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.

Community Brands

The tree planted in my back yard comes from the Plant Center down the road. My wife saw a "tree sale" sign and couldn't resist, so I borrowed a neighbor's trailer and picked it up. It's a big tree.

The way I was treated at the Plant Center motivated me to share my story with everyone. They gave me advice because they wanted me to enjoy the tree and wanted to make sure it would last. They loaded the tree carefully into the trailer for me and provided instructions how to place it in the ground, even though I saved $100 by picking it up myself. And when I asked for some top soil to finish my landscape project, they charged half price even though I had just purchased a discount tree...without delivery.

Do you think I'll recommend this place to my entire neighborhood?

Now my neighbor has a tree planted in his back yard just like mine.

Bad Attitude Makes Bad Coffee

I had the worst cup of coffee at Starbucks yesterday. Turns out the barista was in a foul mood -- honking at the other workers, looking grumpy, throwing cups around. I think that the attitude pretty much guaranteed the outcome; I couldn't even recognize the slop that was supposed to be my favorite drink. Next time you're at a coffee house, take a look at the dude making the coffee first, then decide whether you should risk it.

Polyvore: A Consumer of Everything

I stumbled on another social media site this week called Polyvore.com. I love the name. You have to think about it for a second; a carnivore is an animal that eats other animals, a herbivore eats only plants and an omnivore eats both plants and animals. You get it. So, logically a POLYvore just eats anything and everything it sees...rocks, trees, people, cars, etc.

According to the site, "Polyvore is a unique web application that lets people mix and match images from anywhere." Young consumers' passion for fashion and their insatiable appetite to engage & share what they have (or want to have) makes this site a huge movement in social preference marketing. For a very long time, marketers have been trying to figure out what people are thinking when they buy things...and what things they buy along with other things. Remember the Jetta Trek? Seemed logical at the time, but I wonder how much research money was spent deciding how many people would actually be more likely to buy a car if it had a bike attached to it. In my own experience, I have helped spend a ton of company money conducting studies and focus groups to figure out how our product fits into the lives of consumers. A popular tactic among researchers is to place a blank piece of paper in front of a consumer, along with a fashion magazine, and ask them to create a collage. (This particular exercise might cost you about $30,000 for the moderator's time.) "You have 10 minutes...go." Then the researcher shows it to you (weeks later) and says, "isn't this an interesting collage that Sally put together?"

This trend is apparently so prevalent in business today that I've even been asked to create a collage at work to show what I think a particular consumer group looks like. But now I don't need to guess. I have about a bazillion collages to choose from on this crazy site called Polyvore. It isn't a little focus group with a few moms and a stack of fashion magazines on the table to tear apart. It's a pool of global consumers (in an age bracket with the largest buying power ever seen in human history) with a virtually unlimited amount of visual assets to choose from. The best part is, these consumers are providing researchers more information than they could ever imagine...without even thinking about it. Teens are spending hours creating these pieces of art with products and brands that have become a part of their lives. They even make contests out of them. Sadly, I imagine there are market research professionals who have no idea this information exists...or possibly write it off as a kooky bunch of kids playing digital scrapbook.

I browse these pages, I see how this technology allows consumers to grab whatever they "want" and make personal stories out of them...and I am completely amazed.

I think next year I will save a few hundred thousand dollars on market research and look to sites like Polyvore.com and the wisdom of crowds.

The brain's perception can feel like reality.

My daughter had a dream last night; I blew up in the woods.

It has had a profound affect on her today, almost like it really happened. She had a hard time telling me at first. Like if she told me that she saw me die maybe I actually would die. Then when she told her mom, she started to cry.

You all know what this is like. I think it has happened to most people. You see someone in the distance and something bad is about to happen, and you can't reach them in time. Someone betrays your trust. Or you're running away from something and you keep falling down so it crushes you. Then you wake up, and somehow it feels like it really happened. Sometimes it takes a while to wear off. Married guys have often woken up to the glare of their spouses -- the morning's first words: "you cheated on me."

Now, I'm no child psychologist, so I have no idea how to help my daughter except to let her hug me and know I'm ok. But I wish I could bottle the source of that emotion. It's irrational, because she knows that it didn't actually happen. But somehow the brain interprets it like a real event and it evokes some of the same emotions.

If I could have sold my daughter a helicopter to rescue me at the moment I was about to explode, she would have bought it (assuming I raised her allowance). In the real world, there are emotional conditions that exist where marketers can sell irrational things to irrational people.

So when does someone's mental state make them more susceptible to the influence of advertising or more likely to buy? I don't know yet...but it will fun to find out.

Viral Marketing in 1972

I was born in 1972 in Grand Rapids, MI. Upon my birth, I imagine that people were made aware of the blessed event primarily by phone messages, a newspaper announcement, letters and maybe a postcard dropped in the mail. (Stamps cost eight cents at the time.) Knowing my family, any pictures taken were probably not developed for months (or years) and were certainly never used to share my arrival with people who were unable to visit me to give me my first kisses. It's possible the only people who really saw me within the first few months were neighbors or church friends who lived within a few miles.

What am I thinking, you wonder?

Back in the 1970's, there were still people who engaged in viral marketing. It just intrigues me to think how today's media has seriously altered the way the message is transmitted, the quality of the message, and how the attention span of the people receiving the message has changed.

Imagine your phone buzzing in your pocket. Your friend is sending you a text message. "Where RU" flashes across your screen. "Club Soda - best Martini's in town, live music," you reply. "Never been...heard about it...lemme know what's good on the menu."

So you become an amateur food critique for the evening, not realizing that's what you've become. But in the 1970's you would have thought about the location, the drinks, the meal and the entire experience for hours, days, or months before you decided to share the experience...possibly deciding that your experience wasn't worth sharing at all.

Our location, the circumstances and the media available often determine our likelihood to share things that are happening. The reality is that most people don't filter their surroundings at all; whatever is happening is happening now...it plays the way it plays. We don't consider that maybe our advice will be good or bad for the person receiving it. We only provide the commentary because that's what the recipient expects.

If we had to think, how different would our message be. Like in 1972?

The Anti-Customer

The social networks have brought out individuals with a wide range of social aptitude. For some, this may be their only outlet -- the only place where it's possible for a group of people to hear them or take them seriously. The beauty of the medium is that it's here for everyone and anyone. All you need is a computer and the ability to push some buttons. But that certainly doesn't mean the author has any ability to engage with other users or deliver anything worth reading. But that doesn't prevent them from trying.

When I last read the book "Tipping Point" I had the frame of mind that people who become connectors or salespeople have a basic desire to influence other people in a positive way.

Silly.

As marketers, it's our job to win someone over to the "good" side. It's not that often that we think about the detractors who are trying to do just the opposite. I've recently encountered this with a corporate blog. We love our fans, our fans love us. It seems like the right time and opportunity for brands to host forums to share that love. But some of the "salespeople" in the group aren't always happy or interested in seeing that brand succeed.

Why would someone claim to be a fan of something, then try to persuade others that they should rally against it? It's as if the indignant few are hoping to expose some foul injustice and someday the wronged will become victorious.

Maybe its like that old car in high school -- you couldn't afford the car you really wanted, so it was cool to tell everyone that you hated your car. "My car sucks." So you didn't wash it, never changed the oil, filled it with empty Mountain Dew bottles...and it kept running. You didn't know until later how much you loved that car. Today you might tell someone, "I had this old car and it never owed me a thing...if only I knew then..."

So now as we try and market a brand or a product, there are forces working against the positive influence we are trying to create -- able to vocalize their disdain for the topic at lightening speed with little impunity. Maybe they're just grumpy. Maybe they need a friend. But will I ever be able to win them over? No...at least not by myself.

So, we'll continue to find ourselves in strange debates with otherwise innocuous people that somehow pushed our buttons today.