The Global Social Media Network – Social Media with a Twist

The idea of “listening to the community” as the first step of any Social Media marketing campaign kept cropping up at my recent visits to Blogwell (San Jose) and BarCampLA. I thought it would be helpful to revisit a marketing campaign launched back in 2005-6 by MINI-Cooper that focused heavily on “listening to the community” by targeting owners of MINI-Coopers rather than a new customer. The goal of the campaign was to increase sales through conversations within the MINI-Cooper community.

I had the chance to speak with Tom O’Brien, CMO at MotiveQuest and ask how MINI-Cooper capitalized on this campaign by “listening to the community”.

Before a marketing or advertising campaign is launched, businesses come to MotiveQuest for specific answers about their customers or potential customers. According to MotiveQuest, you are able to “see the “peaks of passion” in online conversations to understand customer motivations.” Through research, they determined that “understanding the drivers of brand advocacy can inform the creation of new marketing campaigns and even product strategy.”

RS: How do you define “community”? How do you begin listening to your audience and what ways do you actually go about doing that?

A community has its own characteristics, its own motivations, and its own interests. To me, if you want that community to love you, the first thing you need to do is understand them.
I’ll give you one example. We’ve done a ton of research on cell phones. In the cell phone world, you use to launch a phone with great fanfare and you’d have a first wave of buyers. You could essentially get a phone out there with good marketing. In today’s world, you can’t do that anymore. Because as soon as the phone is available, there’s 15, 20 or 100 people who are going to analyze it in great detail and then they’re going to post they’re finding out there on the web. Look at a place called HowardForums.com. There are about 8 million messages a year out there on cell phones. People talking to each other about cell phones. And so this is a community. It’s not owned by any of the cell phone companies. It was started by a guy named Howard. This is only one example but it is the essence of one of things going on on the Web. It use to be that I would talk to the people close to me about buying an HDTV or a car or cell phone. Now, essentially the Internet breaks down the boundaries of time and space in such a way that I can get 300 opinions on cell phones, HDTV’s and cars at the stroke of a keyboard. And they’re not very hard to find. There are mavens already out there who know how and what to do and have already answered the questions I’m going to ask. This exists in every category. So, you can no longer hide poor product performance with good marketing because the word gets out there too fast. To some degree product and marketing have become one.

RS: How was it even determined a “community” is there to begin with?

All you have to do is look and what you’ll see is that in cars and virtually everything else there is a very large and passionate conversation around that thing. And if there is no conversation about it, there’s a pretty good bet there is no community. No conversation, essentially, no community. What we do is mine those conversations, organize them and analyze them to understand what are the core human motivations and drivers expressed in the conversation and what are the implications of that for our clients. We call what we do “Online Anthropology”. We’re sitting outside this village observing how people interact and trying to build a model of how it works. Because if you understand the village and how it works, you have a much better chance of doing the right thing from a marketing perspective.

RS: And then you can address the specific concerns that the village is talking about; what drives them and what motivates them.

TO: You can also understand what they already believe to be true about you and your competitors. You can also understand that the consumers may think entirely different than from any marketing message you’re trying to get across. So if I’m New Balance and I want to go against Nike, I better figure out what they believe to be true about me and Nike before I determine what my positioning is, unless I have hundreds of millions to try and convince everyone otherwise.

RS: But you want to start from a more authentic standpoint?

TO: Yes. Figure out where the passion is before you start marketing and then connect to the passion, rather than trying to create some new thing.

RS: It really is going back to the very fundamentals of marketing which is understanding your audience.

TO: And what we have here with the Web is the world’s largest focus group. And it’s raging continuously. All we’re doing is listening in. Let’s look at the MINI Case study. One thing about the work we did with Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP) and MINI on this one is that we did the research on the existing MINI community that convinced them that the essence of the MINI Brand DNA was not “small”, but was really about “creativity and collaboration”. That insight led to a huge shift in positioning MINI.

RS: Through your research you identified features and traits that drove customer affinity for various models. Looks, style, performance, cost, handling, driving, customization, space, comfort and fuel efficiency. What would you say was most important MINI owners?

If you’re looking at this slide, this about the 30th slide in a deck that organizes all the conversation around MINI: how much conversation is there, what are the topics of conversation, what is the positive and negative, where is the conversation happening and compare it to their competitive set. There is a lot of organizing the data and comparing it.

When BSSP came to us they said, “We want to compare MINI to these guys.”

First of all, they had a different competitive set.

RS: Meaning?

They didn’t have Jetta as part of their competitive set. What we found, by looking at the conversations, we can tell who they’re cross shopping against. Because people say “Should I buy a MINI or a Jetta”? We have a very consumer centric view of the world. You don’t have to tell me who your competitive set is. I’ll figure it out just by listening to the conversation. So we follow the data. That’s one really important point.
As you mentioned, the second thing what they asked us to look at were the items in red (see chart). Performance, exterior features, driving style so on and so forth. What we found was that those were not sufficient to bucket all the conversation. People in the community talk about the features of the car a lot but they talk about a lot of other things too.

RS: That’s one of things I found fascinating about this chart was that the competitive set would talk more about the features of the car but the MINI owners were talking more about the social aspects; sharing pictures, dedications, relationships, events, gatherings.

TO: And they’re real. There are real relationships there. We come to know each other, trust each other and talk about all sorts of things beyond the features of the car or whatever the community is about. So these communities are real. They’re not just about the car.

RS: From that information, how would you describe the “creative customization car culture of MINI owners”?

MINI in particular is a pretty tribal community. It’s about belonging to the MINI tribe.

BSSP was asked by MINI and MINI’s charter was:

“We have no new models coming out this year. Can you guys put together a campaign that sells more cars and prove to us that your campaign sold more cars?”

The interesting thing that BSSP did was that their method of selling more cars, was to target the existing MINI community rather than to target people who currently don’t own MINIs. This is a huge leap of faith, in my opinion. We were hired by BSSP to understand the community. They’re hypothesis was if we can get the MINI community more jazzed about the MINI, we’ll sell more cars. To do that you have to understand the community. They hired us to understand what the MINI community was about and what the MINI brand was about through the eyes of the community. The big “A-ha!” from this analysis was that MINI was about “creative customization and collaboration”. It was not about “being small”. If you remember the early ads about MINI, they were all about small. They had MINI on top of an SUV or pulling into a really small parking space. The MINI community is not organized around “small”. It’s all about creativity, collaboration and belonging to the MINI tribe.

The way this project worked was first, analyze and understand two things:
1. What does the MINI community care about?
2. What is the brand DNA of MINI through the eyes of the community?
They’re two slightly different questions. One is about community motivations.
The other is about brand truth.

RS: So after the community was defined, what steps were taken?

So if you go down to Chart #7, Campaign Development, here are the elements that Butler Shine did.

1.They did a covert mailing to current MINI owners where they sent them this puzzle where they went online and worked with other MINI owners to solve a problem.
2. Then, they did the “MINI Takes The States” where they drive across the country having these big jamborees where MINI owners get together with food and music; a kind of tribal “lets get together and show off our MINIs” event.
3. If you participated in one of these things, they gave you a transponder to place underneath the car, so when you drive by one of these billboards, it gives you a personalized message, such as “ Hi Kate, Nice Day For Your Convertible”.

It’s all about being a part of the tribe. What we could see was changes in what we were measuring. So our role was first “help us understand (the MINI owner) and help us measure the effectiveness of the campaign.” Secondly, measure the change. Third, link it to sales.

RS: When “galvanizing brand community” there are two objectives you focus on: “look backwards before looking forwards” and “identify the social currency”. Explain those.

TO: Understand first. Ask, “What’s motivating people?”. This is the “currency”. In the MINI community it’s about belonging or showing off. In a hybrid car community it may be about changing the world, saving the planet. We understand it by listening and analyzing.

RS: How does a company create loyalty?

You create loyalty by understanding what people want and giving it to them. I think it’s really that simple. You create loyalty in the MINI community by giving them more opportunities to interact with each other and find and participate with the MINI tribe. If I was to try and create loyalty within a hybrid car community my actions would be very, very different because a hybrid car isn’t a tribal community, it is an evangelistic community.
Then the second piece about creating loyalty, and this is the hardest part about this whole “social media marketing”, and it’s this: It’s not about marketing. It isn’t.

RS: Based on this conversation here it’s all about listening and understanding.

TO: Right. And what do you do with that? If you’re smart, what you do is figure out how to have relationships with people that are meaningful. Figure out how to be helpful to that community. Here are two different paths I can take. I can post “MINI for Sale!” or “Here’s a deal!” or “Would you please recommend this to a friend?” and I can spend all my time doing that. How do you think that would be received? They’d drive you out of there! Or I can go in there and say, “ I see this particular customization coming up a lot. Here’s a technical service bulletin you can check out that I think explains it. If it doesn’t let me know. You can become a valued member of the community or you can sell at them. They are two very, very different things. And it has huge implications.

I was at the WOMMA conference in Las Vegas, and someone told a story about what they’re doing in social media and they said the hardest thing about it is that its not about marketing campaigns, its about relationships. Now, relationships don’t have a start or end date does they? It’s an open-ended commitment.

The other thing is, it’s not just Marketing. So in order for her to go forward with the program, she had to get Marketing, Customer Service, Engineering, Legal and Executive all to sign off on it. Because it involves all those departments. You can imagine if I wanted to be a valued member of the MINI community it would touch all those things wouldn’t it? It challenges companies because it goes across the traditional silos.

RS: This forces departments within companies to have more and more conversations with each other.

TO: Right.

RS: Given all that’s been said here, what is your definition of social media and how is it affecting traditional media & marketing? What are some examples of the ways in which social media is changing the communications business?

TO: I think we’re just beginning to figure out “social media”. It’s not “media”. It’s really social computing. Me asking questions about how to install DIRECTV is not media. The way I look at this word is this; there’s plumbing that’s available now and the plumbing is the Internet plus all the applications and devices. That allows me to talk to anybody, anywhere. I can find people. I don’t need the marketer to provide me information about their stuff anymore. I bought a digital camera last year. I didn’t go to Canon or Nikon to ask questions about digital cameras I went to the digital camera community. I don’t need the marketer anymore. I honestly don’t. So if they want to be relevant, they ought to be participating in those communities. And participation in the communities is about relationships and not about selling.

Tags: MINI-Cooper, MotiveQuest, social media marketing, Tom O'Brien

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.