Sponsored conversations are the price of being boring
As Andy Sernovitz says in his book, advertising is the price of being boring. I was reminded by this by Ruth at Brand Strategy, who cites Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saying basically the same thing.
It’s the way of the world that not everybody can have an interesting product – there’s only so much enthusiasm one can muster for the mundane (mobile phones, batteries, pencils, etc). But it is often possible to wrap an interesting story around a mundane product. A man eating pies may sound mundane, but if there are 92 pies and they are consumed in every football ground in England, then you have a sporting travelogue that is much more interesting (to footie aficionados at least).
The point is, marketers need to work at the story that sets the context of their product. Give the market something interesting to talk about and talk about it they will.
So I’m troubled by the Sponsored Conversation idea being talked up by Forrester. Essentially this is paying people to talk about your product. It’s happening on blogs and Twitter, as well as in the real world. We talked in the book about ‘Brand Advocates’ – consumers paid to recommend products to their friends and acquaintances.
Personally, I can’t imagine much worse than being pitched to by a friend. They wouldn’t be a friend for long, is my guess, especially if they made a habit of it. Yet this is the kind of thing we’re talking about, migrated to an online platform.
The key concept here, of course, is disclosure. It’s mandatory that anyone being paid to advocate discloses this fact.
Disclosure is fine for transparency but taking payment undermines influence, the likelihood that someone will make a buying decision based on what an advocate says. My suspicion is that sponsored conversations – aka paid advocacy – simply won’t be effective because they won’t be believed.
Which kind of makes the exercise pointless.
Much better to get free advocacy by creating remarkable products and services.
Hi Duncan,
We have found at SAP that there are generally three factors that combine to have a very powerful form of influence on most any decision. The three factors are: Awarness, Reputation and Experience. http://preview.tinyurl.com/pgyvt6
For the most part, paid media (from advertising and sponsored conversations as you note) and unpaid media (from traditional PR through media and blogger relations) are great for generating broad awareness for companies or important industry issues. BUT ‘experience’ is perhaps the single factor in the equation that has the highest and most credible form of influence on any individual or community. This is very hard to ‘buy.’
Experience (good and bad) is authentic and extremely credible. This is were your point on generating advocacy by creating remarkable products and services is SPOT ON.
The more that companies can generate advocacy/endorsement through the positive ‘experience’ of their products/services through their key stakeholder groups (e.g. customers, partners, employees, etc.) the better situated they are to establish a movement that will increase competitive advantage and/or other desirable results.
Great discussion!
All the best,
Don
Thanks, Don. The ‘remarkable’ reference is straight out of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, so no credit for me for that. What confuses/saddens me is that marketers with unremarkable products think they can (or must) buy attention, rather than re-engineering their products or (more easily) their product marketing. You can make unremarkable products remarkable through positioning, success stories, customer service, add-on services, and so on.
Re experience, what’s vital is capturing that experience, both good and bad. The good informs future customers, the bad informs your internal strategy and customer service.