Why social brands are winning in the overtraded attention economy
People are swimming in content. The question is, if your brand stopped marketing, would people miss you?
We trade our attention for value. If you’re offering meaningless fodder that any brand could produce, and that doesn’t spark conversation, you won’t be seen and remembered. Whether you have paid to be in front of people or not.
by Dave Duarte and Bridget McNulty
People are swimming in content. The question is: if your brand stopped marketing, would people miss you?
We trade our attention for value. If you’re offering meaningless fodder that any brand could produce, and that doesn’t spark conversation, you won’t be seen and remembered. Whether you pay to be in front of people or not.
Attention is now more valuable than ever before. With so much competition for it, it’s also becoming more difficult to acquire. Brands today compete on emotional value with the kind of content people love on social media - music, memes, news, celebrity. Some marketers are opting out of organic social media, opting to do only paid social. But this isn’t ultimately a sustainable approach. You need to combine Paid, Owned , and Earned Media. But that is just the start.
Successful Social Brands are going beyond getting attention. They’re aiming for a transformative impact on people’s lives that makes their content unmissable.
Many of these brands are built on a strong social vision that keeps their audience coming back for more. For example, outdoor brand Patagonia is on “a mission to save our home planet”. Their digital campaigns don’t centre around product, but rather around the issues that unite their most loyal customers. Their latest campaign, for example, is around saving Wild Salmon, and is racking up millions of views while continuing to drive sales.
At heart, people are meaning makers. We have a deep sense of needing to make meaning in our lives. But the world we’re living in is so fragmented and busy that it can be difficult to find that meaning.
One of the consequences of having so much choice available to us, ironically, is that choosing becomes more difficult. Strong brands reduce the cognitive strain of choosing by helping us form preferences. Once we know and like a brand, it’s easy to spot them in a cluttered context. And as long as the brand delivers the expected emotional rewards, we’ll keep coming back.
What’s essential to understand is that people want to be loyal. Brand managers make it easier for people to be loyal by producing themed content, in an immediately recognisable way, that delivers on the brand vision.
For example, Nike has established a strong social justice voice around their sponsored athletes.
Nike sided with football player Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the US national anthem to protest systemic racism in the NFL and was suspended for it. The payoff was simple: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything”. Two weeks after the campaign debuted, the company's online sales had risen a whopping 31% and its stock had climbed more than 6% to an all-time high.
Having established the pattern, when the IAAF announced that Caster Semenya wouldn’t be allowed to compete, people expected Nike to respond with an ad. And they delivered on time, and in a way that only Nike could. Their voice is well established, and they show up consistently while still managing to be surprising and original.
This approach would not have worked for another brand. It was a reflection of the ethos Nike has represented for decades.
Social brands deepen their loyalty and connection by letting people own the message. They use campaigns not just to push messages, but to ignite conversations. AirBnB is excellent at this. When they were blocked from sponsoring the Oscars, they decided to run a campaign based around the question: “What movie would you live in?” They seeded the question to key movie industry influencers, and fuelled the conversation with witty responses and paid promotion on Twitter. And of course, sourced places from movies around the world that you could actually book on AirBnB. The result was that they were the most talked about brand at the Oscars.
There is an idea in economics that we need to move up the value chain from selling commodities to offering experiences and driving transformations. Yoco is a South African tech company that epitomises this approach in marketing. If the commodity in marketing is attention, they are using the attention they get to drive transformation for their fans. Their campaigns are driven around the ideal of encouraging entrepreneurship.
Their latest campaign #JustStart goes beyond flogging product. At the top of the funnel is an inspiring video featuring three entrepreneurs who have used the Yoco payment platform to start and grow their businesses. But the campaign goes further than that, offering free resources and training to aspiring entrepreneurs to take that first step.
Brands that provide a big, clear purpose that people can understand and make their own are winning. Brands like Patagonia, Yoco, Nike, and AirBnB are investing their marketing money in creating not just adverts but movements. They aren’t just telling stories, they’re co-creating impact with their consumers. Yoco is igniting Africa’s entrepreneurial uprising. Nike is making everyone an athlete. AirBnB is making everyone feel welcome. They aren’t just producing random content: every post, app, conference takes us towards their bigger social vision.
Your brand can set itself apart by making a simple promise: when you invest your attention with us, your life gets better, the world gets better. We won’t waste your attention, we know how valuable it is.
Need help figuring out how to move your brand beyond the attention economy? We can help you do just that.
Diversity is Smarter. Stop Agreeing to be on All-Male Panels
Gender Diverse Teams Have a Healthier Culture and Better Results. Yet technology's brogrammer culture can be alienating for women. Aléz Odendaal explores the issues and suggests some tangible steps we can all take towards developing a more gender diverse technology ecosystem.
By Alez Odendaal
Technology companies have a gender diversity problem. Just look at the average technology meet-up or conference in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Lusaka, Nairobi, Port Louis, or Harare. Who are the speakers? How many of the delegates are women?
Less than 30% is the likely answer. And it's not just an African thing.
In 2014, a call for transparency in the tech industry led to the release of diversity reports from most of the major tech companies.
Tech gender diversity visualized in the que for the restroom at WWDC. pic.twitter.com/zfEgtXY5Zw
— Ben Bajarin (@BenBajarin) June 8, 2015
The results, which were shocking then, are not much improved now, with Apple at 31% female, Google also at 31%, and Intel at just 23.8%. Ouch.
Much the same can be said of smaller businesses. So many startups seem to be made up of Mark Zuckerberg lookalikes (white, male, hacker swoop haircuts), sexually-charged roguish power elements that have co-opted counter culture’s antagonism for big business, but have actually kept up the status quo. Forgoing things like a human resources department may mean startups become less diverse, less friendly places.
This means that whether you’re in a small company or a Fortune 500, if you’re in the tech industry, it’s likely that your offices aren’t populated by many women. The reasons for these can seem complex, as do would-be solutions. But they need not be. Take a look.
Why diversity is good
It’s at this point that you might be getting defensive, but before you sit on that too long, consider this advice from someone you may already admire; ‘Oversight is not an idea that can be dismissed out of hand’, said Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War (2016), and it’s true. We can’t always see where our actions are leading our greater intentions astray, but when they are questioned we should try to understand that correcting slights from a humble position will always be more noble than never addressing them. And in the case of gender diversity, correcting past mistakes might mean greater profits, as this study, and these companies have found.
The mere presence of diversity in a group creates awkwardness, and the need to diffuse this tension leads to better group problem solving. While homogenous groups feel more confident in their performance and group interactions, it is the diverse groups that are more successful in completing their tasks. - Katherine Phillips, Associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management.
The Pipeline
A common defence laid by companies called to account for their lack of diversity is ‘the pipeline’; a term used to say that a business’s diversity at the level of hiring can only be as fruitful as its pool of applications. In short, these companies can only hire as many minorities as those who applied. Fair enough.
However, this seems to assume a linear history of diversity, with tech being just another field where women have remained marginalised since the fight to enter the workforce alongside men. But something seems to have triggered this bad pipeline entry in recent years, as the number of women studying towards a computer science degree has significantly decreased since the 80s. Appealing to evidence of a small pool of applicants does little to solve this, and does even less to address a company’s role in making the tech space one that is undesirable to women.
And undesirable it truly seems to be. Over half of the US women in science, tech, engineering, and math (STEM) industries leave, not because they can’t or don’t enjoy their work, but rather because of gender prejudice. This is a serious problem. Something that makes women leave their jobs, often without a desire to work in tech again.
The real problems
The reasons keeping women from succeeding in the digital era are systematic, but may be carried out by individuals just like you. They also find women as soon as they enter the industry – or don’t.
When hiring, it’s possible that those eager to assimilate to the aforementioned cookie-cutter Silicon Valley mould that is so appealing in its connotations with runaway success, might only hire those that fit the much-celebrated profile. And with major companies emphasising a referral-based hiring process, I suspect the boy’s club is in no danger without big adjustments
The pay gap is another worry (although it’s diminished in recent years), and women are also less likely to put their names forward for promotion. When these incentives aren’t there, it’s unlikely that tech’s ‘brogrammer’ culture will keep women around.
The sexism that exists in the ‘thousand tiny papercuts’ that are experienced by women every day in the workplace are deeply-felt and weary things, even if men aren’t always able to see them as such.
Sexism isn’t always as overt as the sexual harassment experienced by women in the workplace in the 80s. Sometimes it’s the crude joke you made to the other men in the office, while you all side-eyed your female co-worker for signs of discouragement.
Sometimes it’s calling a woman ‘one of the guys’ because of her efforts to stay included even at the cost of self-defeatist harm.
Then again, sometimes it’s as simple as saying a colleague does X ‘like a woman’. Replace the word ‘woman’ with a racial slur and you might be less inclined to voice your critique so openly or at all.
Without female colleagues to turn to, these factors exacerbate and contribute to an isolating experience that makes women turn away from jobs they enjoy.
How to get it
- Stop agreeing to be on all-male panels - just stop.
- Bolster your interviewing process by implementing measures that work against unconscious bias.
- If you find that there are not enough women applying for a particular position, ask yourself where you may be favouring men in terms of where your position is advertised and shared. Expand your network, surprise yourself, try again.
- You could also try hiring women qualified in less traditionally-suitable degrees, like ThoughtWorks.
- Offer flexible work hours and paid family leave in order to alleviate the pressure some women feel as primary caregivers, like Facebook has done.
- Instil a spirit of mentorship over that of competition, offering a space where women are free to make mistakes without fear of co-workers thinking less of her, and less of women more generally. A very frequent issue.
- Train your managerial staff to understand the need for retention, and work to come up with positive strategies for this goal.
- Bring awareness to your employees on the nature of micro-aggressions like those mentioned above, and make it easy for women to come forward with evidence of sexism.
- Fund local projects that aim to help women and people of colour in your field, ensuring that ‘pipeline’ expands.
It Takes a Village to Raise an Idea
In this piece, Dave Duarte looks at how individuals become more capable as part of a collective. And how to balance the paradox where groups are better because of excellent individuals, and excellent individuals are made better through an better group.
by Dave Duarte
The incredibly fast spread of Pokemon Go shows how quickly technologies can spread today, and how rapidly they can change behaviour. This makes it increasingly difficult to imagine what the world will be like in 5 years time.
I went to a talk by Capitec founder Jannie Mouton a few weeks ago, where he pointed out that trying to predict what markets will do in the short term is a suckers game. The only way to win is to focus on value and develop a CAPABILITY to understand and adapt to change.
So what one thing can you do to increase your digital capability?
It takes a generation to make a significant difference to the world
Many technological breakthroughs come out of communities of exploration - at universities that bring brilliant people together; cities like San Franscisco; and Cape Town with a vibrant tech culture, or from people who fall into a sub-culture that values innovation (like Silicon Cape or #tabletoptuesday). And inventors build on a set of existing technologies and norms. Change happens at the pace of cultural readiness for it.
The 2500 year old Antikythera mechanism
This is why the 2500 year old computer didn’t take off at the time. There wasn’t an ecosystem for it - an active community of distributors, inventors, hackers, users, supply chains. Change happens at the pace of cultural readiness. Cultural readiness is about the tools we use, the skills we have.
One of the great enablers of our technological breakthroughs is our educational system’s focus on science, technology, engineering, and maths. We are where we are because of the design of a mega system of human organisation that brings people together to learn. It's got us to where we are, but what will get us to where we need to be next?
Genius is a cultural value as much as an individual attribute. If you’re extraordinary at something it’s partly because you were born with some complimentary strengths, but largely because you gained access to resources and support along the way, and were lucky enough that your strengths were valued in the time and place you lived. It is so much easier to be a genius in a smart city than a poor village.
You think you’re looking for an opportunity, but that opportunity usually comes in the form of a person.
If you need to move fast on a concept, as you usually do in tech, it is extremely beneficial to have a network to draw on that will help you bring your idea to life. And when you have the idea, it’s probably too late to go looking for that person or plug into that network. It's said that luck is when opportunity meets preparedness. But when opportunity comes, it's usually too late to prepare.
We think it’s about lone inventors, when it’s actually about communities that enable those inventors. It takes a village to raise an idea. Individual brilliance is essential, but let’s not forget that those individuals are enabled by context.
The difference between thinking about a cool invention, and actually inventing it is a matter of convenience. You're more likely to build out your idea if you know people who can help you with advice, skills, funding, and access.
Being part of a scene of people who are into something enables this convenience. For example, I’m not likely to come up with a cutting edge way to grow crops today if I'm not part of a community that's into things like farming or agritech or biohacking or internet-of-things. I might want a better crop, but I’m not aware of the issues at play, I don’t know the people who could help me develop the solution, I don’t know the people who have the problem I’m trying to solve, don’t have a direct connection to my users.
Whether in business or politics or science or art, look at the achievers. They didn’t do it alone. They had help. They were part of a scene. They were connected to people who were striving for the same, and they lived in a place and time that inspired their performance.
If you want to make a difference, if you want to do something great, stop trying to do it alone.
Trust moves through networks of connected people. Money moves through networks of connected people. Ideas move through networks of connected people. Get connected. Plug into a scene that inspires you, that makes you better. That inspires your best performance.
And if you see someone else in your community breaking through with their ideas and work: celebrate! Know that by being part of that community, you have contributed to their success. If you happen to be that person that breaks through - don’t let it get to your head. You didn’t do it alone. Give back to your scene through mentoring, coaching, investment or contributing your skills.
As a generation, we can be petty about protecting our ideas or we can work together to get behind the people who are making it. We can do what we can to put the world on track to sustainability, harmony with nature, technological brilliance, the eradication of poverty, and the other goals very well worth striving for. Who the hell cares who gets the credit. Let’s get this done, together.
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Take-Out: If there's one thing you can do to increase your capability, it's to join and participate in a digitally oriented community. Go to Silicon Cape Meetups, attend the Kat-O meetups, or apply to join the Treeshake Expert Network.
Dave Duarte, founder of Treeshake, is passionate about community engagement as a driver of value. As social marketer, speaker, facilitator and advisor, his warm and engaging style makes the future easy to engage with. Dave brings over a decade of facilitation experience to his work at Treeshake. He has founded several businesses, and served in leadership positions in media, academia, and non-profits.