Caring Companies

The other day I received an email from coglode.com updating me on a new cognitive bias that had been added to their ever-growing registrar: the Noble Edge Effect. In short, it describes the tendency to perceive socially conscientious companies as superior to those that are not.

How fitting then, for the recently slaughtered Fresh in Our Memories ANZAC campaign from Woolworths to come along and demonstrate that manufacturing social conscientiousness can do the exact opposite, while crashing and burning spectacularly.

Digital brands have a jumped onto a trend of interjecting themselves into any facet of a consumer’s life they can squeeze into. From appropriating hashtags to prostituting their services for likes, shares, and other intrinsically worthless Internet currency, some brands just love to straddle the line between social acceptability and ‘creepy uncle’.

Admittedly, I know little about social media strategy, but I do know a bit about psychology, and every time I read articles where marketing CEOs praise brand relationships and authenticity, it baffles me.

How is it that social media has come to be seen as some benevolent force paving the way for the future of advertising? To marketers, social media should only be what its name implies and nothing more: a media channel.

The best social media campaigns (excluding those that piggyback on existing social causes to foster some notion of conscientiousness) would fare just as well as print or TV campaigns. This is because they operate under the same strategy as such campaigns would.

People use social media to talk to other people, not faceless entities pushing products that they barely think about, let alone care about.

Why then, is digital strategy any different from traditional media strategy? Psychologically, it is operating in an identical environment: one where people do not seek out, dote on, or even consider advertising. Pop up ads, self-serving ‘brand stories’, and manufactured hashtags do nothing but teach consumers exactly how to avoid that class of bullshit in the future.

And that’s at the positive end. At the negative end, they enrage to the point that they spark petitions, boycotts, and other slacktivist movements that provide a feel-good reward to those participating. And why wouldn’t they? The power to contribute to the shut down of corporations and campaigns with just one click? Who wouldn’t want that kind of power, especially when it’s so damn easy.

In the wake of ‘Fresh in Our Memories’, the message to agencies couldn’t be clearer. Manufacturing conscientiousness, interjecting into social media conversations, and indeed expecting consumers to put any effort at all into engaging with your brand beyond buying their product, is a terrible strategy.

At best, it teaches potential consumers how to avoid you and places barriers between them and the products. At worst, it results in a social media backhand so swift that it reverberates all the way down the marketing corporate spine to knock some poor copywriter off his pedestal into the void of unemployment.

Advertising should stick to what it’s good at: selling a fucking product, unless you want your very own Hitler spoof.

a.ce