Why People Buy a Tent Only to Post It on Instagram
Part 1: Marketing Is Beyond Your Control
“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
— Oscar Wilde said that.
Nowadays, people want to imitate brands far more than most brands deserve.
— I’m saying that.
The lines between entertainment and advertising are blurring more and more everyday. Everyone has a brand, everyone is a publisher, and they are all searching for experiences and products to help them tell their stories. The best companies have already adapted to this, and are working with their audiences to spread a collaborative brand story.
This development in consumer behavior is the biggest opportunity awaiting consumer brands in the coming decade.
Welcome to the emergence of Participatory Marketing.
As the digital and social media marketing landscapes have matured and consolidated, two important things happened that most brands have not adapted to:
First, people have gotten smarter about advertising because they see it so often, and now tune it out at a higher rate than ever before. Check out these stats:
91% of people say ads are more intrusive today than 2-3 years ago
87% say there are more ads in general than 2-3 years ago
79%feel like they’re being tracked by retargeted ads
Ad blocker usage also continues to rise:
Second, social media has given individuals the tools to grow brand platforms of their own. Now, the products and services a company provides are being used as plot points and props in brand stories that regular, everyday people are telling and monetizing across Instagram, YouTube, and other social platforms.
We’ve entered the age of screen time, all the time. Just how much time are people spending on social media?
Fact: As of 2015, 1 in every 5 minutes an American spent on a mobile device is on Facebook or Instagram.
Fact: People spend close to 2 hours and 20 minutes per day online on their phone. (Zenith)
While people are ignoring pop ups, muting TV commercials, or driving past billboards, they are looking for, viewing, saving, and sharing the content that’s important to them on social platforms. These digital platforms are the connective tissue between all your other marketing channels because they are always available and always getting our attention. If a brand is not pulling all the threads laid out in other channels together on social, then they’re missing the keystone in your marketing strategy.
Sounds hard, right?
Well...yes, it is. At first.
But this shift is good news for a lot of consumer brands, but outdoor gear brands are uniquely equipped to benefit from it.
Here’s why.
Outdoor products enable some of the most compelling stories that individuals, influencers, and smaller brands are telling online. For everyone following along, the products come to epitomize the stories they’re featured in. Buying the tent only to post it on social media may seem insane at first glance, but those consumers don’t want the tent. They want the content to reinforce their personal brand.
Part 2: Your Company Needs a Brand Narrative to Create Fans
What, exactly, is going on online?
When people look back a thousand years from now on the blip in time that witnessed the creation of social media, the way they’ll understand it was the continuation of the democratization of publishing. What does that mean?
Here are the highlights:
The invention of the printing press, the newspaper, the novel, the television, all the way up to blogs, Instagram accounts, and live streaming can be looked at as a continual loosening of the editorial constraints on expression, and the democratization of publishing.
Overall, more and more people are gaining the ability to express themselves, albeit in different mediums, at each point along the way.
With the explosion of smartphones and social media over the last 10 years, the tools to share your own personal story through words, images, and video became available in a single small device that fits in our pockets.
Telling your story has never been easier.
Sharing your story, whatever it is, is significantly easier to do today (via words, photos, and videos), than it has ever been in the history of the world. From personal experiences to branded messaging, whatever we deem interesting or important can now be broadcast through a variety of mediums to an effectively limitless audience.
All from one device.
And people can interact with it. In real time!
So, here’s the big idea:
What is driving this ever-increasing fixation on social platforms is the constant source of other people’s life stories that it offers, and the unrealized ability to share our own with the world that it presents. People are looking for blueprints to emulate as they tell their stories, and the smartest brands are filling that void in ways that benefit both the brand and the customer.
It shouldn’t be a huge surprise then that people don’t have much time to look at ads on the internet anymore.
Part 3: Here’s the Story Your Brand Should Be Telling
Now that we’re all on the same page about what’s happening online, let’s think about your brands again. Outdoor gear brands makes products that help people go on adventures. Most stories are about adventures. People now have all the tools to match up with their human compulsion to read and tell stories. So… they are probably looking for supplies for their adventures, right?
The Problem: Most people are not good storytellers. And even for those who are, storytelling is hard.
The Solution: An effective brand narrative.
What Makes an Effective Brand Narrative?
Brands can give consumers the tools and guidance on how their products, their services, and their brands as a whole can aid that consumer in telling their own story. Just show them a consistent example, and let them do the rest.
Consistency is key, but that doesn’t mean a brand narrative is made up of rigid guidelines. Brand narratives rely on a consistent organizing principle that inspires endless conversation rather than a single brand message (like a tagline, for example) used to hit consumer over the head until they buy something. While that organizing principle stays constant across all your marketing channels, it can manifest itself slightly differently depending on each channel’s specifications, user expectations, demographics, and position in the buyer journey.
What Is An Organizing Principle?
An organizing principle is the main idea around which a brand is experienced by consumers. Harley Davidson’s organizing principle is the freedom of the open road. Apple’s organizing principle is better design. Nike’s organizing principle is transcendence through athletics. At its best it is consistent, but able to be personalized in the hands of the consumer.
So, how does a company craft a brand narrative, based on an organizing principle, that people will want to join in on and make their own? It needs the right quantities of the following attributes, in proportions appropriate for your brand.
Entertaining
First things first, a brand needs to catch a user’s attention. It needs to stand out on busy and competitive online content platforms. Whether they leverage beautiful content, humor, vulnerability, beauty, great design, important information or something else, the brands that earner user attention online are, at minimum, entertaining their audiences.
Aspirational
It’s important to differentiate between Inspire and Aspire. Providing inspiration, creating the urge within your consumer to do something, is nice. But it’s also fleeting. Providing your audience with that initial inspiration as well as the long-term aspirations to back it up is how to grow an engaged community. Your brand’s content should inspire your consumers to aspire to a goal. That goal will be different for different brands. Some brands should motivate their customers to have all the gear they need to be prepared for their next great adventure. Others should inspire their customers to become better stewards of the environment. Still others should push their customers to get outside to reconnect with themselves or loved ones away from the day’s distractions. Whatever aspiration your brand provides should align with your organizing principle.
Actionable
When a consumer decides to follow along with a brand, via social media, newsletters, or catalogues, they are making a commitment of their time and attention. For that commitment to have real staying power, the brand needs to go beyond entertainment and aspirations. Providing actionable content is key. For most brands, this can simply be updates on new products, sales, maintenance recommendations, or curated accessory suggestions. But there are tactics beyond the basics, whether that means highlighting worthy causes they can support, producing educational content so they can get the most out of your products, or sharing curated information the brand has gleaned from being an authority in the space. A brand should provide consumers with everything they need to take action, to ensure they’ll keep coming back for more.
Joinable
Brand loyalty in today’s world is based on people feeling like they are participating in a community rather than yelling into the void. Whether it’s through events and causes, or a shared mission, or simply a hashtag that consumers can identify with, creating a feeling of belonging and community is key.
Pay Off
Whether it’s promotions, giveaways, or freebies, consumers want an incentive over and above the prior points to let a brand occupy the real estate on their social feeds and in their inbox. It takes time and attention to follow a brand, even passively, and brands need to offer something in exchange for that.
If your company’s organizing principle can deliver on these 5 characteristics, you’re good to go. Wrapping it up in a clear and concise brand narrative ensures that various members of your team, outside agency partners, and other vendors will all be aligned on how to communicate your brand’s story.
Chances are, you’ve got a community of customers chomping at the bit to tell stories online. And your products are part of the toolkit they need to do that. In a future where consumers benefit more from the endless hours we all spend looking at screens, brand narratives will have taken the place of ad copy and recycled stock photos, and we’ll all be better off.