Social Glue: How to Make Your Brand Talkworthy
August 17, 2012Tags: Brad Fay, Ed Keller, Flat12 Bierwerks, Keller Fay Group, Marketplace presence, The Face to Face Book, WOM
By Ed Keller
First posted on Forbes.com
August 17, 2012
What company doesn’t want its brands to be talked about?
Every business person – from entrepreneur to CMO of a Fortune 500 company – is now coming to realize that social chatter is critical to a brand’s marketplace performance. Ask your customers how they came to choose your brand and I am confident that the majority will say it was the advice of a friend or family member. But how do you go about making your brand talkworthy? That’s harder to determine. And many marketers wonder whether they can create buzz even if they are a small business, or their product/service lacks sexiness, or their budget is limited. The answer is yes.
In The Face-to-Face Book, my coauthor Brad Fay and I profile Steve Hershberger, a social marketing consultant who became a partner in a craft beer start up in Indianapolis. The craft beer is called Flat12 Bierwerks, whose name is a nod to the city’s racing history and the Flathead 12-cylinder engine. Hershberger’s story helps illustrate the pathway that a small business can take to help create a brand that people will want to talk about and will help drive marketplace success.
Hershberger understands the golden rule of word of mouth success – before you talk, listen. Understand what people are talking about before you decide to join the conversation yourself. So his work on Flat12 Bierwerks started by observing people in bars. “I watched who came and went and I watched who attracted others like bees in flowers,” he told us. “And then in some cases I would just make composite sketches of who I thought these people were, in some cases I’d strike up a conversation and I’d talk to them about themselves.”
One scene in particular stuck with Hershberger. While on one of his tavern trips, he watched a customer at a tavern order a Killian’s. Someone at the table intervened and insisted that he try out a new beer from craft brewer New Belgium, a recommendation based on another beer he knew his friend likes. Then a broader conversation about beer ensued. “This guy gave him a 30-second lesson on craft beer, just simple stuff and really well-thought out. I’m just sitting there watching, going okay, that’s it. This guy was unremarkable. If you put him in a mall with 20 other people you’d never pick him out. Probably 33 years old, likely had a kid, probably played ultimate Frisbee or golf, somebody you’d want to hang out with.”
Suddenly, Hershberger understood not only his target consumers but also the role good beer played in their lives. They were people who certainly liked their craft beer, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all of their existence. Good beer was table stakes. It was an important part of the story but not the entire proposition, “something that is very important to the customer that I wanted but it didn’t define who they were and that was an important distinction for us.”
Today, Hershberger touts Flat12 as one of the Midwest’s fastest growing beer brands. With a tiny marketing budget, Flat12 has achieved early success with very little help from traditional marketing. Instead, it has ridden a wave of word of mouth that comes through associations with themes and events that are important to its consumers, including music and arts festivals and triathlons and by tying up with a food truck that makes grilled pizza.
Hershberger and his partners also rely on encouraging the brand’s fans to talk up not just Flat12 but the craft-beer experience more generally. More than a beer, Flat12 is a community that delivers the good life to its members. When its fans advocate the brand to friends, they are not saying “drink this,” so much as they are saying “join our community that values what’s good.”
Hershberger’s central insight, the idea that craft beer is “social glue,” is a very important notion if you’re interested in how brands can harness the power of word of mouth and it goes well beyond the fermenting of malted barley and wheat. It’s an understanding that, contrary to many assumptions we all make about how people view marketing, that social experiences aren’t interrupted by brands or products but rather improved by them. As such, marketers can take advantage of the inherently social qualities of life without fear that consumers will balk, provided they tread carefully.
Brands aren’t born social. They don’t get talkworthy on their own or because an agency signs them up for Facebook and Twitter accounts. Word of mouth success takes planning and execution to insure that you product is worth talking about, to make a humble can of soda or a hot new cell phone into products that become that social glue between people.
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