Social media was supposed to usher in a golden age of branding. But
things didn’t turn out that way. Marketers originally thought that
Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would let them bypass mainstream media
and connect directly with customers. Hoping to attract huge audiences to
their brands, they spent billions producing their own creative content.
But consumers never showed up. In fact, social media seems to have made
brands less significant. What happened? The issue is, social media has
transformed how culture works, in a way that weakens certain branding
techniques. It has united once-isolated communities into influential
crowdcultures. Crowdcultures are very prolific cultural innovators.
Their members produce their own content—so well that companies simply
can’t compete. Consider that people making videos in their living rooms
top the charts on YouTube, which few companies have managed to crack.
While they diminish the impact of branded content, crowdcultures grease
the wheels for an alternative approach, cultural branding. In it, a
brand sets itself apart by promoting a new ideology that springs from
the crowd. Chipotle did this successfully when it made two short films
critiquing industrial food, tapping into a movement that began in the
organic-farming subculture and blew up into a mainstream concern on
social media. Other good examples come from personal care. Axe revived
its brand by becoming an over-the-top cheerleader for the “lad” crowd
that arose as a response to politically correct gender politics. Dove
championed the other side of the divide, with campaigns that spoke to
crowdculture concerns about unhealthy beauty standards for women. Brands
succeed when they break through in culture, and crowdcultures are a
great vehicle for doing that. But firms can’t identify the critical
opportunities by relying on traditional segmentation and trend reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]