Shifting the burden: the value of user-generated content

You’ve heard it before – the war to dominate the online space is all about content, because that’s what people are interested in.

Generating interesting, engaging content can be the key to a successful mobile marketing strategy.

Today’s consumer is all about being informed: consumers are more interested in obtaining clear information about brands, prices, products, and other details before making purchases.

Moreover, the emergence of social media enables consumers to share their purchase decisions and demonstrate brand loyalty with their friends and family.

The consumer’s natural resistance to programmed marketing messages make advocacy from other users much more meaningful and convincing. Marketers have started developing innovative as well as creative strategies that let users to participate through user-generated content.

Today’s marketing is about information sharing, brand communities, and interaction with the brand.

The emergence of user-generated content has brought brands to the next level. This generally involves the creation of communities where patrons or users can gather to discuss and talk about the products on offer, as well as competitions or other inducements to get users to create new and interesting assets around the brand.

In some cases, this may involve seeding the public with creative resources that users can work with or personalise and share.

Coca-Cola, for example, ran an open casting call for performers to dance the Toe Tappy dance, which will then be used as the basis for a Coke Zero advertising campaign. Campaigns like these let consumers identify with their preferred brands, forming a relationship above and beyond the simple fulfillment of consumer needs.

This higher level of brand engagement can take many forms – interaction on Facebook Pages, for example – but more often than not, it involves some element of user-generated content.

Consumers are willing to take video or photos of themselves enjoying products, and submitting them to websites and so on, sometimes in exchange for incentives, but sometimes also just for five minutes of Internet fame.

This changing approach works particularly well over the mobile channel, since many mobile devices are already equipped to allow the creation of user-generated content, either photos, or videos, or even voice recordings and other media.

Allowing consumers to personalize the content encourages users to explore what the brands stand for in the market at emotional level. Brands encourage users to go deeper into brand meaning and interact with the brand more closely, in the process also broadening the brand identity and letting consumers demonstrate what the brand means to them.

This open dialogue can be invaluable to marketers, although there is some possibility of backfire. Even so, letting consumers direct the nature of brand interaction, as well as generating content that will attract and engage other consumers may be a trend that more brands will explore now that the tools for content creation are in more people’s hands.  

Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, Mobile Marketing Association Asia