Building Brand Equity Through Social Media

3
1774

Share on LinkedIn

Paul Legutko’s discussion:

“……, but simply the fact that someone is staring at your company logo and creative for a certain period of time. This has an inherent branding value, and “branding” is something both marketers and management understand……high-volume sites can have significant brand-equity.”

and Jim Sterne’s response regarding brand impact, awareness and brand character attribution, can further be applied to the way major corporates are using the power of social media to garner brand dividends.

Coke, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Proctor and Gamble, Nike, Nissan, Pepsi are part of a trend where a large number of corporates are creating online communities and social networking sites, taking advantage of the interactivity that the internet as a digital medium provides, to capitalise on the huge number of cybersurfers.

With humongous volumes of visitors on these sites, organisations have successfully mingled CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT with increasing BRAND FAMILIARITY and distinction and focussing on solution importance, to try and create CUSTOMER LOYALTY.

Hindustan Unilever’s( India’s biggest consumer goods company) brainchild Sunsilk Gang of Girls, promoting the shampoo brand Sunsilk, has a total of 579899 members in 34122 gangs. This has evolved into a huge medium where people participate, give their views and are really bonding with the brand. By discussing commonplace issues like hair care, shampooing and conditioning, hair tips, hair biology and hosting hair gurus by tying up with hairstylists like Javed, Sunsilk GOG has struck a chord with the readers. By tying up with leading magazines like NewWoman and Cosmopolitan,and Marjorrie Orr at Astrology.com, Sunsilk GOG has been able to delve into areas of interest for women ranging from beauty tips to love quizzes to astrology and with Monster.com to cater to their career aspirations. Typically catering to the youth interests of today, members can even watch funky music videos, download wallpapers and screensavers and participate in exciting contests, Sudoku and word search games.

With a traffic rank of 25,500 the Proctor and Gamble brainchild Beinggirl aims at engaging the female segment for P&G’s products targetted for the female community. By giving females an opportunity to discuss issues close to their hearts, without giving up their identities, P&G has been able to provide a medium for interaction and developing relationships with its customers thereby facilitating brand loyalty. About 62% of the clientele of beinggirl is from China and 14% from the U.S.

Most of these sites, especially those catering to niche audiences, use the skills of online community managers to nudge the conversation, seed chat forums with threads, recruit others to take a lead in various topics, and monitor the dialogue

Nike’s joga.com for football lovers, Coke’s mycoke.com and Pepsi’s pepsizone for young adventurers out to network, share photographs,videos,music and have fun, Nissan’s community for car lovers discussing car models and their features……the list is endless……

Agreed that there are no ways to quantify brand loyalty as a result of such ventures, but as Paul said, as long as larger number of visitors can identify brands , logos and products, garnering brand dividends as a result of such endeavours is a foregone conclusion.

Vandana Ahuja, PhD.
Amity Business School
Dr. Vandana Ahuja has over 21 years of experience across the corporate sector and academia. She is the author of the book on Digital Marketing - published by Oxford University Press. She is a Professor with Amity Business School and has several years of research experience across the domains of Digital Marketing, CRM and Social Media Marketing. She is an expert in the usage of Digital and Social Media platforms across diverse industry verticals.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for the excellent resource; I love seeing such clear examples behind concepts like social media branding.

    We liked the article so well we included it in our latest blog post: Tips for Building Your Company Brand Online

    Your other articles offer excellent insights as well, especially the GM piece. It’s very nice to see commentary built around real-life businesses and the decisions they are making.

    Lovely work,

    ~Jessica

  2. Nice post indeed. Would you also happen to have examples of B2B initiatives in social media? Or do you think that the audiences in B2B are too small to set up new networks and initiatives should use existing business networks such as LinkedIn?

  3. its a good resource for management students to understand that how social netwrkng play vital in buildng brand equity in present competitive synerio

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here