‘Unmarketing’ and giving your community control
This week Inside Facebook published its list of the 30 most popular pages on Facebook. US President Barack Obama leads with 5.7 million supporters, followed by Coke with 3.1 million and then chocolate spread Nutella with 2.9 million.
Except that the Nutella page in question with its three million fans isn’t actually maintained by Italian confectionary giant Ferrero, for one thing the overview is in what I believe is Turkish and then English. In fact, a stat that I found amazing was one cited by Francesco Castaldo on his website:
In January there were 122 Nutella pages on Facebook. Three were about the product, including the one with three million fans, and the other 119 were derived (eg Crepe Nutella). By comparison, the manufacturer, Ferrero apparently had two pages about the company, the main one of which has under 1000 fans.
Francesco Castaldo says “If those pages (meaning the fan ones) were managed by the Ferrero company, they could engage those 3M users in marketing activities (send updates, hold contests etc.).” Yes, they should engage those three million users, but the precise reason those pages have so many fans is of course because they work bottom up – they come from the community, instead of the brand.
For Ferrero just to run them, wouldn’t work. Some marketer like myself would no doubt wade in and try to fill the place with key messages…leaving the punters heading for the exit!
Michael Tchong of Ubercool says Nutella is a prime example of Unmarketing, and in a sense this is what Skittles tried to do with varying success when it replaced its website with social network feeds.
The marketing of no marketing
So when you find an example of Unmarketing what should you do about it? Last year Brian Oberkirch published some guidelines around the ‘marketing of no marketing’, which are worth reading. They include:
“Serve communities: Don’t build them. Find existing groups and add value to what they are trying to do. Participate. Host, if you must, but I bet groups are already helping themselves.”
Sound advice, let them do their own thing, but find ways of adding to their enjoyment of whatever they are doing. In Nutella’s case that could include, for example, giving a sneak NPD preview to those three million people on the Facebook page.
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- that sometimes they are “just not into you”
Hi Kelly, thank you for the comment and I like your analogy about Beer X, which really is spot on.
I guess those of us in brand marketing are sometimes at risk of looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope and forget that most consumers don’t really see things the way we do!
Dirk – very nice post. Having lots of discussions over the past few months with Matt about this very same thing. He has a nice analogy. If I go to a bar, I like to hang out with my friends and maybe we all drink the same thing…Beer X. But that doesn’t mean I want to hang out in place that only serves Beer X or is owned by the people who make beer X. Beer X is welcome and served at my bar, but hanging out in a place dominated by Beer X would be dull and controlled. This rush to “build a community” can sometimes work really well for some brands, but for others the smart thing to do is find a place that is already in existence and add some value and fun there.