How brands can be topical without f*cking it up
Brands are keen to be culturally relevant on social media but it requires a deep understanding of who you are and what interests your audience. CR explores how to get the balance right
The way we use social media has changed so much that it’s meant that brands have also had to shift and adapt to ensure they’re reaching the same spaces their customers are in. Previously social media used to just be another platform to talk about your products and promotions, but now brands are having to use their channels to create dialogue and community.
This has led to an influx of approaches that are typically variations of meme marketing, moment or topical marketing, and community engagement where brands create content that comments on topical events and happenings to engage with followers – the result, in theory, to appear more human and boost brand awareness. It is a risky strategy – while some brands have seen success, others have fallen flat, either misjudging the tone, their audience, or what they should be even commenting on.
Here, CR speaks to three experts about the dos and don’ts, and asks how brands can be topical without getting themselves cancelled.
Spoiler: it’s Aldi Admin x https://t.co/lL8r1Sobmb
— Aldi Stores UK (@AldiUK) January 9, 2024
WHAT’S THE VALUE?
If the dangers of commenting on social are so high, why do brands do it? According to social media consultant Rachel Karten one reason is it provides brands an easy way into the cultural conversation. “It’s getting more expensive to participate in pop culture, whether it’s sponsoring a big game or event. Social media is free and you can potentially gain lots of attention, impressions and followers with minimal spend,” she says. “When it’s done correctly, audiences do like it as it’s something that will make them feel closer to the brand.”
“We’ve also been talking about words like ‘authenticity’ and ‘relevance’, and this can be a very easy first step into that,” adds Charlie Cottrell, executive editorial director at We Are Social. She believes using memes on social media, adding humour to your presence and other techniques, can help brands demonstrate that in a more personal way to their audiences, especially when trying to reach new people. “This style of marketing is about understanding the conversational cues of your audience and interpreting them in a way that feels relevant to them,” she says.
CREATE A PERSONA PEOPLE CAN BELIEVE IN
For a brand to create a dialogue with its customers and beyond, there needs to be a personality they can interact with. Cottrell believes it’s a completely different toolbox to the tone of voice in a brand identity. Instead, the first step is to find a point of view. “If you’re entering into this space and you’re going to try and comment topically on something, you have to bring a new angle to that commentary,” she says. “If you can’t get that right, you probably aren’t ready.”
What Cottrell and the team try to create for their clients are “brand personas”, so building the character of the brand, what they say, how they interact with people. “Tone of voice gives you a set of rules for engagement and words that you don’t use, whereas with a persona, it’s a rounded character where they have to be able to show up and be funny in the good times, as well as show up and be respectful in the challenging times.”
if “I’m never flying Ryanair ever again” was a person https://t.co/b81gsRKi7H
— Ryanair (@Ryanair) January 11, 2024
A good example of a memorable persona is Ryanair, known for its punchy, deadpan tone which sees the brand brazenly clap back at disgruntled passengers. “If you don’t commit to it, you’re never going to get any kind of result if you try and please everybody. It works for Ryanair because they’re so harsh to their audience base but they just kept committing to it and over time they brought everybody around,” explains Cottrell. “If that had been one singular post everyone would just be really pissed off, but they’ve built it out as the character.”
Duolingo has also been lauded for its “unhinged” TikToks that utilise its owl mascot and play into viral trends and memes, while other standouts include Netflix, one of the “originators in this space”, and Aldi, whose accounts are run by McCann Manchester. Its success comes from remaining authentic to the Aldi brand so that when it responds cheekily to M&S (remember #FreeCuthbert?) their customers get the joke.
“Aldi’s drumbeat approach works for the brand, but it is not a cookie cutter approach. It also took about six months of consistent cultural hijacking until we started seeing real success,” says Calum McDonald-Ball, joint head of McCann Content Studios. “Brands need to consider the roles they can play in customers’ lives and mirror this on social. In an authentic way that is ownable to them. That’s the only way it can be maintained. You see some brands have flash in the pan success, a moment where the social media stars aligned, but most of the time it’s inconsistent.”
@duolingo sad g(owl) hours #duoplushie #duolingo #languagelearning #emo ♬ Rio romeo – ℒ????????????
NURTURE YOUR AUDIENCE
Once a fully formed persona has been created, it’s important for brands to remember who they’re doing it for. This is where social differentiates from TV or radio in that it opens up a two-way dialogue, which needs to be nurtured.
This also extends to understanding what your audience likes, what they’re interested in, and what cultural happenings they’re talking about. Specifically, memes have become a common, inexpensive way to do this, but Cottrell sees them as bigger than just some fun images with a bit of text. “Memes are a form of language and they’re something a community creates to self identify and then find other people that identify themselves within that community,” she explains.
“So it’s a really nuanced thing that manifests as something really light and flippant. The way that brands can get this right or wrong is about their commitment to it. If you chase the meme, you’ll get a little burst of excitement and then that’ll fade. A brand that understands memes as a cultural dialogue will invest in committing to that language.”
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DON’T COMMENT ON EVERYTHING
Part of getting it right is having a balance between what your channels will comment on and take part in. Many brands tend to stay clear of politics and religion, but even on the lighter side, commenting on every entertainment story won’t be relevant to your brand and could lead to some faux pas. This happens more often around sensitive stories, as seen with the shoehorned tributes by some brands around the Queen’s death in 2022, which were heavily mocked.
“There can be a sense of because people are talking about it online, it means that a brand should be talking about it, and there are certain conversations that maybe brands just shouldn’t enter into,” explains Karten. “Whether it’s celebrities feuding or a popular trial – if a brand takes a side, it just doesn’t make sense to do that or it can come across as doing it for self-gain.”
Similarly Cottrell believes when a brand’s ego is at the heart of what they’re posting, they end up not “listening properly to the cultural cues”. “It’s like when you see a brand taking a meme and clunkily changing the punchline into a product name. You’ve got to take your cues from the audience, and you can’t just appropriate a meme, it’ll just get thrown out,” she says.
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For McDonald-Ball he believes it’s about brands understanding where they can truly fit in. “Some brands can hijack culture, some brands need to spark conversations and lead it. Some brands also need to curate content to attract their community, while others need to connect to their audiences by prompting them to join conversations,” he explains. “Social isn’t there to just go viral and create funny content, it’s a channel within the brand’s marketing mix, that is there to support the brand in supporting its products and services. Social still has that role to do.”
REACT FAST
If you want to be part of cultural commentary around topical events, then reaction times have to be swift, otherwise the moment passes and your brand will seem irrelevant. Karten references suitcase company Away as an example of how to do it right, with its recent riff on the very popular Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein campaign that came out in early January. On its channels, the brand shared a black and white photo of one of their suitcases in a pair of Calvin Klein pants on a rooftop in New York, emulating the Allen White shoot.
“It was a funny way to tap into what everyone was talking about,” says Karten. “A post about how durable Away’s suitcases are might not have performed as well at that time because everyone was talking about this shoot, so they pivoted their posts quickly and riffed on that moment.”
Karten also cites high end fashion retailer Ssense as playing into these pop culture moments at just the right time, mentioning its take on Spotify Wrapped by matching listeners with a Sound Town based on their listening and artist affinity. “Everyone had these cities like Burlington matched to their music taste and Ssense put together outfits based on the specific cities that were trending,” she explains. “A lot of brands were jumping on the Spotify Wrapped template but this was a smarter way to approach it as it was ownable to them as a brand.”
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DON’T FORGET THE BIGGER PICTURE
While this approach is great for brand building and community, this kind of marketing often doesn’t include a call-to-action or clear redirection to a brand’s website or products. Instead the focus is on getting people to think of them more organically.
“Brands need to continue to consider the customer journey: consumers aren’t likely to purchase from a brand due to a funny post around culture,” says McDonald-Ball. “However, this content allows the brand to reach new audiences and keep front of mind. We still need to take the customers on a journey to purchase, and this is where the social voice helps brands work harder, cutting through the sea of ads and the saturated space social now is.”
So can you build a brand just by using memes and topical marketing? “Right now, you need to have it as a blend,” says Cottrell. “For established brands it can be very hard to turn direction and move away from the kind of format that they know and the advertising rhythm they have. If you move away from it too much, and you’re also desperately ‘meme-y’, then there’s a chance that you lose the brand, and the base that you’ve built up.”
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Though Cottrell is clear to point out that brands shouldn’t worry about this approach alienating their audience. “If you’re going to do something that’s so radically offensive to your core audience, then it’s probably not the right thing for your brand anyway,” she reflects. “But if you’re saying, ‘I want to put some jokes on TikTok, but the older generation might not get it’ then I wouldn’t worry about it because they’re probably not going to be there.”
But you can’t just rely on what’s trending to see you through, as when people reach the tipping point of wanting to see what you’re all about as a brand and there’s nothing concrete there, that can be a problem, says Karten. “Some brands on TikTok, for instance, have built huge awareness of their brand using trending sounds and concepts, trying to hack the system. But on a deeper level, how strong is your product? How interesting are you beyond participating in every trend? It can’t be your only long-term strategy.”
