Selling through social media could soon become a thing of the past, after Morrisons’ marketing boss claims that building consumer relationships is the key to social media success.
A lot of brands are and have been doing it for years, the goal is to sell, meaning every activity on social media has that in mind. Increasingly, this is now changing and the brands are becoming ‘one of us’ – we are seeing less focus on products and services, while brand reputation and identity take the spotlight.
In an interview with marketingweek.com, Morrisons’ marketing director Andy Atkinson claims the supermarket chain are using social media to help embrace brand loyalty. “We were a bit late to digital and social, it’s only been a focus for the last 18 months. But what we’ve noticed is using social channels purely to sell products will result in failure and most companies are making that mistake.”
“Social media isn’t a platform for selling. It is about reaching out and building a relationship. We want to adopt that progressive mentality,” he said. Turning up late to the social media party may have unintentionally been a stroke of genius for the Morrisons’ marketing team, it’s allowed for more time to pick the perfect gift (strategy), giving the host (consumer) more incentive to invite them back to subsequent parties (follow and engage on social media)
Interestingly, very recently we posted an article here on Junior-Broker that debated the possible fall of Twitter, suggesting brands may alter the way social media is used to increase the chances of being featured on the ‘while you were away’ section, I even specifically mentioned brands needed to adopt a more human presence in the ever-changing social media landscape.
Morrisons’ seem to be one step ahead and are already using social media for customer interaction as opposed to pure sales, and their adopted model could become something we see more frequently over the coming years.
When we analyse brands that are notorious for selling products through social media, one of the most prominent successes of recent years has to be Old Spice. By embracing silly humour, we witnessed multiple campaigns which generated so much buzz online, you’d be mad for thinking there’d ever be another way.
However, have you seen much of Old Spice’s work recently? Answer: Probably not. While still producing some fantastic adverts (seriously, find them on YouTube), the consumers – or at least UK consumers – don’t seem to be sharing videos online as much. Perhaps this could be down to the target audience changing, or it could be a shift in the social sphere, I’m going for the latter.
There’s still clearly room for brand that choose to sell through social media, but it’s hard to believe these brands will be able to keep doing what they’re doing forever.
