Building Brand Love in 2021 – The Social Media Playbook

Anthony Padayachi, Creative Director, BC Web Wise, shares his strategy for building brand love in 2021 and turning consumers into brand evangelists.

Tap on your Instagram stories bubble and chances are that at least 1 out of 10 stories that you tap through features a brand. Be it your cousin trying out an Oreo-Nutella dessert, or the wanderer friend atop his RE Himalayan at Leh. Each one of us is influenced by and are in turn influencing friends and family through the stories we create every now and then – a result of affection towards certain products and services. Can brands create a mechanism that nurtures brand love? Let’s dive in!

Step 1 - Create a Community around Interests

Consumers value the experiences that are enabled by a brand more than the brand itself. This step involves finding out what the brand delivers at the macro level. For instance, Araldite Adhesives is building a community of DIY enthusiasts. While the product is more about fixing stuff, the social media approach is around interests, especially upcycling. The community members aka fans/ followers who engage with the content form the foundation of building brand love.

Step 2 - Build a consumer-interaction system

Consumers love brands that are responsive on social media. Creating a system that encourages existing consumers and prospects to share product feedback/ reviews will open up a channel of interactions. Reposting these on the brand’s handle encourages others to proactively create brand love stories.

Hero MotoCorp has a mechanism in place to feature Xpulse riders on their page – the content encourages the Xpulse community to share more ride stories, tagging the brand.

Step 3 - Engage with Interest Groups

Existing interest groups play an important role in speeding up the process of building brand love. Engaging with these groups through something as simple as commenting on their content gives the brand visibility and increases chances of attracting genuine followers to the brand page. Sponsored digital activations within these groups also help in gaining some momentum.

For instance, Asus India collaborated with Mumbai Instagrammers for the first-ever low-light photowalk to promote their smartphone’s low-light camera USP.

Step 4 - Create Consumer Evangelists

Every brand will have a set of individuals who are constantly engaging and creating brand stories. This step involves celebrating these consumers on social media, one of the ways is to create content in collaboration with these consumers, turning them into evangelists.

Step 5 - Measure and Optimise

Analyse the engagement you get on home-grown influencer content; a couple of consumer evangelists may have done so well that it would be worth investing a little more in collaborative content, or even feature them in the brand’s next DVC. As the influencer clan grows, you could also invest in offline meet-ups, thereby maximising visibility and snowballing brand love.