Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers' online behaviours boost brand engagement

Web 2.0 users’ high involvement and their expectations of online experience including rich information and opportunities to contribute or create—plus their familiarity with engaging in relationships and dialogue online—are a complex meal for some businesses to digest. Managing marketing and customer relationships in an age where consumers are active—and reachable—in a non-commercial environment is a difficult thing to get right. The fact that getting it wrong can spawn user-generated content, content that can influence your audiences for years onward, creates a critical imperative to approach online markets carefully. But the potential for the internet to become a powerful interface into people’s lives, where they engage in many ways and are cognitively engaged and contributing—possibly even contributing directly to you marketing by posting content relating to your business such as reviews, blogs and niche-interest dialogues and forum participation—makes web 2.0 an irresistibly powerful tool for marketers interested in utilising the latest in technological and social trends.

Although giving control to consumers rather than trying to control consumers is a tremendous and difficult conceptual evolution for many people to transcend, there is strong evidence for its ultimate success. By allowing people more and more to direct the services and products an organisation provides to them, to control communication and relationships, and to influence other consumers, these people are very likely to exhibit greater connections to brands than might have been imagined using conventional, ‘us-managing-them’ CRM and brand management.

“Robert B. Cialdini, author of The Psychology of Influence, reports that psychologists have long understood the consistency principle, which is needed to direct human action because the desire for consistency is a central motivator of our behavior. For example, Cialdini said, “Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment” (Cialdini, 2007)” (Rapacz & Reilly, 2008).

“Studies have consistently found that commitment fosters greater resistance to attitude change. As Ahluwalia et. al report, “Individuals who are committed to a brand, for example, have been shown to resist persuasive communications that portray the brand negatively” (Ahluwalia, 2007)” (Rapacz & Reilly, 2008).

Computing is facilitating people’s urges to contribute and express themselves, and for marketers this is a big deal: the cognitive surplus

During the past 50 years in prosperous countries people have invested their cognitive surplus – the idle, ‘functionally available’ or ‘free-thinking’ time in peoples’ days – almost entirely in the watching of television. Post-war, TV has occupied people’s cognitive surplus. This idea is put forth strongly by Clay Shirkey who teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU and serves as a popular commentator on evolving trends in online activity. Shirkey observes that the web is emerging as the new space for occupying the cognitive surplus, is poised to significantly displace TV’s role, and offers different avenues for occupying time that are importantly different from the purely passive consumption of television: On the web, in addition to observation, people can create, engage and converse

Shirkey claims that even a small shift away from purely observational free time may be a very significant shift in our society. He uses examples like online photo-sharing (at Flickr.com) and raises an important point: Pre-web 2.0, an individual engaging in the sharing of their creative photography would indicate a significant, committed activity. For people pursuing this activity, the technology provides efficiency that means real results are obtained in relatively few hours, enabling them to master their interest and generate a significant output. Today’s moderately talented amateur photographers can manage and distribute their output in a way that is so accessible, and that has such a great potential reach, that it is affecting a long-standing business—Shirkey cites a 99% drop in the average cost of stock photographs. (Elizabeth Bowie, 2008)

Very different from passive consumption of broadcast media and its advertising, engaged online activities create a setting where individuals are cognitively more active, guiding or creating or contributing – rather than just observing. Even very casual online ‘surfing’ is a far more engaged and cognitive activity than pure observation of a medium and media interface that one cannot influence or control such as TV. But with online activities becoming more and more participatory and with online technologies enabling far more sophisticated creation and input from people who are not considered experts in the field of their interest or expression, this new use of the cognitive surplus is actually time removed from the cognitive surplus itself. Becoming task-oriented and characterised by higher cognitive involvement, the time spent no longer fits with the cognitive surplus concept; it is productive and purposeful and, importantly, that it is being directed by consumers’ interests means that it is a window to their ideas and values.

For businesses, understanding that people using web 2.0 are highly involved with an activity or topic—and thereby targeting them in a way that is relevant and useful to them—makes web 2.0 importantly different from its earlier incarnation in a commercial sense. Web 2.0 is the internet with high cognitive involvement and providing facility for high levels of interactivity and expression. Because of this Web 2.0 is a unique new form media from web 1.0.

Web 2.0 sceptics might point out that the shift away from television and toward more engaged or productive (if not practical or necessary) online activities is not thus far a huge movement, but rather a gradual and fractional one. Shirkey provides an answer for this that may be more significant than even he intends: After fifty years of a strict media monoculture, even a relatively small shift in the focus of cognitive surplus time, away from purely passive consumption, may represent an extremely important change within our society. (Elizabeth Bowie, 2008)

Online contributors fuel their own brand engagement and convictions 

A hypothesis that we might grow from the beginning of Shirkey’s estimation of this change’s significance is this: Individuals’ interests and values are both satisfied and strengthened by the surplus time they invest in more engaged, involved online activities. These activities also boost their cognitive involvement (which is a concept that has received relatively little academic attention in recent years, though the antecedent, if not analogous, concept of engagement has enjoyed much attention in this context re: Web 2.0).

This notion is consistent with recent observations by Rapacz and Reilly (2008) and also with the literature on cognitive consumer involvement which indicates consumers’ cognitive involvement with a concept is both self-reinforcing and creates a receptiveness to external reinforcement where other influences (or influencers) support a hypothesis, as in Bottie et al. (2003).

And this idea highlights an immensely powerful concept for businesses whose consumers are engaging online; reflecting from a different angle the same ideas proposed by Rapacz (discussed earlier in this post):
Where consumers are creating content online that expresses their own involvement with a brand or product, their own input creates a psychological scenario that bolsters the commitment of their own ideas or causes them to defend and develop the ideas. Further, where these individuals’ ideas and interests are further reinforced by engagement in a network or community of like-thinking individuals, or even where they are called on to defend their content contribution and ideas, the individuals’ involvement with the subject (the brand or product) may be reinforced or increased.

It is observed that younger consumer groups who are heavy users of the internet—this no longer being an unusual or niche group—are heavily influenced by others with whom they interact online. “People like me” has become a tremendously powerful source of consumer information, topping surveys in many countries. Importantly, individuals identified as “opinion elites” indicate they will serve roles as influencers as much in favour of companies they do trust as in the disfavour of companies they do not. (StrategyOne, 2008)

Your dream customers

We might draw this toward a simple conclusion: Consumers creating online content or networking with your brand or product as a subject are not a threat! These people are in fact every marketer’s ‘fantasy consumers’: They are engaged, informed, likely to act as influencers and likely to have their own ideas and convictions relating to your business. These attributes are reinforced by their own online participation.

Engaging with these consumers positively will both increase those individuals’ positive engagement with your brand and increase the chance that they will represent ideas that are analogous with your organisation’s interests when collaborating and networking online.

This post is part of a developing series:

1. Web 2.0 Marketing: Consumers’ online behaviours boost brand engagement  (you are here)
2. Does the 2.0 revolution warrant renaming business functions?
3. Definitions and critical success factors for CRM
4. Is CRM 2.0 something new?  
5. What is Marketing 2.0?

References

Botti, S., McGill, A. L., & Iyengar, S. S. (2003). Preference for control and its effect on the evaluation of consumption experiences. In Advances in Consumer Research (Vol. 30, pp. 127-128).

Elizabeth Bowie, T. H., Dan Misener, and Nora Young (Writer) (2008). Clay Shirky on your “cognitive surplus”, Spark. Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (A CBC radio broadcast & podcast)

Rapacz, D., & Reilly, M. (2008). The New View of Relationship Marketing: Better integration to deepen brand commitment. Journal of Integrated Marketing Communications (2008), 19-25.

StrategyOne. (2008). Trust Barometer 2008. Edelman Trust Barometer.