It’s time to influence the influencers
Says GHMC’s Julian Routledge*. In a world of increased personal interaction and involvement, there’s a complex network of conversation taking place around brands and the influence on purchasing decisions which brands need to understand if they are to gain a foothold in the modern marketplace.
For modern marketers to raise their game, and ultimately their sales, they need to tap into these conversations and target a different kind of customer – one who takes pride in influencing the purchase decisions of family, friends and colleagues, and in the case of bloggers, their wider social network. If brand owners can identify those respected and persuasive individuals, talk to them in the right way and recruit them as ambassadors, then they represent a whole new kind of customer value.
The process of reaching consumers, profiling them and tracking their behaviour has become far easier thanks to the whole spectrum of social networking media. The challenge today is not whom to communicate with, but to find out which messages to use to convert customers into active brand evangelists.
We know that consumers are increasingly either ignoring or rejecting traditional corporate marketing, preferring to do their own research and placing ever greater store in user-generated recommendations from trusted stakeholders.
Who these key stakeholders – or influencers – are changes from sector to sector, from channel to channel. And they’re not always the obvious choices. Marketers need to audit the marketplace using a variety of techniques, from good old-fashioned gut-level insight and research-based investigative marketing to specific online profiling and tracking tools. The solid principles of accurate targeting, intelligent selection criteria and diligent results evaluation that have always underpinned good DM remain as valid today as they ever were.
Of course, the proof of any pudding is in its eating.
For Nutricia, we set out to reach the hearts and minds of mums-to-be without compromising the accepted and agreed truth that ‘breast is best’, while still communicating the key message that if it has to be formula milk, then it has to be Cow&Gate formula milk.
We identified that the stakeholder who exerts the major influence over mums-to-be is neither the GP, nor fellow mums of a similar age, but the midwife, who combines the crucial blend of impartiality, depth of knowledge, experience and objectivity that mums trust wholeheartedly.
However, because midwives cannot receive any kind of direct brand advertising material, we had to ensure that all content was non-brand-related and unbiased, focusing on best-practice articles, issues of clinical importance and continuous professional development topics.
In a completely different arena, for Srixon golf balls we initiated a by-invitation-only scheme designed to identify the top-level amateur players from around the nation’s golf clubs and recruit them as influencers for the brand. ‘Srixon Ambassadors’ invites single-number handicappers to play and review a box of a dozen top-of-the-range Srixon balls and give their feedback.
If they love the superior feel and performance of Srixon balls, the player is invited to join ‘Ambassadors’ and spread the news by, in turn, handing out sample packs to fellow low-handicap golfing peers. And so, within golf clubs, we establish a network of influential, respected players all of whom play, recommend and effectively endorse Srixon balls.
Our profiling activity has revealed subsequently that the recommendation process is now occurring at inter-club competition level. So ‘Ambassadors’ has now extended its operation, with club captains being offered two boxes of balls prior to major games – one dozen for the home team, and a second dozen to be offered as a courtesy box to the captain and players of the opposing guest team.
The reality is that the marketers who genuinely know how to ‘influence the influencers’ and are incorporating this into the marketing mix are the ones seeing major benefits in the sales of their products.
*Julian Routledge is creative director at GHMC
