How to Create Customer Experience Using Social Media

How do companies use Web 2.0 to create a relevant and engaging customer experience to market their products? With blogs, wikis, Youtube, facebook applications, myspace, twitter, podcasts, etc, the Web 2.0 social media options seem to be endless. I’m interested in examining how different businesses can use these tools to not only create an experience that will successfully link to their product, but also how these marketing campaigns can find out more information about their customers and what segment they should be targeting.

In my previous blog, I mentioned the Mountain Dew Dewmocracy marketing campaign that spurred fans to vote for their favorite flavor of Mountain Dew drink. After the voting ended and the raspberry-flavored Voltage was chosen to be part of the Mountain Dew line, Pepsi started a new marketing campaign in which consumers could create their own commercial to advertise the new Mountain Dew Voltage. I believe that it was a contest to see who could make the best one and it would be launched as a real TV commercial. However, most of the videos were posted on the website during the time span of the campaign. When I checked back now, they are using online games to attract users to win Voltage gear. With the easy and convenient sharing of media via Youtube, and the overall faster speeds of the Internet, companies can leverage the user-generated content of videos to promote their products. However, a 50-year old retired senior won’t usually be posting Mountain Dew videos, so Pepsi has segmented their population quite well to the generation of teenagers and young adults who use this form of media to communicate. If you don’t believe me about the video communication, just check out the video option on Facebook wall. If you think no one uses it, think again. A few of my friends in California had a music video wall posting war, where every other day a new video was posted on someone’s wall. The guys would post a Kelly Clarkson video one day, and the girls would respond with the Backstreet Boys the next day. This only proves social media is a huge hit and communication tool among my generation, if only companies can use it correctly.

Social media is still a new horizon for some companies though, and something like viral videos is a hit or miss. In the case of Burger King, you may create a huge make the chicken dance viral website, but it has nothing to do with your brand. In traditional media terms, it would be one of those commercials that you talk about to your friends and then can’t remember what it was advertising. Great entertainment value and possibly experience for the customer, but horrible brand advertising.

Specifically in my paper, I want to analyze a few companies and how their social media campaigns were successful or not in creating a customer experience. I’m not sure if I should focus on a specific social media though or a specific company or pick a few. How much information should I need for a 10 page paper? I found an interesting article on how Cheeto’s has a Random Acts of Cheetos where consumers can upload their own RAOC videos on their www.orangeunderground.com website. Click here for the article.

It is similar to Mountain Dew’s second campaign. The video marketing campaigns may be easy to find, but less diverse in terms of the targeted segment. Although I haven’t done enough research, I might want to look into Facebook Applications and what companies have created popular ones and what experience made it so popular for consumers to download. As you can see, I’m still processing my thoughts. Do you have any suggestions or ways to narrow my focus?

True Beauty, The Real Experience?

I found our true beauty day to be a great way to learn and understand what consumer experience really means. The experience that we gain from a product is not necessarily how it was displayed or what immediate benefits it gives us, but the deeper benefits (such as inner beauty and self-confidence) that a simple product such as deodorant could instill within us. It reminds me a bit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which we’ve obtained the basic needs and now are at the higher stages of self-esteem and self-actualization.

For Dove products, the marketing scheme is aimed at young to middle-aged women who probably want to be assured that they are beautiful, and will rally behind a brand who knows that true beauty doesn’t mean being a 6-foot skinny blonde model. I believe many of the marketing decisions have to do with what customer experience this segment needs.

With Axe products and the high school male population whom they segment to, the customer experience that Axe is trying to achieve is love, sex, acceptance, and hot factor confidence. The experience of being the hot guy that all the girls chase is the experience. Perhaps it does conflict with the Dove true beauty campaign, but we ignore the fact that these campaigns were made on 2 separate segments that need to hear 2 opposing ideas. This isn’t Unilever’s fault. From a marketing perspective, I think they both have done a good job. As a woman, I still side with Dove and think Axe has racy commercials. I also would never need to buy Axe.

This past summer, I really admired Pepsi’s Mountain Dew marketing campaign. I thought it was one of the smartest ones yet. Mountain Dew came out with 3 new flavors: Revolution, Supernova, and Voltage in the Dewmocracy campaign. Mountain Dew drinkers were to vote online for their favorite drink flavor, and that one would be kept permanently, while the other ones would only be a part of Mountain Dew’s history. However, I noticed that the flavors were only sold in 12 packs of cans, at least in the Austin area. As an avid Mountain Dew fan, I went through two 12-packs of Mountain Dew to compare flavors, even though I never buy cans of soda, but try to limit drinking soda to when I go out to eat. I found myself sharing my discovery of the new Mountain Dew’s and bringing a few cans of the soda to share with my other Mountain Dew-drinking coworkers. I also presumed to go on their website and check out what other fans were saying. I found the Mountain Dew campaign was not just a way to get the best flavor of Mountain Dew to be chosen, but also a way to create the user experience of community, sense of democracy and choice, and personal freedom and control. All of that could be found in a simple soft drink.

The other marketing experience that I notice a lot is chick flick movies. As I watched “He’s Just Not That Into You” with a bunch of my girl friends, I realized how much we related to the movie as we talked about it once the credits started rolling. The theater experience and hearing when everyone laughs, or especially when you hear only a few men chuckle, gives the whole movie a new sense of meaning. If I had waited to rent it and watched it by myself, the movie would barely be half as good. When you experience it together with a bunch of other women and be like “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe we do that,” the feeling of understanding and relating to another woman is priceless. You feel their pains, their laughs, and every other rollercoaster ride emotion in between. We certainly do pay for the experience, and not just the 2 hours of entertainment.

the Secret to Happiness is Low Expectations

I must say that I absolutely loved this podcast! I was watching it in the MIL Lab and caught myself laughing out loud a few times at the various cartoons and the honesty and reality of what Schwarz was saying. I believe the paradox of choice and its 4 negative effects that he highlights, strongly relate to our purchasing behavior.

Analysis Paralysis. When there are way too many choices, we get paralyzed by analyzing all our options and find it impossible to make a decision. Sometimes the easiest choice is to not make a decision at all! Like cell phones. I still haven’t picked up a new one (after 2 years of my old LG that won’t die), because there are way too many phones and options, and not to mention carriers and contracts. I also find that once I do make a decision, I’m not only wondering about what could have been, but I’m also frustrated at how much time it took me to make that decision. This past Christmas, I exchanged some PJ pants from Kohl’s that I had gotten as a gift. I spent a good 45 minutes in the store trying to find something else that I wanted for the exchange. I finally decided on a shirt, but wasn’t completely satisfied. I ended up returning to Kohl’s the next week to go to more of the departments (mainly the picture frames) and returned my already exchanged item for a frame and another shirt. The fact that I remember this in detail, tells you how frustrated and annoyed I am by the whole ordeal. Just give me cash next year….or a gift card to a smaller boutique. From a business perspective, I think that there is a nice niche for boutiques (instead of large department stores like Kohl’s) because you only have so many options when you are in a boutique, and it makes for an easier decision if you don’t compare to all the other stores.

Opportunity Costs = Less Satisfaction. Like I mentioned before, once you make the decision, you keep dwelling on what might have been. It makes you doubt whether or not that was the best option. It reminds me of a story that one of my past professors told about how he offered his young son a lollipop one day and the kid was so excited. The next day, he offered his son a choice between 2 lollipops, and the kid chose one of them, but was noticeably not as happy as he was the day previously. It’s ironic to us, because we are so used to thinking that more choices are a good thing, but in fact, it makes us less happy with our decisions.

Escalation of Expectation. I loved how he said that the secret to happiness is keeping low expectations. I find it very true! Whenever I go watch a movie, I prefer to go on the first day with one of the reasons being that you can make your own judgments, and not have to listen to all the hype from friends or critics. I find that the movies where I go in with high expectation, I usually find to be quite disappointing whereas movies like Iron Man (that I had no expectations for), I found to be refreshingly awesome. I realized that a lot of my friends were disappointed by the Dark Knight which I found amazing (after I watched it the opening night), but they were all the ones who saw it our rave reviews. I’m starting to think that I should stop saying great things about movies, as well as set low expectations for movies that I watch. I want to be “pleasantly surprised” as Schwarz would say; something which has disappeared after all of our many choices, and thus higher expectation for the perfect product.

Self-Blame. We have to blame ourselves if we are unhappy with our decisions especially since there are so many choices. I believe this self-blame will lead us to avoid decision making, because we don’t want to hold the responsibility. It makes me think that it puts a lot of pressure on the household, and that each spouse must really support the other, in all the decisions that have to be made (ex: food, laundry detergent, vacation, schools for children, etc). All in all, more choices is not better, and huge makeup stores like Sephora are great in number of choices, but overwhelming to the point where I’d rather not make a decision, or I face the risk of being stuck unsatisfied and wondering if I could have made a better choice.