Author: Maarten Albarda

Senior Lead @ Flock Associates Limited

How can companies achieve staying consistent with the brand – and still be a part of all the conversations that are relevant to consumers?

Posted on by Maarten Albarda

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The more relevant question is – should you be part of that conversation or not? What we’ve seen during COVID is that in the beginning, every brand was saying the same thing: we understand these are difficult times, but here’s how are cookies, cars, or hand lotion is the best solution under these current difficult circumstances. It just doesn’t make sense – consumers are very smart and educated, and they’ll pull through that very quickly. In fact, I believe it can become counterproductive because you can get the ridicule of consumers, and you become a hashtag or something like that.

What we’ve learned from the research is that if you can find that natural, logical place that makes sense at that moment and the consumer can relate to who you are in that moment – then it makes perfect sense to do that.

It can enrich and enhance communication because it can actually make you more relevant and make you stand out from the competition. But if the opposite is true, when it sort of feels dragged into it, not relevant and kind of virtue signaling, consumers are not going to buy into that. They know when they’re being taken for granted or taken in a direction that doesn’t make sense. The best-case scenario is that they’ll make fun of you for 15 seconds on Twitter, or, in the worst-case scenario, you will have to pull ads and do all sorts of other things. Be very careful and find the natural interaction with it.

How does social media influence brand perception compared to TV ads or other marketing channels?

Posted on by Maarten Albarda

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We are only beginning to learn because Facebook is maybe 15 years old, relatively young, and it’s certainly evolving a lot as well – and we are learning how these interactions work. We can see how social media influences how people perceive, engage and interact with a brand. For me, it’s the first time that it is really coming together in a different way than in the past when social media marketing was more action-oriented. This is more brand-building oriented, and I think that we are at the very beginning of understanding it. The key now is how do you combine the stream of paid advertising content and user-generated content – importantly, how do you strike the right tone that all can become one.

Research that you are doing here is, for the first time, allowing us to understand how consumers interact and respond to the content.

For the first time, we are beginning to understand not only how it drives clicks and engagement but also brand awareness, brand understanding, and other things typical for TV advertising that now you can expect from this medium as well.

How should companies use behavioral research on social media to make data-driven decisions?

Posted on by Maarten Albarda

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The question often is now what? That’s the kind of a question you need to ask yourself as a marketer with any kind of insight or research: what can I do with this? It’s something that I almost find difficult more than the research itself – how do I find the way to use this usefully? Ultimately, what you should do as a company is to say what does this tell me about my core objectives and business goals.

For me, marketing is a subset of business, communication, and media goals, etc. If you want to find out how does this help, go back to big questions and big issues you were trying to address as a marketer and what does this tell me:

either to confirm that those were the right issues or to contradict,

give me a new insight in terms of how I relate to the target audience, how they think and feel about my brand, etc. Relate back what you learned to what you are trying to do in your marketing efforts.