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Friday, May 2, 2025

Marketing: An age-old recipe

by

20150618

As a grand­fa­ther who launched his first busi­ness­es as a teenag­er in the wild and crazy 1960s, I do rea­son­ably well at stay­ing cur­rent with to­day's dig­i­tal ad­vances and the op­por­tu­ni­ties they present for busi­ness­es of all sizes. Un­der­stand­ing new plat­forms and apps is not dif­fi­cult, so­cial me­dia and dig­i­tal net­work­ing may have giv­en us new ways of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with cus­tomers, but the un­der­ly­ing con­cepts re­flect busi­ness prac­tices that go back a very long time.

Hav­ing suf­fered from dyslex­ia all my life, I do oc­ca­sion­al­ly have trou­ble keep­ing up with acronyms. I once fa­mous­ly sug­gest­ed at a meet­ing that my team should get a "DNA" in place be­fore con­tin­u­ing talks with a po­ten­tial busi­ness part­ner.

There were a few em­bar­rassed coughs and some "did-he-re­al­ly-say-that?" glances shot at me be­fore a se­nior ex­ec­u­tive from Vir­gin quipped: "Ehm, Richard, we don't re­al­ly need to check in­to their ge­net­ics, a sim­ple nondis­clo­sure agree­ment will suf­fice."

I put my foot in the al­pha­bet soup re­cent­ly when a con­ver­sa­tion with one of our mar­ket­ing groups turned to the need for "UGC." Rather than ask­ing "UG . What?" I in­stead said, "Oh yes, I re­mem­ber UGC–the French com­pa­ny that ac­quired Vir­gin Cin­e­ma Group." Again, I got some blank, mys­ti­fied stares be­fore some­one said, "That may be so, Richard, but this UGC is 'user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent.' You know, like earned me­dia, that kind of stuff."

For­tu­nate­ly, the con­ver­sa­tion im­proved from then on be­cause it turned out that I have been an ac­tive pro­mot­er of UGC for decades. The idea at its core is to give cus­tomers a fo­rum to in­ter­act with your prod­uct or ser­vice, share their feed­back and tell oth­er per­spec­tive buy­ers just how good your brand is. Two can play this game!

I re­cent­ly read a re­port on a study con­duct­ed by the Nielsen Com­pa­ny in which they found that while 47 per cent of con­sumers in coun­tries around the world trust tra­di­tion­al paid ad­ver­tis­ing, a whop­ping 92 per cent trust earned pro­mo­tions (such as word-of-mouth rec­om­men­da­tions from friends).

Sim­i­lar­ly, earned me­dia in­volves mes­sages that ad­ver­tis­ers don't ful­ly con­trol. In­stead, this type of brand pub­lic­i­ty re­lies on cus­tomers' every­day use of the In­ter­net and so­cial me­dia.

We're es­sen­tial­ly talk­ing about word of mouth, de­liv­ered on a mul­ti­tude of apps and plat­forms. It has al­ways been true that when your friend says, "I al­ways use Prod­uct X for rea­sons A, B and C," that's a lot more ef­fec­tive in in­spir­ing you to buy Prod­uct X than any­thing that Prod­uct X might say about it­self in a slick paid ad­ver­tise­ment. Dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy sim­ply makes it eas­i­er for cus­tomers to rec­om­mend prod­ucts.

Dis­cus­sions about this can be full of buzz­words about "so­cial en­gage­ment" and keep­ing the right "con­tent" out there, about "so­cial sig­nals" that are "qual­i­ty in­di­ca­tors," or about the "rip­ple ef­fect" can oc­cur when paid and earned me­dia con­verge and cre­ate a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tidal wave.

Don't be dis­tract­ed by the ter­mi­nol­o­gy: en­gag­ing with your cus­tomers is crit­i­cal, and the strat­e­gy you de­cide on should be tai­lored to your busi­ness.

When you're work­ing on reach­ing out to cus­tomers, don't for­get that you al­so have to win over your in­ter­nal cus­tomers, that is, your em­ploy­ees and col­leagues. They are like­ly to gen­er­ate your brand's most in­flu­en­tial "con­tent," so make sure you are al­so putting ef­fort in­to de­vel­op­ing or main­tain­ing open in­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Years ago I used to de­light in cold-call­ing Vir­gin At­lantic pas­sen­gers in their limos (which we pro­vid­ed) af­ter their ar­rival at Lon­don's Heathrow air­port. I'd ask how they'd en­joyed the flight and whether they had any sug­ges­tions about how we could do things bet­ter.

I sup­pose this strat­e­gy could have been called "RGC: Richard-Gen­er­at­ed Con­tent." It was al­ways a great source of cus­tomer feed­back and a won­der­ful ex­er­cise in pub­lic re­la­tions.

These days I reach more peo­ple on a much wider range of top­ics via my blog at Vir­gin.com/Richard­Bran­son, which some­how at­tracts mil­lions of vis­i­tors and stim­u­lates all na­ture of healthy de­bate.

And, if I can man­age to at­tract eight mil­lion fol­low­ers on LinkedIn, there's no rea­son why oth­er en­tre­pre­neurs–no mat­ter what their age–can't go with the so­cial me­dia flow and make it work to their com­mer­cial ad­van­tage too.

(Richard Bran­son is the founder of the Vir­gin Group and com­pa­nies such as Vir­gin At­lantic, Vir­gin Amer­i­ca, Vir­gin Mo­bile and Vir­gin Ac­tive. He main­tains a blog at www.vir­gin.com/richard-bran­son/blog. You can fol­low him on Twit­ter at twit­ter.com/richard­bran­son. To learn more about the Vir­gin Group: www.vir­gin.com.)

(Ques­tions from read­ers will be an­swered in fu­ture columns. Please send them to Richard­Bran­son@ny­times.com. Please in­clude your name, coun­try, e-mail ad­dress and the name of the Web site or pub­li­ca­tion where you read the col­umn.)


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