A Social Brand: Before There Was Internet

It started with a simple message... "i love VB! :)"

On November 13th, 2007, at 3:34pm...the Vera Bradley page on FaceBook was born.

When the marketing team at Vera Bradley brainstormed ideas for the 2007 holiday season, suddenly it felt like the right time to engage fans online. After all, customers had been creating their own communities and chatting on blogs like LiveJournal and MySpace for months. Just a few years earlier the attitude was, "why would anyone spend time talking about handbags on the Internet?"

There have always been followers of this American success story...and they were talking about their special bond with the product long before Al Gore invented the Internet. The Vera Bradley brand has grown as if the company was deliberately using a direct selling model. But people weren't being paid for having home parties...they just shared their love affair with their favorite handbags whenever they got the chance. They shared their collections, gave gifts, and treated themselves to a little happiness in a colorful quilted bag.

Now they get together online.

"What bag did you use today," Sarah asks. The answers reveal a companionship with the product...."this one's going to class with me, but later I'm taking this one to work..."

Another post, "Is there anything you wish Vera Bradley made?" just gave the product development team the kind of information that used to take hours of brainstorming and cost thousands in research.

Over 36,000 FaceBook fans, 2,000 discussion topics and 1,200 wall posts later, this really should come as no surprise. After all, the company has featured its friends and family in catalogs since the beginning. Friends and family work for the company. New employees often comment how "everyone is just so nice" when they start their new jobs. Friendly, approachable, fun...authentic. It's the culture that makes this brand a no-brainer for social media. And with product names like "Java Blue" and "Raspberry Fizz" why wouldn't people want to talk?

The discussions aren't always so nice; questions about manufacturing or quality pop up and are debated. The biggest fans are brutally honest sometimes. People want to know why a certain color was retired, just when they started to like it. The new colors are stellar, or a total disappointment. No matter the topic, the loyalists will debate their position and share how they really feel. Like every relationship, sometimes you have to air your concerns -- it's the kind of authenticity and transparency people expect from their favorite brands.

If Vera Bradley were to stay away from the social crowd...only feed the craze with traditional media like ads, catalogs and mailers...would the brand continue to grow? Possibly. But as the brand evangelists continue to carry her products and tell her story, Vera Bradley would risk losing a new era of consumers who expect to hear a real voice. The images on the page would appear contrived; models staged for a photo shoot just to sell more quilted cotton handbags. Just another advertisement from a manufacturer trying to make money.

If the only brand elements a customer touches and sees are on cold paper, the company is saying that it doesn't want to have a real conversation with its customers. "Just buy our products and we'll keep making them." That wouldn't be logical, and would be contrary to the brand promise.

The communication paradigm shift may be painful to some execs and old-school marketers, but brands must constantly rethink how to engage customers in conversation, considering the high expectations and power of the crowd. For this company, it all started with a gift, and it is very fortunate to have sustained a social following that other companies can't buy.