Brand marketing in social media era

With the prevalence of social media, brand building is facing a very difficult challenge. As early as ten years ago, most companies were still cheering for the golden age of brand marketing. These companies have hired creative companies and technical armies to implant all kinds of brand promotion content in the whole digital world, but with little effect.

The company's digital marketing strategy focuses on brand content, because the general thinking in the industry is that social media will help enterprises to establish direct contact with target customers across traditional media, thus making their own brands the hub of customer communities. Therefore, the company invested heavily to realize this vision. However, contrary to expectations, few brands can generate meaningful business benefits through online customers.

In order to solve this problem, we need to keep in mind that successful brand marketing is often inseparable from culture, not just relying on technological innovation. Digital technology has not only created a powerful new social network, but also greatly changed the operation mode of social culture, that is, created the so-called mass culture. The prevalence of popular culture has also changed the brand rules. If people can deeply understand this pop culture phenomenon, they can understand why the marketing strategy centered on brand content has failed, and what brand marketing method should be used to replace this outdated strategy in the social media era.

Different from the traditional media era, because customers can freely choose what kind of information to receive, it is more difficult to succeed through traditional brand marketing strategies. The new digital technology makes customers no longer passively accept advertisements, so major enterprises increase their innovation efforts. For example, BMW is the first in the industry to practice online short film production, and even openly employs top Hollywood directors to participate in it, so as to promote more spectacular car special effects and production quality. These early practices make enterprises realize that if Hollywood-class ideas are delivered at the speed of the Internet, it will help attract a large number of customers to watch.

Historically, cultural innovation often comes from marginal groups, who challenge the mainstream norms of society, while enterprises and mass traditions spread these new ideas to the mass market as intermediaries. However, social media has changed all this. Its appearance brings together once isolated communities and makes them work together to form an interconnected network, which has a more direct and substantial impact on culture. These new popular cultures are embodied in two ways: one is subculture, which incubates new ideas and practices; The second is the art world, which has created a new world of entertainment.

Nowadays, popular culture in the era of social media can cover almost all topics: from espresso to the disillusionment of the American dream, Victorian novels, handmade furniture to liberalism, new urbanism, three-dimensional printing and animation, bird watching and so on. However, when enterprises carry out brand marketing, they are mainly faced with structural problems, not creative problems. Large enterprises are often good at coordinating and implementing complex marketing programs in various markets around the world, but this organizational model is too mediocre in the social media era to bring cultural innovation.

At the same time, large enterprises are also facing the challenge of star effect: social media enables stars to interact directly with the public online, instead of indirectly interacting with the public by sponsoring a corporate brand in the past, so the traditional brand sponsored by stars can easily lose its appeal to the public. In order to solve this problem, the famous sports brand Andema began to try to improve the brand influence through the combination of star sponsorship and cultural brand. In short, in order to carry out effective brand marketing on social media, it is necessary for enterprises to do more homework for popular culture.