Create Brand Attraction

Imagine someone that you’ve known your whole life. We’ll call him Bob. He’s pretty much a loser. (Sorry, Bob). He spends an enormous amount of time on the Internet and social media. He has his own website, filled with content mostly about himself. He is on almost every possible digital platform, also posting things that are mostly about himself.

            Bob is also very insecure. In the early days of Facebook, he was practically begging people to like him. Now if people mention him in a post, he immediately thanks them. He jumps on any trending topic or event. He posts on National Doughnut Day. He knows when it’s National Umbrella Day (that’s February 10, in case you’re interested). During the Super Bowl, he tries to make funny comments about the game or the commercials, which is weird because he doesn’t normally follow sports. Occasionally, he says something offensive and then immediately falls all over himself with apologies. All in all, he’s hard to like.

            He’s also like many of the brands you know. If we’re being honest with ourselves as marketers, we’re no strangers to a tweet on National Tip Your Hat Day (January 15). We jump nervously onto every new platform (often by reposting things we’ve already posted on some other platform, even though they don’t really seem to fit). We tend to respond to everything anyone posts about us. And way too many of us have spent the Super Bowl trying to think up something funny to say--a practice that thankfully seems to be fading in popularity.

            That said, whenever we see reports that show low engagement or realize that we are not able to connect our efforts to a meaningful difference in our business, we never discuss it in normal, human terms,. Instead, we have a have a rich vocabulary that covers all kinds of possible issues. We talk about engagement, influencers, CTRs, and CPMs. We have an impossibly complex set of rules. We know that Facebook posts are more effective at forty characters than four hundred; that a blog post is most effective at 1,600 words (believe it or not, that’s actually a widely recommended best practice, even though it seems awfully long); and that people respond well to smiles and won’t wait more than a few seconds for someone to start talking in a video.

            But if a person came to you wondering why they weren’t getting much traction on social media or finding much romance on a dating site, the last thing you’d do is look at the word length of his or her posts. You wouldn’t concern yourself at all with engagement rates or the list of rules that marketers have created. Those things, we know, don’t really matter if there are deeper issues causing the problem. All that is just surface detail. People don’t fail at social media because they’re not following a set of rules, no matter what our research says. They fail because they are not interesting or likable. The same thing, of course, goes for brands. You can follow all the rules you want, but no one is going to like you if you’re not likable to begin with.

            To help Bob, you’d have to take a step back and say, “Let me read what you’re posting.” Then you’d get right to the heart of the matter. He’s a bore. He’s a phony. Worst of all, he’s insecure. You’d tell Bob that he’s is much better than this. He needs to be himself, get a point of view, and act with a lot more confidence. He needs to find his mojo and stop acting like a spineless toad. Or at least get a dog. That always helps.

The Anti-Bob

Now let’s look at a different person, one who is much more successful than Bob online and also acts quite differently from most brands. Her name is Hannah Hart, and a few years ago, she was drinking wine (a favorite pastime of hers) and playing around with a webcam in her sister’s kitchen. She was not much of a cook but had the exceedingly rare talent of being able to stay funny while completely over-served with alcohol. 

            That night, she taped an episode of a fictional show called My Drunk Kitchen. The video opened with her wearing a beanie and squinting into the camera (according to our rulebook, it took her far too long for her to say anything). “This is a bottle of wine I found in my sister’s kitchen,” she finally slurred, “and it’s free.” The rest of her presentation was kinetic and fun. She ran, danced, and joked, all the while demonstrating how to make a grilled cheese—or actually a grilled bread, since she’d forgotten to buy cheese. Finally, she wrapped up by saying, “And on a serious note, don’t beat your kids.”

            Within a few days, her video had gotten one hundred thousand views. Within months, she had quit her day job as a translator and started making YouTube videos full-time. 

            You probably think she is successful because she’s so funny, and of course that’s part of it. Then again, lots of people are funny, and many funnier than she. But if you analyze Hart carefully, you’ll notice there’s a method to her madness—and it’s very different from how brands tend to work. For example:

• She’s warm and confident, while most brands are cautious and careful.
• She doesn’t care what people think.
• She’s funny, but turns it off from time to time.
• She routinely exceeds the three-minute video length considered best practices by market research.
• Forget 40 characters on Facebook. There are shorter novels than her Facebook posts.
• She doesn’t comment on cultural or breaking news events (except for LGBT causes, for which she’s an advocate).

Another way of putting it is that Hart is acting natural. She does what she thinks works. She’s not the most hilarious person around, but she projects an attractive presence that makes people like her. While she’s far from a traditional beauty, her comment threads are filled with people declaring their love for her and begging to be her friend. And she has done all this while breaking many of our rules. Brands should find this interesting.