute:
- It’s novel to have a great support experience via social media, and
- It’s easy to pass that interaction virally, and
- The interaction is captured digitally for all to see on Twitter, whereas a good in-store interaction is seen by the customer himself, and maybe a few others around him.
Very tough for Amazon or Walmart to mimic that kind of experience.
Once you’ve identified the experience, you want to scale it with your integrated communications. You can do that by assigning specific roles to each touchpoint in the mix. I’ll explain how in my next post.
MLC members can take a look at an illustrative example of a beer brand applying this sort of thinking to choose its social experience in our case on Experience Driven Touchpoint Planning.
Related posts:
