Is It Difficult to Create Relevant Branded Content for Your Brand’s Social Media?

SEPTEMBER 20, 2020 | By Antonio Miranda

Before the era of social media communications, when large creative teams were used to formulate ideas that would mobilize consumers to talk about a particular campaign, the figure of the creative guru was highly valued at the leading communication agencies in the world.

With the change in the communication landscape, in which traditional forms of mass communication (TV, magazines, out-of-home media, sponsorships of opinion leaders, etc.) lost space to social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), consumers began to have more options to consume content, either from traditional media conglomerates or, now, from ordinary people who started to create and distribute their own content, on-demand, with inexpensive audiovisual equipment. The "content of the people", which was now being designed with minimal budgets, tended to be closer to what people lived in their realities and seemed to be more relevant to a specific audience.

This phenomenon was analyzed by Jonathan Mildenhall, former SVP of Integrated Marketing Communication and Design Excellence at the Coca-Cola Company, who in 2011 announced a new marketing strategy called Liquid & Linked. This strategy was creatively described in this video. The marketing community received Liquid & Linked as something very innovative. It introduced a new concept called "content excellence" (branded content in social media), which would have come to replace what was practiced until then: the idea of "creative excellence" (the traditional mass-media approach).

In Mildenhall's view of how branded content should play its role in the era of social media, brands would become the epicenter of how people's opinions and thoughts would be decoded, elaborated with branded content, and redistributed, using, as raw materials, common human interests such as trends, social issues, behavior, and culture. And the role of creating branded content would be leveraged by the unprecedented power of social media platforms.

Since then, during the past decade, several companies began to believe that it was their function to generate content, and perhaps even create trends, to their different audiences, with the expectation that, through social media platforms and their own websites, they would be able to bring their brands closer to their target audiences and, at the same time, become the main drivers of opinion formation and dialogue regarding broader issues of the societies where these companies were located.

However, as mentioned before, the advent of social media gave ordinary people an instant voice. Now anyone with a simple smartphone could become a content generator and, with few limitations, transmit information, entertainment, and opinions that could be relevant to a specific audience.

This had a profound impact on brands' ability to lead the communication process. Although they were expecting to become the main generators of relevant social media content, they started to lose relevance in social media to ordinary people. For example, we can analyze the case of what happens in the sports cars' communication environment. The channels and profiles of consolidated companies and brands cannot attract and engage the same number of subscribers as the "ordinary people's" YouTube channels.

That same scenario can be easily verified considering numerous industries such as cosmetics, beverages, fashion, food, etc. But why couldn't Mildenhall's vision within Coca-Cola's Liquid & Linked strategy really take off and become what was expected to be by the year 2020? Why weren't powerful global brands, with plenty of resources, able to take the lead in content generation and excellence? What have "the ordinary people" done so well that the global brands have not been able to do?

In an interesting article named "Branding in the Age of Social Media" published on Harvard Business Review in March 2016, the author Douglas Holt discussed the new scenario that social media imposed on marketers. According to him, before social media, the conventional models of branding were focused on larger portions of society and tried to break through in culture. Marketers who believed in branded content thought that social media would, one day, allow companies to dismiss traditional media and build relationships directly with consumers. However, after years of observation, it has become clear that not many brands have truly created relevant content and engagement via social media. The answer, according to Holt, would be in the fact that "digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works".

This is when we have the understand Holt's concept of crowdculture, which he explains as "digital crowds that serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture". Examples of crowdculture can be the hipster movement that started in New York City, the non-GMO products concern that has been rising in the past decade, the anti-fast food movement in the 2000s, and the feminist movement against the super skinny models standard of beauty. These movements started with a small group and grew in importance and reach until they changed the culture.

Basically, what Holt believes and tries to explain is that now, with people having the freedom to consume and create whatever content they wish, without being required to see (actually being able to skip) any influential forms of ads in between each piece of content that is relevant for them, brands and marketers lost, at least for a moment, the control of their actions in guiding consumers through the content that they wanted to become relevant for their audiences. With the rise of crowdculture, the belief of branded content, as Mildenhall envisioned, no longer made sense to consumers as they started to perceive that they didn't need any intermediaries to format a message that was already taking shape in their digital groups of interest.

Therefore, Mildenhall's vision in Coca-Cola's Liquid & Linked strategy has not become the formula to allow brands to generate content that would enable them to attract, entertain, engage, and be meaningful to consumers. This is easier to understand today than it was back then, of course. The Liquid & Linked strategy, at the time, may have made rational sense from a cause and consequence perspective considering what marketers were used to dealing with in a traditional media way of thinking.

An important factor may have been left out of the Liquid & Linked strategy's elaboration. The fact that people care about satisfying their personal needs, interests, beliefs, desires, and values first, preferably without having to dedicate much time and effort (for example watching an undesired ad) to fulfill their objective. Marketers should always be aware of that in the era of social media.

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