Storytizing

Bob Pearson

• Publisher: 1845 Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780999662335
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

With the boom of e-commerce and social

media, companies no longer hold primary
control over their brand message. They now
share that power with customers.
That shift means companies must create agile
marketing campaigns that solicit the feedback
and participation of key influencers. In this new
day and age, businesses and their customers tell
the story collectively—advertising is passé; welcome
to Storytizing.
Storytizing explains how marketing professionals
can employ sophisticated new tools to
better understand how brand messages proliferate
and who helps shape them. Using interviews,
anecdotes and lessons generated through his vast
experience with Fortune 500 leaders, Pearson
shows how firms can identify the customers and
trends that shape their brand’s story. Through
those insights, Storytizing will help companies:
» Develop an Audience Architecture that
provides a predictive view of how to align your
story with your audience, as well as show how
messages evolve in real time
» Use sophisticated tools and big data to
segment the market into those who lead, those
who share and those who “lurk and learn”
» Deploy similar tools to help transform your
employees into influential brand ambassadors
» Learn from the experiences of peers, with
contributions from some of the world’s top
marketing professionals
In his first book, PreCommerce, Pearson
showed that companies must engage directly
with customers. Now this book lays out the increasingly
sophisticated strategies companies
must deploy to create, shape and sustain their
brand message in this new Storytizing era.

Chapter 6

SNAP(CHAT), CRACKLE & POP MEDIA

“Change before you have to.”

- Jack Welch

Whenever I run across Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, my mind immediately pictures Snap, Crackle and Pop, the cereal’s cartoon mascots. They still make me chuckle, because they remind me of those carefree days as a kid, long before we worried about gluten, genetically modified organisms and sugar content. We didn’t need a whole lot more than a few dancing animated characters to seal our choice of cereal.

The sheer span of their history make Snap, Crackle and Pop a premier example of branding. But those three names also hint at a deeper, more technical lesson for marketing professionals. It turns out snap, crackle and pop are also three of the six “derivatives of position” in physics. Very generally speaking, the derivatives of position help describe the ways objects or groups of objects move. The first four relate to, in order, velocity, acceleration, jerk (the rate of change of acceleration) and jounce (the rate of change of the jerk). For the most part, classical physicists focus only on the first three derivatives, so they gave the remaining trio a nickname—snap, crackle and pop. Because those higher-order derivatives have little use for most physics researchers, there’s little consensus about them.

Market research often runs into its own snap, crackle and pop problem. We can easily identify velocity in how quickly today’s technologies allow us to disseminate and access brand messages. The rapid development of new apps, devices and capabilities accelerate that already rapid pace. And brilliant scientific innovation paves the way for leapfrog technologies that prompt new “jerks” in the market.

The higher-order changes in technology and the marketplace aren’t always as easy to discern. Think of Steve Jobs’ uncanny ability to develop the iPhone and other products we didn’t realize we wanted. Somehow, he could foresee how a combination of variables would work together. For example, Corning was ready to stop making Gorilla glass until Jobs asked them to continue. Every executive in the industry knew of Gorilla glass and capacitive touch technology, but no one figured out the power of putting the two together. Meanwhile, the music industry was in the midst of a tectonic transition, ripe for disruption and in search of ways to increase—or at least stabilize— revenue. It helped that Jobs had one of the best design teams sitting there in Cupertino, but the “snap, crackle and pop” envisioned how they could come together in a single device. And now that device, or similar devices the iPhone inspired, sit in billions of pockets and purses around the world.

In today’s media world, we are surrounded by a similar set of influences that have led to disruptive innovation. I see five major drivers, but the “snap, crackle and pop” of the marketplace are bound to produce others we can’t yet imagine.

1.Video compression — We have made tremendous progress in how we compress video, making it possible to enjoy short bursts of video on our phone with little delay. We no longer worry about pixels, bits and file sizes. We just expect visual content to work.

2.Texting and messaging — We send over eight trillion text messages each year, worldwide. (I don’t know about you, but I’m betting once you reach one trillion per year, habits are pretty clear.) We like to speak and share our thinking quickly and succinctly.

3.The phone as our camera and video player — Our phones now work as well as most of the cameras we used to purchase, and we’re comfortable taking video at almost any time. We’re chronicling our lives whenever we want to.

4.The importance of 4G LTE — We can download 4- to 5-times faster than with 3G, which makes all the difference in our desire to download photos, watch movies or video chat as we move around during the day. Essentially, we can have entertainment come to us, rather than finding the right time and place for it.

5.The integration of images — Developers are making it easier for social channels to add tools that allow users to enhance their posts, similar to Snapchat’s option to geo-filter backgrounds. Based on who you are and where you are at the moment, the content you may desire can be at your beck and call. Geo-targeting, content and our lives are finally becoming fully integrated.

FIVE DISRUPTIVE TRENDS LEADING TO A NEW SOCIAL LAYER

People around the world share trillions of messages, images and videos each year, increasingly through social media and not just via text. The emerging social context engines will know so much about us that we’ll come to rely as much on their judgment as we rely on search today. This will put search engines in a squeeze, trying to remain relevant with our online social lives. If you’re not the social layer for customers—their primary channel on which they conduct the majority of their personal and business activities, from socializing to e-commerce—you will become a secondary source.

One could imagine a case in which Google becomes something like our library, while a channel like Snapchat becomes our primary social layer with new functionality that lets us communicate easily with friends and colleagues, learn what we can buy and order items we like. In essence, it becomes our everyday platform for virtually all our needs. Google, of course, is fully capable of making this happen, as well, but no doubt some companies will underestimate the transformative power of the key market trends pushing us toward a new social layer.

New social channels will integrate what we prefer far faster

All of us can explain what Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook do. But several Chinese platforms have already moved beyond them by seamlessly integrating a wider variety of capabilities. WeChat mixes features similar to Instagram (posting photos), Foursquare (finding people near you) and instant messaging. Youku combines shades of Netflix and YouTube. And on Sina Weibo, users can post like we do on Twitter and post like we do on Facebook. When technology removes barriers, we build what we want.

Texting will become old school as social chat takes off

Right now, we think of Millennials when we consider the Snapchat audience. In reality, Snapchat is integrating images, video, text and content into one place. More and more, users of all shapes and sizes will favor this richer way of communicating over plain text.

Three seconds will be the new norm to grab attention

We already see the “quick grab” on Facebook. If you don’t get hooked in seconds, you pass on a video. We are training our brains to do what we do best: make quick decisions based on limited information. Today, first impressions register faster than ever.

Entertainment will become a 24/7 opportunity similar to music

Since we can access shows, movies and music anytime we want, entertainment companies who make all their best content available will become our go-to sources. Those who make us jump through hoops will be left behind to fend for themselves.

Snapchat will lead to snap decisions on where and how we buy

If we are comfortable with a purchase and we can snap to buy, we will. Any social channel we trust could become our new place to buy, and if it integrates enough functionality it could become the primary social and ecommerce layer for many.

THE POWER OF SNAPCHAT

To illustrate how powerful Snapchat has become—and to illustrate the potential it has to transform how we communicate, buy and sell in the future—I brainstormed some future-ready ideas with my W2O colleagues. Think of this like an open letter to Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, coming from marketers and how they would like to see the channel evolve, with a few ideas of how to make it happen:

Provide greater transparency on users of its service — Transparency allows marketers to focus their advertising and brand messaging. The data can be anonymized to respect privacy, while still achieving targeting goals. But it is critical for marketing strategy and planning; it cannot be held only by Snapchat.

•IDEA: OPEN UP A LIMITED API, ALA FACEBOOK’S 30 DAYS OF DATA. Brands must be able to access data to plan. Facebook has shown the way on how to protect individual privacy while still preserving the integrity of the data.

Help brands develop relationships with Snapchat Stars. We all know the power of influencers. The Stories feature on Snapchat has started to produce key influencers that could have major impacts for a brand. These stars are similar to those on YouTube, Vine, Instagram and other channels. If a cosmetics company could join forces with influencers who provide make-up tips or how-to videos for skin care, they could increase both the reach and the authenticity of their message. In turn, this supports the users who drive Snapchat traffic.

•IDEA: CREATE A PLATFORM WHERE BRANDS AND INFLUENCERS CAN MEET. These relationships lead to more targeted earned and paid media, something valuable and worth paying for. It helps the users gain additional influence, building loyalty to the platform and their audience. And it boosts authenticity, critical on Snapchat where audiences tend to take a much more skeptical view of advertising.

Create a “Snap to Buy” feature. We need a return on our investment. If Snapchat creates a “snap to buy” feature where users can purchase products or download important purchasing information for later use, we can better track funnel activity. This can work for a brand by partnering with emerging stars, mapping them as they discuss a topic, providing an option to buy directly within the chat, and then delivering directly to the user or to a local outlet. For consumables, this scenario could also facilitate simple couponing or co-marketing opportunities.

New models can open up opportunities–including the chance for brands to sponsor other brands.

Develop new content partnerships between talent, media networks and brands. A traditional ad won’t work in Snapchat. However, new models can open up opportunities—including the chance for brands to sponsor other brands. Snapchat’s media service, called Discover, hosts branded properties for Yahoo, People, Cosmopolitan, the Food Network, Daily Mail, Vice, CNN and others. Build bridges between the Discover properties and other complementary brands.

•IDEA: BLEND A TV SHOW WITH BRAND X. Brand X works with the talent on a TV show. The talent on the show Snapchats on a key topic, which also involves Brand X products. This would generate great content, keep the topic aligned with Snapchat users’ interests and integrate brands appropriately.

Innovate in geo-location. Snapchat already innovated with picture filters that are automatically uploaded from your location. Since Snapchat users already accept geo-located content, new ways to build value via location won’t alienate the target audience.

•IDEA ONE: CREATE A CONTEST BASED ON GEO-LOCATION USE. Once a certain level of use is reached, prizes are made available. Brands could provide filters based on relevant topics, such as the Olympic Games, with backgrounds that feature local athletes. Or a razor company could sponsor the Movember fund-raiser, capitalizing on the idea that men will be shaving in the near future.

•IDEA TWO: ALIGN SNAPCHAT CONTENT FROM BRANDS DOWN TO THE STORE LEVEL. If the retail networks of a country are aligned to geo-location, a brand can offer unique content—including coupons and other offers—at the zip code level. Users can snap-to-buy, and the product gets delivered to your closest store.

Improve how the Stories platform is handled. On the Snapchat app, Stories are essentially paid content from brands. But those stories don’t appear in-line when users interact with friends, which is what they come to Snapchat to do. It’s a couple clicks off the beaten path. CNN doesn’t put all its advertisements on a separate page for paid content. If brands have found success with this approach, OK, but on the whole the Stories experience does not overlap with how most people use the app.

Partner with users to create a “brand studio.” A “brand studio” platform on Snapchat should contain a wide range of brand content— images, video, quotes, etc.—but it also should remain open to anyone. Encourage users to add their own ideas, make requests and participate in making each brand studio as cool as it can be. Ultimately, brands could create content directly with, and within, ...