OK, I’ve another bit of Altimeter research to recommend:  “The Rise of Digital Influence.”  As with many studies on social media, content marketing and other areas of the still developing digital world, this one raises as many important questions as it answers.  It does a good overview job of answering the question  “What is digital influence, and how can my brand take advantage of it?”  It completely begs the issue of “When will ‘sparking desired effects’ among the influential digerati slip over into anti-social, trust-damaging marketing manipulation?”

WHAT IS DIGITAL INFLUENCE, AND HOW CAN BRANDS LEVERAGE IT?

Let’s back up to the first half of that question.  The report helpfully tries to level up the notion of digital influence from one of mere electronic word of mouth – with influencers being those having the most “mouths” follow and repeat what they say – to a more nuanced understanding of digital influence, which the report alliterates as being comprised of

Reach:  Popularity, proximity and goodwill
Resonance:  Frequency, period, amplitude
Relevance:  Authority, trust, affinity

USING DIGITAL INFLUENCE VERSUS PEDDLING IT
The report goes on to talk about how “businesses can shape and steer positive conversations and… desired outcomes,” and offers case histories wherein companies offered often very expensive “incentives”  to influencers in exchange for tacit help engaging their followers to help achieve those “desired outcomes.”  It also mentions that “… the brand borrows the social capital of the individual to appear approachable and desirable to their followers.”

This brings me to the real issue at hand: the difference between “borrowing” social capital and buying it. When your approach is to attract digital influencers via free phones, expensive trips and the like, the balance tips in the direction of “buying.”

PAYING FOR INFLUENCE BUILDS NO MORE TRUST IN MARKETING THAN IT DOES IN POLITICS
So what’s the harm?  The potential harm is the same we see in the politics of pay-to-play states like the one I live in, or in the influence-peddling hallways of Congress:  once consumers, like voters, wise up, long-term damage is done to the trust required to make relationships, or even entire systems, work.

HOW TO BUILD SOCIAL TRUST
While the report evinces some of the subtle arrogance that typifies any hot trend and its new masters (sample section heading:  “The New Era of Consumer Influence: When Nobodies Become Somebodies), it also highlights (though not as much as I think it should) two keys to keeping consumer trust while paying to piggyback on the authority and relationships of others:

1.    Provide real value to develop honest support from digital influencers
It’s a central tenant of all social and content marketing that’s it’s not all about your brand. As the report puts it “Rather than ask connected consumers to share random or purely promotional updates related to your business, provide them with ideas, content, links, or editorial suggestions…”  In short, provide incentives that have a natural value to your target influencers (and their followers).

2.     Be aggressively honest and open – transparency begets trust
It’s not enough to simply comply with the FTC Endorsement disclosure guidelines for blogs, social media, etcetera. Marketers would be wise to follow the lead of Virgin America, who, as mentioned in one of the Altimeter report case histories, assertively encouraged an honest, no-holds-barred response from the digital recruitees by announcing, “We do not want to ‘buy’ your tweets.  You are receiving the product because you are influential and have authority on topics related to the product… You are welcome to tell the world you love the product, you hate the product, or say nothing at all.”

What are you doing to create relationships with digital influencers – and how are you doing it?

World's least funny logo?

And don’t forget absurdity….    A new survey on the impact of comedy, from, surprise, surprise, Comedy Central, finds that  “More than music, more than sports, more than ‘personal style,’ comedy has become essential to how young men view themselves and others…”

Interestingly, the survey pretty thoroughly dissed distaff millennials (hey, “girls” just aren’t funny, right?  For an alternative perspective, says the father of two girls, check out this New York Times feature).  Of course “Comedy Central’s audience ‘skews 65 percent male.’ So does most of its talent…” and therefore the emphasis makes good business sense, if failing to rise to the level of broadly relevant research.

Still, overlooking the majority of millennials allowed Comedy Central’s researchers to concentrate on the sophisticated tendencies of my much-coveted younger brethren, yielding such nuggets as:

•    Young men like toilet humor (they had to do research to figure that out?)

•     Millennials are “comfortable with uncomfortable truths” (Translation, anything goes)

•      Irony is out, absurdity is in

•      Millennial men have a short attention span (again, my observation from the first bullet above), so keep the humor short and fast-paced

Which is not to say millennial men are immune to comedy of substance (no, not those substances).  Two of their favorite shows are “The Daily Show,” and its love child,  “The Colbert Report,”  arguably two of the funniest  pretend/pretend attacks on the realities of political and cultural life as we suffer them today.

Laugh all you want… funny works.   The upshot for marketers?  Funny works.  Always has. Always will – and with this group, more than ever.  I’d also submit that, as the best humor comes from the truth of life well-observed, brand truth – and ensuing trust – can be built as well on laughter as on any other foundation.

(That said, you might want to ponder the laughable truth about all of us marketing types in Stephen Colbert’s recent “sponsortunity” feature on Wheat Thins.)

Conversations go better over a cup of coffee… so let’s make this another Free Coffee Card post.  The first 10 to comment will get a Starbuck’s Coffee card.  Enjoy!
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I like to blog about marketing to millennials not simply because it’s the subject matter that consistently draws the most readers but because, as those readers know, millennials are no longer what’s next, they’re what’s now.

And while I have previously observed that for this generation brand interaction and attachment is less a matter of trust than transaction, I don’t mean to leave you with the impression that that’s entirely a bad thing (not that I can’t be a self-righteous, judgemental S.O.B when I want to be).  It can, after all, lead to a much more dynamic, even kinetic (if unpredictable) brand-consumer relationship. As Nick Shore of MTV notes in a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog,  it’s a relationship shaped by the fascination with, and extensive exposure to, video games.  He makes a compelling case that marketers wanting to get to the next level with millennials have to observe a new set of rules to win in the “gamification of marketing.”

Here are brief highlights of what he had to say; I suggest that anyone interested in marketing to millennials read the entire post.

Principle #1: Play fair or you are “fair game”
Millennials demand fairness, transparency, and clear, consistent rules in every aspect of life.

 Principle #2:  Leverage the Leaderboard
Four out of five want to know how the deals they get compare to what others are getting. 74% percent feel that they’ve “won” when they get more than the average consumer.

 Principle #3:  Smart Cuts, Not Short Cuts
Part of the “intrinsic” reward of gaming (the pleasure of playing versus the end reward) is a sense of efficacy and smartness. There’s a clear case for layering this into the marketing interaction.

 Principle #4: Deliver dopamine/adrenaline fixes
Half of respondents in our study — perhaps those more prone to Millennial micro-boredom — believe that “life can be less stimulating than gaming.”

 Principle #5: Hand over that joystick.
Millennials are accustomed to having a voice, and having it heeded. And they’re frustrated when big corporations don’t give them a voice or a true “role” as a consumer…

Game on!

I’d like to forego a typical post today and think beyond branding, to join in remembering an event that is sadly fading from view along with its few remaining survivors (it’s worth reading today’s New York Times article on the subject).

It’s Pearl Harbor Day
I don’t actually have to be reminded that December 7th is Pearl Harbor day; it’s the day that shaped my parent’s generation more than any other. And I’m proud to say that my young children at least know what Pearl Harbor Day is, although the date itself may not stick so vividly in their imaginations (I cannot help but visualize my own, very young father piloting a B-24 as I am currently reading… OK, listening to… Laura Hilldebrand’s book Unbroken.)

I hope that the millennial generation will likewise be positively shaped by what is sometimes called their Pearl Harbor, the events of 9/11. I hope that they, like The Greatest Generation, will rise to the challenges of their times and harness their considerable inventiveness to not just reclaim but re-invent America for peace and prosperity in its multi-cultural, multi-modal future. In short, I hope that, to twist the old trope, they learn from history and get it to repeat itself.

PS: As marketers, I believe we can help realize the hope above – help Millennials and the Homeland Generation that follows – by reinforcing the concept and experience of trust… hence, the brand trust focus of this blog.

As with any advancing army, it should be no surprise that people just can’t get their minds off Millennials (and no wonder that any variation of “millennial” makes a most attractive keyword in blog posts). But how well do you understand them, even if you are “them?” And how much are you like, or unlike, the Millennial generation?

Are you 20% Millennial? 50% Millennial? 100%?
The folks at Pew Research developed a handy little quiz to answer that last question: “How Millennial Are You? The Quiz.” It turns out that, while I am nearly a Gen Xer, at least according to this evaluation, I’m only 31% Millennial. (Damn, I guess I’ll have to take my hoodies back to Abercrombie.)

I’m not sure how valuable this “tool” really is in understanding the millennial marketing juggernaut, but it’s fun and at least mildly thought provoking (not to mention an excellent excuse to pack a post with high-value keywords like “millennials,” “millennial marketing,” and “millennial generation”).

It’s not about age – really. It’s about state of mind.
The quiz is quite quick – so please take it and let me know how youthful you really are.

PS: Pew did create a pretty good primer on Millennial beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, which you can download here.

I have written frequently about Millennials and brand trust, specifically wondering if what’s called “brand trust” with this generation isn’t really “brand transaction,” as represented in the deal-driven, “gimme”-oriented nature of incentivizing online interaction.

A fundamental shift in the nature of brand trust, with millennials
Given that there may be underway a fundamental shift in the nature and importance of brand trust (which undergirds brand loyalty, a prerequisite of repeat business and its result, longer-term brand success) I can’t help but question what seems to be the emotion-driven interest in Groupon as the next hot thing (not that emotions aren’t constantly driving today’s wildly unpredictable market overall… a phenomenon that quickly drove the opening stock price up by nearly half on this, the first day of trading.)

This investor euphoria emerged in spite of considerable questioning – right up to the IPO – about the business-building value of Groupon, whose users are known to flit from deal to deal (as they are encouraged to do by the very concept of the daily deal) rather than form bonds with and return to merchants they’ve discovered via The Big G. I’m just not sure why investors aren’t paying attention to the discussion.

And why should a blog about branding be concerned with an IPO?
Indeed, why should I, a lowly brand strategist and creative director, be opining on financial matters? Because branding – good or bad – has a bottom line effect. According to both investor relations practitioners and academics, branding affects valuation, the core concern of shareholders everywhere. Creating business-building brand trust is, or should be, a primary duty of branding professionals, like me.

So, back to Groupon. Since market upticks generally drive IPO interest and valuations higher, it’s no surprise that Groupon went public at “a premium to reality.” The reality which will bring any momentarily skyrocketing stock price back to earth will likely be the habit of Millennial consumers to gravitate not toward the most reliable, dependable or even proven-to-them resource… but to the deal, the offer, the “gimme.” This is a tendency they’ve been trained in by marketers of all sorts, one that can only further undermine the dynamics of loyalty and trust upon which either Groupon or its customers might build businesses of more lasting value.

It’s your choice: daily deals or lasting brand value
The upshot for brand marketers? If you want to have a healthy, long-term brand, look beyond the deal, daily or otherwise. Create a brand of lasting, inherent, self-evident value, and, even in this short-term world, market it in a way that respects and preserves that value over the long haul. Millennials, and the rest of us, deserve no less – and in the long term will respond to that more.

In my last post, Brands as Functional Friends for Millennials, I opined on the potential to create brand trust, and subsequent loyalty, among Millennials by becoming functional friends, i.e., by actively providing useful resources and support. This is differentiated from the notion of “faux friends,” that is, brands that build excitement, if not real attachment, by being a part of the “gimme culture,” wherein your brand is only as good with its audience as its last offer, daily deal, freebie, or other “gimme.” (For more thoughts on that subject, check out Marketing to Millennials: Brand Trust or Transaction?)

So I’m wondering where on that brand friendship spectrum you would place the involved parties featured in last Sunday’s New York Times article On Campus, It’s One Big Commercial.

Can you sell more soap in an Ivory Tower?
The piece talks about the growing, if not new, marketing practice of not merely reaching out to kids on campus but actually becoming part of institutionalized college life. Besides the well-established outreach of “brand ambassadors” and “campus evangelists” (the commercial kind), the article describes how brands are now even creating events on official school calendars:

“Just how far one big company — Target — has permeated [the University of North Carolina] was evident at freshmen welcome week in late August, at what students and administrators alike characterized as a touchstone party for the class of 2015. As part of the official university program, Target sponsored a welcome dinner on a Friday. Then, on Saturday, for the first real social event for freshmen, it hired buses to ferry students to a Target superstore in Durham for late-night shopping, says Winston B. Crisp, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs.”

As a parent of not-quite-old-enough-for-college kids, I cringed a bit at the thought of the hallowed halls of higher learning becoming the hollow halls of hyper-selling. As a marketer, however, I have to admit that my initial reaction was “Wow, Target does it again!”

Brand Trust Winners and Losers
Nonetheless, I think there are brand winners and losers in this scenario. The UNC brand (and that of the 65 other universities in the Target program) is at risk here, at least with tuition-paying parents who may look askance at paying for the privilege of turning their kids into a captive marketing audience. (And then there’s the question of maintaining trust in an educational brand’s commitment to unfettered academic inquiry and intellectual honesty, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

And even the Marvelous Marketing Machine from Minneapolis faces the long-term risk of being seen as a faux friend. After all, no matter how fun and involving the events may be, they are, at their core, selling opportunities dressed up as social occasions. To this crucial demographic group of which one noted survey says “… nothing matters more than authenticity…” events that purport to build school spirit and aid student life, while being commercial at heart, may over the longer term undermine a brands image as an authentic “friend.”

Then again, college kids may just not care – Target’s program is now rockin’ the freshman welcome week ritual at 66 universities across the country. But the business of buying consumer love is a fickle one, as the final quote in the Times article implies:

“Back at Target, Nitin Goel, a wiry, gum-chewing 18-year-old in low-slung jeans, is loaded down with free mac and cheese. He’s carrying a friend’s new beanbag chair. Earlier that night, waiting for the Target bus by the campus bookstore, Mr. Goel had pledged allegiance to Wal-Mart, where he had shopped all his life. Now he doesn’t seem quite so sure.”

My money says that as soon as ol’ Noel gets a free ride and a gaggle of gimmes from former-favorite Wal-Mart, he’s out the Target door once again.

Your thoughts?

The conventional wisdom – and a considerable amount of research – holds that millennials don’t trust institutions. They trust friends. They particularly don’ t trust financial brands, but then, those have been taking a hit across the demographic board. Now research suggests that millennials also may not even trust themselves when it comes to money.

As the offspring of an all-consuming consumer society just now facing up to its excesses and limitations, millennials are exhibiting a new sense of caution, a stepping away from the temptation to buy now, pay later. A recent survey from the Auriemma Consulting Group notes, according to its director Dr. Patricia Sahn, “Millennials have turned away from credit cards in droves since the recession began, and it’s not clear to what extent they will come back when conditions improve.”

I assume she’s referring to financial conditions – but credit card companies will do well to develop better “user conditions,” developing more millennial-friendly offers, features, support and “practical brand personality” (I’m not just talking brand imagery here and projected personality, but the perceived personality which emerges in a user’s mind after multiple brand interactions).

To their credit, debit cards are trying to be better “friends” to millennials
Credit cards can take some cues from their corporate cousins in debit cards, by far the favored financial tool of the millennial generation (for more on that, download the BAI/Hitachi Consulting 2010 Study of Consumer Payment Preferences). One big player in debit, Pulse (part of the Discover family) just introduced a revamped customer information website, debitsavvy.org, aiming more directly at millennials in the hope of becoming a resource to help manage their money, and live their lives, with debit. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops, and if it attracts millennial participation – becoming, in effect, a brand as “functional friend”, to be relied on and trusted. At this point, the nascent site still feels pretty corporate, awaiting more social features and perhaps not yet totally willing to live in a millennial skin, but I particularly like elements such as the video contest (actually a carry-over from the previous site iteration) and the upcoming Twitter contest.

Your brand, too, can become a “functional friend” to millennials
It’s not just credit cards that could benefit from considering how they, too, can make their brands into functional friends for millennials. Virtually any brand in any category can quit waiting until financial conditions improve and start creating user conditions uniquely appealing – and useful – to millennials. That’s how you friend them. That’s how you earn trust. That’s how brands thrive going forward.

Who do you see doing a good job of this right now?

NOTE: This is another one of our free-coffee-card posts – the first ten who comment will receive a free $5 Starbucks gift card. We like to think of it as a “virtual coffee break,” a chance to bridge the inevitable distance of social media and share something real. Of course, it could just be another one of those online incentives I briefly take to task in the post that follows, but you be the judge (over a nice, hot latte).

I keep suffering a bit of a personal disconnect as I compare research on the almighty millennial marketing segment with my personal experience with members of this ascendant, collective world power. The millennials I know, by and large, are warm, caring and engaged with life around them. Of course, there’s that research I cited in a previous post indicating that millennials think it’s better to receive than give. And now there’s a study making the case that, based on the soundtrack of their lives, Millennials are The-All-About-Me Generation.

Don’t just listen to millennials – listen to their music, too
I’m referring to an interesting, if debatable, piece of research based on an extensive computer analysis of popular song lyrics over the past 30 years. In it, “…psychologists report finding… a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions. ‘Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before,’ Dr. [Nathan] DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says.”

What does an abundance of consumer self-love mean for marketing to millennials?
Other studies, including one of 50,000 college students (by two of DeWall’s co-author’s, who also published a book with the ominous title The Narcissism Epidemic) note that during that same 30-year period studied, reported levels of loneliness and depression increased, which the song-lyric analysis ties into “a decline in words related to social connections and positive emotions…”

So, how do you create brand passion, brand loyalty, brand anything with self-loving consumers? I tend to agree with my colleague Bob Davies, of the consumer insight firm Candescence, who’s been making a case for being “relevant and relational,” when marketing to millennials, and nothing would seem to be more relevant to this group than offerings that help them better relate to each other, the world and even themselves.

Serve this online generation’s need for real human connection
This may seem like a “Duh!’ moment to those who’ve already jumped into the conjugal bed of modern marketing – social media – where everyone is trying to frantically (too frantically?) consummate consumer bonds, but I think it requires looking beyond the easy tactic of creating transactional relationships (online contests, etc.) and looking for ways of honestly serving what appears to be an sadly unmet need for human connection. Does this mean cause-related marketing? Perhaps, although that is often treated as just another superficial incentive and therefore reverts to the transactional mode. I suspect this requires some “out-of-the-device” thinking – that is, marketers may increasingly need to figure out how to facilitate and be part of real world connections, too.

Of course, it could just be that to reach the self-absorbed we need only to feed the Super Self another hit of instant gratification (and if you think that I’m being too hard on millennials, check out Bob Davies’ post “Millennial Values,” which notes that their loftiest goals are getting rich and famous, while they are significantly less interested in community involvement than their Gen-X counterparts.) But I prefer to believe in what I see in my focus group of one: young, promising, good-at-heart millennials in need of more than marketing – or, insofar as we can positively impact their lives, in need of marketing that leads them to something more than just themselves.

Copywriters, art directors and graphic designers all have illusions of creating a timeless campaign, tagline, brand identity or ad (can anyone say “Lemon” and not conjure up what I mean?), something that will outlive our careers. But the digital age is giving a whole new meaning to the notion of “timeless,” and even “immortality,” as discussed an interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times, “Things to Do in Cyberspace When You’re Dead.”

The article deals with the personal implications of the “digital afterlife,” and describes trying to preserve and control one’s digital legacy. It mentions posthumous Facebook status (turning your page in to a memorial), “digital estate-management services” to archive literally every bit of your online life, and even a symposium/trade show event called “Digital Death Day.” And while this is all directed at individuals, it makes me wonder about the possibly damning implications of a digital afterlife for brands.

We gleefully cede control of our brand messaging and reputations daily in pursuit of consumer engagement and user-generated content – and we do it all in a very large medium, the Internet, that we can neither truly control nor certainly ever erase. In short, nothing dies on the Internet. So, beyond the challenges of online brand management in the here and now, how do we plan and provide for our brands’ futures?

In the past it was relatively easy to reposition a failing brand – you flooded the airwaves and print media with new images and messaging, completely replacing the old messaging which, save for museum archives and antique shops, was largely out of the consumer’s reach. But in a new world where every iteration of your ads, every tweet, every product description or review may well be forever searchable, accessible, and part of (the confusion around) the consumer conversation, how will you manage, let alone drive, necessary brand evolution?

I have three suggestions for aiming your brand toward the Virtual Pearly Gates rather than the Eternal Digital Inferno:

The 3 Keys to Brand Heaven in the Digital Age

1. Find the Simple Truth About Your Brand
Don’t confuse brand positioning with brand posturing.

2. Always be honest
The best way to keep your future brand story from being contradicted by its past is to keep it a true story all along.

3. Cultivate a culture that supports points 1 and 2
How many times have you heard it: Your people are your brand. Make sure they understand your promise, care about it and are just as rewarded by delivering it as are your customers are by receiving it.