Being conversation-worthy on every brand level

Being conversation-worthy, having consumers and clients talk about you. That’s pretty high on the agenda of most brands and organisations. Being conversation-worthy isn’t only about remarkable ads (hey, advertising still works), it’s also about acts. It isn’t only about a smart activation campaign on a social network, but it’s also about really integrating conversations in everything you do as a company.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve worked hard to implement conversation-thinking in several companies, ranging from Unilever to Telenet and KLM to Puratos. Some takeaways:

  • Brands with a purpose (a commitment to something that adds value to people’s everyday lives) have more potential to build long-term relationships and fuel a year-round conversation. E.g. Dove’s commitment to real beauty is more easily translated in a long-term conversation than a random cleaning product.
  • Being conversation-worthy is about paying carefull attention to earned, owned AND paid media. No earned media without a decent owned presence. No reach without a smart use of paid media.
  • Martin Kloos introduced me to the concept of a ‘Social media voice‘, a translation of the brand/company values in an online persona/voice. It’s a simple concept but helps companies define the right tone of voice and actions within the social media space.
  • In every consumer interaction, think how this interaction could lead to the consumer telling someone else, whether it is offline or online via social meda. E.g. the Il Giglio d’Oro bed & breakfast in Firenze stimulates every customer to write a testimonial on Tripadvisor.com (read more).

We have translated our learnings into a first draft of our model for being conversation-worthy on every brand level. Let me know what you think.

Being conversation-worthy on every brand level

3 comments
  1. I guess your insights are right. Although their succes depends on 1. The Perceived Authenticy of The Brand. & 2. The Relationship with The Customer. As with Dove… Lately I’ve seen some Theatrical Performances by Dance Students at The Schouwburg in Rotterdam. Part of the show (the in-betweens) were some YouTube movies by Dove, WNF, WE, Sony, National Geographic and others. Lovemarks? Its fascinating to see how student age 17-20 mix brands with their art projects.

    1. Cool! Is there any video footage of those in-betweens?

      You’re absolutely right. It isn’t only brand purpose. However, a broader purposes usually goes hand-in-hand with being authentic and some other elements. We have done some research on that as well, which resulted in the CRUSH model (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/polledemaagt/5486023953/in/pool-1665332@N22/)

      1. Not really, but the footage of the in betweens are regular commercials posted by the brands themselves on YouTube. I will be posting a video with fragments of the dance performances themselves. I didn’t have enough MB to shoot the commercials too. More info about the project: http://goo.gl/Wl0VK and http://goo.gl/hK5uI

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