Brand romance on social media

St Valentine’s Day is one of the most popular celebrations in the UK with consumer spending reaching?868 million British pounds in 2021. For brands across various industries, the romance season constitutes a unique opportunity to launch special promotions, new products, or advertising campaigns that tap into the themes of love and romance. By tapping into the sentiments of Valentine’s day, brands can showcase their products or services as a way to enhance romantic experiences and build a positive brand image.

A Good example of this is fashion designer's 2023 campaigns, e.g. Burberry’s "B: Mine" Campaign showing Moments?of Embrace; Zara’s Campaign Chocolate, Flowers (British Flower Association 2023), cards sales (DIY?Garden 2023) and sales of products with ‘hearts’ significantly increase. Also, chocolatiers, florists, and jewellery companies offer special gifts or discounts for couples.

Beauty and personal care brands release special limited edition products or host pampering events,?and restaurants create special menus or offer romantic dining experiences. These celebrations aim to engage customers and create a memorable experience that will increase sales and build brand loyalty (Manohar et al.2022).?

Brands often communicate with their customers around Valentine's Day through a variety of channels. Social media e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is one of the most significant channels used by brands to grasp consumers' attention during the season. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are social media platforms that are more associated with B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing, whereas, LinkedIn and Twitter are associated with B2B (Business to Business) marketing (Inc. 2023). Social Media Marketing could be conceptualised as a strategy of digital marketing that employs social networking platforms Marketers use to enhance their brands and product exposure and to develop their relationships with consumers (De Vries et al. 2017).

A close look at the encoding used by B2C brands in designing their?messages shows their intention to associate their products and services with a favourable emotional state so they can connect with their audience?creatively. They carefully select the elements of the message that will be delivered to their audience and encode the message in such a way that it will be understood by it. Around the Valentine’s period, Brands use words, signs and symbols that are familiar to the target audience, e.g. the colour red, heart-shaped products and packaging, intimacy between people, and love-is-in-the-air type songs.?

Valentine's Day is typically more associated with B2C brands, as they are often more focused on promotions and advertising to consumers. However, the “love is in the air season” is becoming increasingly important for B2B brands. More and more B2B brands are using social media to communicate around Valentine's Day by leveraging the season's themes of love and romance to engage their customers and generate positive WOM (Word of Mouth). To achieve this B2B brands must create social media content that increases customer liking behaviour (Agnihotri 2020). According to Deng et al. (2021), for B2B brands creating social media posts is challenging, as brands are still struggling to determine the right content to post so they can stimulate their stakeholder engagement and WOM. One way to explain this is the slow adoption of social media by B2B brands compared with B2C brands (Iankova et al. 2019).

In the B2B context, the buyer and seller of the product are both businesses. B2B brands from very few industries remain reluctant in the way they communicate about love around Valentine’s Day. The codes e.g. colours, text, images, and sounds, that are used are less provocative than those used in a B2C context. This could be explained by the nature of the target audience i.e. businesses. B2B brands are communicating with a rational audience that makes decisions following a relatively long buying process where several individuals in the buying centre intervene to ensure the best (Forbes 2021). Also, Valentine’s Day is mainly consumer-driven. To surf the love-is-in-the-air wave, “B2B brands either need a genuinely authentic purpose for it, or well written, likely comedic angle, and it’s very hard to establish B2B credibility with comedy” (James Baldwin, Business Director, B2B Influence, Ogilvy).

A Cisco ad on Twitter released during the love period of 2022 shows an encoding of the message totally different than what is usually?done in a B2C context. The main colour used is blue and the choice of the text and words are consistent with the nature of their target audience i.e. business customers. The ad features a male person, that could represent any person, on a mountain. Despite being in this environment where it is difficult to get wi-fi, this person seems able to access a wi-fi point. The only indication of Valentine’s Day is the small blue heat on the top of the advert. Compared to the above-mentioned B2C ads, this ad barely focuses on Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day was also an opportunity for Cisco to launch its Cisco ASR 9000 in 2008. The encoding of the message, although featuring a couple and telling the audience about the different presents a man can give his partner on Valentine’s Day, seems to be carefully chosen to fit the nature of the target audience.??

Overall, B2B and B2C advertising for Valentine's Day can be a great way for companies to enhance awareness about their brands, products and services creatively. Although very scarce, B2B marketing advertising tends to focus on connecting businesses and promoting corporate products or services. While B2C advertising campaigns seek to reach a broader audience by highlighting and tapping into more compelling love symbols, products or services tailored to consumers. Whether it is B2B or B2C advertising in the lead-up to Valentine's Day, advertisers must encode messages consistently towards their target audience. This will lead to messages being decoded favourably and Valentine’s Day campaigns will drive sales and boost brand visibility.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

The author of this article is, Dr Kaouther Kooli, who is a Principal Academic in Marketing. She works in the Marketing, Strategy & Innovation Department at the Bournemouth University Business School.

References

Agnihotri, R. (2020). Social media, customer engagement, and sales organizations: A research agenda. Industrial Marketing Management, 90, 291–299.

British Flower Association 2023. Valentines- everything you need to know. Available at https://www.britishfloristassociation.org/valentines-everything-you-need-to-know/, accessed on 2nd February 2023.

De Vries, L., Peluso, A.M., Romani, S., Leeflang, P.S.H. and Marcati, A. (2017), “Explaining consumer brand-related activities on social media: an investigation of the different roles of self-expression and socializing motivations”, Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 75, pp. 272-282.

DIY Garden 2023. 50 Latest Valentine’s Day Spending Statistics For The UK (2023), available at https://diygarden.co.uk/statistics/valentines-day-spending-statistics, accessed on 2nd February 2023.

Forbes 2021. B2B Buying Process Explained: How To Help Your Customers Make Buying Decisions. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2021/09/13/b2b-buying-process-explained-how-to-help-your-customers-make-buying-decisions/ accessed on 2nd February 2023.

Inc. 2023. 5 Key Differences Between LinkedIn and Twitter When Building Your Marketing Strategy. Available at https://www.inc.com/hillel-fuld/5-key-differences-between-linkedin-twitter-when-building-your-marketing-strategy.html accessed on 2nd February 2023.

Manohar, S., Kumar, R., Saha, R. and Mittal, A., 2022. Examining the effect of emotional branding in building brand equity of social marketing campaigns: a case on Swachh Bharat, India. Society and Business Review, (ahead-of-print).

Statista 2022. Expected retail spending on Valentine's Day in the United Kingdom (UK) from 2017 to 2022. Available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/510981/valentines-day-total-spending-great-britain/, accessed on 2nd February 2023.

?

?