Brand Interaction Driving Marketing

In the age of social media, it has become very clear the necessity for customer service on all the various outlets. Much of your modern customer base prefers to send things like Facebook messages or Tweets to a business when they have an issue with a product or service rather than an email or (a millennial’s worst fear) a phone call. This fact has caused some larger brands to have a great deal of mishaps involving this social interaction due to a lack of proper management. One of our favorites was when Dominos Pizza installed autoresponder apology app on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. They were receiving a majority of complaints on social media about their pizza and thought that this would be the most effective way to resolve the situation while saving on man hours. However, when the app responded to a compliment with an apology, it went viral and became a PR nightmare.

While the negative side of improper brand interacting is obvious, positive brand interaction not only drive market awareness, but sales as well. Two great examples of this are Taco Bell and, because it is almost Christmas time, Elf On A Shelf.

Taco Bell often receives a lot of flak, wherein its food suffers the brunt of the criticism. Yet, the average yearly earnings for a single Taco Bell store is well over 1 million US dollars according to Bloomberg. Herein is the secret to Taco Bell’s brand interaction: they love to actively interact with their fans.

There is a very high likelihood that if you happen to tweet to Taco Bell positively, mention you are in a Taco Bell, use their hashtag, or even mention Tacos, they will tweet to you. These brand interactions with their fan base have gone viral many times, providing free market awareness. Even beyond that, those that they interact with become an amazing source of word-of-mouth influencers that further drive sales and marketing. There is a certain level of excitement when a large brand interacts with you on a personal level. This helps convert that person to the brand and become a true fan.

While Taco Bell demonstrates an amazing active brand interaction, Elf On A Shelf has created an empire through accidental, passive brand interaction. For those not aware of this product, it is one of Santa’s elves that a parent buys and over the month of December, reposition and move around the home. It is meant to convey the magic of Christmas (as well as make children behave because the elf may be a spy), but has accidentally spawned a viral marketing campaign for itself, one that brought in over 15 million dollars in sales in 2011 alone.

The viral nature of the marketing arouse from people placing this unassuming elf in compromising or funny poses. Sometimes the elf would be aided by other popular action figure types, always for the sake of comedy. As this trend grew, so did sales. The sales grew from both brand awareness driven by viral photos, as well as people purchasing the elf in order to make their own viral funny photos. Additionally, thousands of memes have spawned about this strange little elf, again, circulating awareness and providing free marketing. It was smart on the part of this team to allow the initial waves of funny photos to be passed around on their social media, as it goes against the intent of the product. However, by allowing their consumers to have fun with their brand, they have succeeded in growing the company.

Branding is vital; it is not just who you are but what you do. Whether it is through active or passive brand interaction, there needs to be consistency and direction in the actions that your company takes.