Do you want to “friend” a detergent?
Lefty December 16th, 2008
This past Sunday’s NY Times ran an interesting article on the challenges of using social networks for marketing. This is particularly relevant for me, as one of my freelance projects right now involves creating a Facebook page for a major financial services company. I think the key quote is here:
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
I’m reminded of a brand strategy class I took at Stern last summer in which brand benefits were broken into functional, emotional, and self-expressive. Functional benefits speak to actual features and utility (i.e. a car gets me from point A to point B and has automatic transmission), while emotional benefits speak to how a brand makes me feel about myself. Self-expressive benefits matter most in a social context however. When a brand allows consumers to communicate something about themselves, it becomes highly relevant to sites like Facebook. For that reason, I can see brands with strong self-expressive benefits like Apple (“I think different”) or Harley-Davidson (“I’m an all-American tough guy) having effective social networking presences. For brands that lack a self-expressive component, it’s going to be an uphill battle.