Future of Strategy 2024: Marketing Won’t Save You. Your Consumers Will
By Matt Klein, Head of Global Foresight at Reddit.
Too many brands ignore a powerful source of consumer knowledge before launching a product: their marketing departments and the connection to the consumer. Brands that shy away from ingesting critical feedback are also missing an opportunity to course correct. Reddit’s Matt Klein lays out how to tap into consumer sentiment.
You get a brief and, unfortunately, the product and brand are set up to fail. There’s nothing you can do about it. Good luck.
Entertainment studios are testy when audiences voice disappointment in a film before its second trailer even gets released. Car manufacturers are distraught when their primary segment has no interest in their next model. And financial service organizations are perplexed when consumers become antagonistic to anything they have to say.
These scenarios are marketing’s everyday dilemmas.
We’re post-copy, jingles, and TV spots. Now, we discuss “cultural strategy,” the practice of effectively resonating within the larger zeitgeist ecosystem. But while this approach is more “PR” than traditional advertising, being proficient in emerging social shifts does not make selling an unwanted film, car or credit card any more successful. No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.
What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts. Too often, every single day, we attempt to map finished products to a mismatched zeitgeist.
Instead, such cultural intelligence should be leading R&D, innovation and executive strategy. We’re spending millions too late.
We’ve reversed the figure and the ground: We spend more time, energy and money on the attempted harmonization of an offering and culture, than we are ensuring whatever’s being produced is even desired and produced effectively via insight.
This remains the invaluable potential of marketing. Using cultural intelligence to work higher upstream, touching product.
As founder of BBH Sir John Hegarty puts it, “Never ignore product. It’s the only part of your business that customers care about.”
Textbook marketers will argue, “Actually, product is a part of marketing.”
Sure. The 4Ps of Marketing are product, price, place, and promotion… But when was the last time your marketing team got intimately involved in an innovation pipeline, pricing dynamics or product distribution channel strategy?
Marketing generally remains a promotion-centric function.
What we can agree upon is that the single best thing we can do for marketing’s success is ensure marketing has a say in something other than promotion. After all, marketing has an antenna tuned to the market and zeitgeist better than anyone else inside an org.
Cultural strategy is not just a function of marketing with a focus on trend-spotting. As strategy executive Nick Susi puts it, “Should cultural fluency just be a marketer’s job? Absolutely not. Yet unfortunately this is what happens. Cultural fluency should be an entire organization’s value, integral to their DNA. That’s when the magic happens.”
People continue to go nuts over what comes out of companies like MSCHF, Lego or Teenage Engineering, because as Susi points out, this is because cultural fluency isn’t outsourced or designated to a single team. Rather, “it runs through the entire company’s people, process and product – not just positioning.”
According to the former Head of Communications at Ericsson, Nils-Ingvar Lundin, “If you want a good image, start with a good reality.”
There’s no promotion without product
Plenty of organizations produce incredible products and fail because they were never discovered. And there are plenty of mediocre products with incredible marketing, and they do quite well. The point being that this is not a “one or another” debate. In fact, plenty of organizations’ products are the brand itself. After all, that’s fashion – Balenciaga, LOEWE, Ralph Lauren, etc.
As institutional trust declines, and organizational messages, claims and promises are criticized, debated and debunked, promotion becomes further convoluted. As Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange of Future Commerce put it, we’re in the era of the “Multi-Player Brand.” Brands no longer communicate top-down, where a singular vision gets accepted by all. Instead, today, brands are open-sourced, consistently evolving and increasingly contextual. Brands are co-written in the comments. Fandoms are the new executive board.
So if 1. marketing’s cultural intelligence should have more of a word in upstream decision-making, 2. product requires a refreshed prioritization and 3. consumers are increasingly in control, then what are we to do?
Listen.
It’s that simple.
Listen deeply to what people have to say about your brand and your product. The answer key is already in front of us. This is not new, but it is becoming more and more important, and rarely is it being implemented at the right moments, (again, during R&D vs. post-campaign analysis.)
How do we do this? I’ve dubbed it “Layering & Triangulating.” Instead of relying upon a single source, stack as many layers of data on top of another (social listening + media analyses + focus groups + ethnographies + industry data, etc.) and seek the patterns (or better yet, seek contrasts and tensions). By increasing the variety of our data, we can increase our confidence in the spotted themes. Most importantly, we bring this all up earlier in the strategy development process.
The scarcity or tardiness of this exercise is no one team’s particular fault, but rather a downside of scale, fragmentation, silo-ing and poor agency relationship dynamics. We don’t need more “trends” – we need better sharing and earlier integration of them.
There’s one last important detail to all this listening:
Every brand wants to be spoken about… that is until someone has reasonable feedback about them. Then, suddenly, these comments are labeled “negative sentiment” – a conversation to quietly overlook or publicly refute.
Negative sentiment is forever a brands’ biggest opportunity
Consumer feedback is a signal of investment. Criticism is a form of constructive optimism. And feedback is a manifestation of caring.
People talk about things they are interested in.
Why again are we hiding from this?
So what does this look like in practice?
It looks like Domino’s Turnaround Campaign, addressing, head on, its cardboard crust claims. “There comes a time when you know you’ve got to make a change,” said Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s at the time. Fifteen years later, Domino’s stock is up +30x reaching a $14B market cap.
Abercrombie & Fitch, while less explicit, also leaned into their hatred in order to turn an entire organization around. One of the earliest dominos in 2013 was a 70,000 person-signed petition demanding change from A&F. It led to an A&F senior staff meeting with the petition lead and CEO of the National Eating Disorders Association. In less than a decade, the brand went from America’s most hated retailer to one of Gen Z’s favorite brands.
It also looks like LEGO’s Ideas Forum, allowing community members to submit and vote on product requests. With a call to action to become a “LEGO Fan Designer,” there’s a clear invitation for all to participate in product development.
It can also look like beauty brands Rhode and TIRTIR expanding shade colors after consumer feedback. TIRTIR went from 3 to 40 shades in less than 365 days, while Rhode founder Hailey Bieber reached out to beauty influencer Golloria George after her negative review. George later shared, “Hailey, thank you for reaching out and listening to me and treating me like a human. This is redemption. Bravo.” Beyond beauty, EA and The Sims developers, addressed similar skin tone feedback and thanked mods’ efforts to create a more realistically diverse Sims world in the meantime.
In 1985 Coca-Cola, slipped to a 24% market share and was beaten by the sweeter Pepsi in blind-taste taste. Coke decided to not only change its near-century-old formula… but discontinue its original flavor. Chaos ensued. There were protesters, calls and letters, and people began hoarding packs of the original. Swiftly, in the next quarter, Coca-Cola brought back its original formula, naming it, “Coca-Cola Classic.” Celebration. Coke’s president made a mea culpa, while other executives claimed they had no idea the impact they were causing. “We are not selling a soft drink. We are selling a little tiny piece of people’s lives.” Ironically, the return to classic revitalized the brand so strongly that still today people conspire that it was all a part of the plan.
Playing with feedback is as old as modern advertising. Since the 60s, Avis has been proclaiming they “try harder,” acknowledging their second-place position to leader Hertz. Leaning into their feedback, perceived inferior status, modesty and required extra effort has defined an entire brand for generations. Today, Avis commands nearly 3x the market cap of Hertz.
Addressing feedback can be immediate or span decades, and it can inform a brand tops-down or a single SKU.
Today, you don’t have to wait to develop and launch a new Coke to then learn if people will like it. Even better, consumers are proactively sharing thoughts before you can even ask the question. On Reddit, people are naturally and passionately sharing such feedback. This remains a missed opportunity for any organization interested in what consumers truly think and feel.
The world’s greatest focus group is too often omitted.
According to GWI, Redditors are more likely than any other social media user to self-identify as early adopters, go-getters, tech-confident, trend-setters, and open-minded. These characteristics ultimately produce vocal opinions… which should be engaged with and harnessed for strategy… and not to be intimidated by.
For important context, when we analyze a massive cluster of conversation around auto brands, positive brand mentions outweigh negative ones 4:1, and when clicking into those negative posts, 91% of them are debating product quality vs. < 2% of them are trolling. Meanwhile, only 3% of all posts get cross-posted to other communities.
TL;DR: Negative sentiment is the minority of conversation, overwhelmingly constructive, and safely localized and contextual.
From global survey data, we found 82% of Redditors agree: “Addressing negative feedback is a great way for a brand to differentiate themselves positively” and 72% agree: “Brands which ignore negative feedback look worse than those who reply.” Redditors are more likely to believe this than those on any social media platform.
To resonate in culture today, build with people, not just for them. Listen to the people you care most about, and who care most about you. And reflect upon what they have to say… no matter how uncomfortable it may be.
If the answers for great products and therefore more effective marketing are already in front of us, the question is: “Are you willing to listen to those who want to help you most?”
Now what?
- Listen to what your (potential) consumers have to say. Ask questions. Engage. Learn. This may include apologizing, taking accountability and facing feedback. There’s only an upside to this.
- Work to ensure marketers gain access to all teams involved with the product, and earlier in the development process. If you’re an agency, platform or vendor, attempt to understand the holistic picture of the brand before (and while engaging), empathizing with its larger goals and challenges. Again, there is no promotion without product.
- Make cultural intelligence and fluency an organization-wide priority, not just something for an agency or hip Jr. Strategist. It’s everyone’s role to understand how their work informs – and is informed by – culture, which exists outside their day-to-day.
Credit: wARC