Ferrero

Miguel Zorrilla

Culture is moving faster and faster. Every day marketers are deciphering new scenes, memes, and dances by TikTok teens. As we hustle to keep up and constantly refresh, I think it’s a good idea for marketers to dig deeper on certain concepts and buzzwords we’ve been using to talk about reaching and connecting with people and reframe how we might think about them today and in the future.

Audience and Community

“Know your audience” is something we’ve all heard and said a lot in our careers. But depending on your marketing objectives–and to be honest your budget as well–an audience may be too big a target to be effective. The word audience also evokes a group of people sitting patiently waiting to hear what your brand has to say, which as we know is not the case in a very distracting media landscape.

I encourage you to think about engaging communities as much as reaching audiences. The interconnectivity of various media and social platforms now allows communities to grow their relevance through their interests.  

When we started the Game Better with Butterfinger effort I thought “Gamers” was the audience we were looking to reach. But I quickly learned that gaming is really an activity that many different communities engage in, and that we’d get better results the more specific we get with those communities. Instead of solely trying to reach an audience of gamers through big conventions and preroll buys on Twitch and YouTube, we worked with influential fans to engage the communities who love specific games and franchises. In other words, offering a specific community – take Final Fantasy fans – specific, almost esoteric things like a dynamic Tifa Lockhart theme, a Cloud Strife plush, or in-game bangles and belts worked really well for us, engaging the community better than a big sponsorship that reached an audience of gamers likely would have.

Authenticity and Intimacy

Authenticity – meeting people where they are in a believable way – is something brands have been after for years now. It can help shape a winning brand and is crucial to engaging communities. 

I think marketers can also be thinking about how to use the intimacy of the fastest growing forms of media. Take podcasting: Unlike the noisy house party of Twitter or Facebook, listening to a podcast is almost by default a solo experience – something you do while working or exercising or commuting, and almost always, the people speaking are literally plugged straight into your head! That is an intimate media experience that makes you feel like the podcaster is someone you and you alone chat and laugh with every day. This feeling can create a lot of trust with the listener, sometimes fostering what could be called a parasocial relationship. Parasocial relationships is a phenomenon in which you feel like you have a relationship with someone, but that person may not even know who you are. It sounds a little weird but if you think about this moment in history, it makes sense that we’d want to feel some kinship and connection with the media content we consume.

“Authenticity – meeting people where they are in a believable way – is something brands have been after for years now. It can help shape a winning brand and is crucial to engaging communities”

Streaming on Twitch is another example of this more intimate media. When you watch a streamer on Twitch – especially an up and coming one with a few hundred or so viewers instead of hundreds of thousands – you’ll notice they mention viewers by name just to thank them for joining or just to say hi. If you type a question or make a good joke in the chat box, they’ll answer you or laugh. This creates the sense that you know the person – you root for them, both within the game they’re playing and as they grow their audience and career.

The Butterfinger team has seen a lot of success working with these kinds of folks. Followers are excited for their favorite up and coming streamers when they see a brand like Butterfinger has partnered with them – if feels like their friend is getting their flowers and Butterfinger gets positive feelings from them as the brand giving those flowers. Streamers and their audiences alike are also excited when the Butterfinger brand pops into the chat and cracks jokes just like them.

Experiences and Choices

It is now almost taken for granted that Millennials and Gen Z value experiences over “things”. But we always want more from these experiences. We want novelty and we want choice.

Take a look at Cameo. With this app, when your friend gets engaged you might spend a hundred bucks not on cigars, but to have your friend’s favorite contestant from The Bachelor personally congratulate them! This platform is successful not only because of the surprising experience of a personal message from a famous person, but the choices you have in creating a very specific experience to delight the people you care about.

With our promotion with online sports gear retailer Fanatics, the Butterfinger team wanted to elevate the idea of choice as well as experience for our consumers, so our so in our sweepstakes fans could win the chance to win a VIP trip to the championship of their choice next year. We didn’t force the Super Bowl or March Madness, we provided our fans the opportunity to choose and cultivate their own once-in-a-lifetime experience.

When you look at these three concepts it’s about moving from an idea of one broad American culture to a multitude of diverse and overlapping cultures. This has of course been happening for many years at this point, but now marketers have more tools than ever to track and engage them, and I for one am very excited about that.