The Missing First Step In Social 'Brand Advocate' Programs #DigitalSense

I've seen a lot of articles over the years about recruiting passionate brand advocates who'll represent you, promote you, and share your content for free if you can just track them down and engage them. The trouble is all of these pieces seem to miss a very simple first step: accepting that these people don't actually exist. The sooner we realise this, the more awesome & impactful our social marketing can actually become, and ironically the more chance an advocacy campaign has of actually succeeding.

Certainly there are people who might regularly buy from you, a few of them may well even quite like you, and in some industries be willing to walk around with your logo on their clothing, but none of these are really signs of brand advocates in waiting. These very same people will switch to a rival brand without thinking if availability, price or some other factor demands it, and they almost certainly know shockingly little about the brand values & attitudes we marketers slave endlessly over.

You don't really have to take my word for it, far more intellectually thorough individuals like Byron Sharp have crunched endless amounts of data to prove this - it turns out even famously 'advocated' brands like Apple or Harley Davidson turn out to have almost no loyalty advantage over other large competitors. Cadbury's Cherry Ripe is regularly voted one of Australia's most loved brands and has had a solid & steady market penetration of around 30% for years. As such you might think it would suit a core advocates program, except that in reality almost half of those buyers didn't buy it at all the previous year, and that same percentage have picked up a different bar this year without a thought. It's a yummy and very well-known chocolate bar with solid penetration, but it doesn't rank on anyone's priorities vs their own everyday concerns.

Probably the best way to bring it home would be to think about your own life (or better yet your partner/parent's who's a little outside the marketing bubble) and consider how many brands they currently do or would willingly actively advocate for. If the average answer to this question is above 1 we're all lying to ourselves - they're all far too busy working, shopping, looking after the kids and taking the bins out to take time out of their days to go out and advocate for a faceless brand unless there's something in it for them.

The fact that a tiny handful of the world's 7 billion+ people can be shown to be passionate advocates for an even smaller range of brands does not disprove this, it merely creates a false promise that marketers seems worryingly tempted by. Don't even think about saying that it's a generational thing either and that technology fuelled millennials are turning the tables on this status quo. Not only are they far more overwhelmed with content & messages than ever, they also have what Vice calls well developed 'bullshit detectors' - in other words there's never been a generation less likely to find itself casually doing your dirty work.

This no doubt sounds all rather negative, but realising how little people can ever hope to care about our brands is one of the most exciting & creative epiphanies a modern marketer can have. As soon as you stop labouring under the false pretence that you're somehow falling short of inspiring a societal movement around your brand, and realise that no one else is either, a great load lifts off your shoulders. Instead of thinking endlessly about how you'll find, engage and nurture these mythical super fans instead try and come up with a creative approach which is good enough that Joe Blogs on the street, who's never even heard of you before, takes note.

Realising that brand advocates don't really exist in meaningful numbers is the perfect first step because then, quote ironically, your brand advocate program actually stands a chance of succeeding. You don't need to persuade someone to fall in love with you, get a tattoo and tell their friends about your 5 key brand values... You just need to make people care enough about you to buy you when they see you or maybe, just maybe, to pass on a specific piece of content you paid to ensure they saw in the first place. Or if you really do want to pursue advocacy and influencer schemes? At least recognise that people won't truly care and your only hope of success is if you find ways to give them something in return and make it worth their while, professional YouTube influencers call this a 'pay cheque'.

Certainly personal recommendations and advocacy are things most marketers would love to attract, but unless you work in a very prestigious and high consideration industry they're almost certainly not worth the costs & efforts to chase. I know many of you will work on or with exactly these sorts of schemes and please do share your own experiences in the comments, perhaps I'm just missing a trick?

Find me on LinkedIn - I'm a digital evangelist but also a realist - #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I hope to help marketers like myself make sense of digital and brands transform their media approaches to drive business results. I am Global Digital Director at Carat (part of Dentsu Aegis Network), an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media.