Icing on the media cake for non-engaging products

Ivory soap bar

Chris Brogan writes today about how social media and building relationships can help sales.

First off, I think Chris is correct about nisch fast-moving consumer brands, especially those with a strong local connection, having a very interesting opportunity with social media. Definitely.

However, soap, detergents, hard-surface cleaners, etc. are not engaging products in themselves and social media do not scale well for non-engaging, mass market products with very large and broad target groups. For the bigger brands in these product categories I therefore think it is important to emphasize that social media can only be a complement to more large-scale media and part of a much broader media strategy.

Don´t get me wrong, I love social media and the importance of building strong relationships with consumer ambassadors in the core target group, but this is “icing on the media cake” for a bigger advertiser of these products who need to reach and influence those who, – unlike Chris, finds soap and tire brands too boring and non-engaging to connect with via social media.

Building brand awareness and top of mind can be accomplished large scale and to a sufficient level for these products with great ROI using a backbone of more traditional media channels. Having worked for one of these FMCG giants, I also know from personal experience how extremely thoroughly all media investments are measured, benchmarked and evaluated by these companies so there is no guesswork involved in these decisions and I hardly think social media opportunities are neglected.

Second, I reacted on the following section comparing media costs from Chris:

If you’re Glynne Soaps, you can’t pay for full spread magazine ads and soap operas. You can spend time on social platforms meeting people, talking to them about their stuff (and not just soap). Maybe you don’t pick up the ad campaign for a while, but that would be at an inflection point.

Here I think it is important to point out that spending time on social media is in fact a cost and probably a higher one than you think. One of the most common financial mistakes is to not measure personnel time costs and have proper time management follow-up. Yes, spending time on social media can be very useful, but the time spent represents an opportunity cost and needs to be taken into account. This is true for all companies, large and small.

If you start measuring or at least estimate the time spent on social media, costs for full spread magazine ads might not seem as expensive anymore in comparison… Once again, I don´t think Chris is wrong about the potential of social media, but the costs needs to be taken into account also for this media choice and just because you can spend time on building relationships via these channels for your brand, does not mean it is necessarily cheap in comparison to other opportunities.

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