The internet: it’s become our world.
In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg describes the early stages of Facebook as a way of “taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online." Well, today, with Facebook at whatever number in the hundred millions it’s now at, and hundreds of millions of other sites competing for whatever’s left over, it seems like the entire experience of life is now online.
And everything online is personal—everyone and everything, including celebrities and even businesses, feels like somebody you know, perhaps because with a few clicks you can literally know everything about them. Just look at Facebook, for example, how similar the business pages are to the user profile pages—and it goes beyond the basic structural setup of photos and contact info. What it comes down to is that businesses themselves function like autonomous beings, like people, with carefully cultivated personalities, voices, and reputations. And in a world where reputation has become synonymous with representation, this is incredibly important. But it’s also incredibly flexible, just as it is with people.
Lindsey Lohan is not rich and famous for being an upstanding citizen and a positive role model. She is, quite obviously, neither of these things. But she’s rich and famous. Tina Fey is also rich and famous, but in this case it’s for being hilarious and lovable—her public persona, which coincides with the character she plays on 30 Rock, seems so genuine that she can
embarrass herself and still come out on top, because she’s calm and confident about her image, and she doesn’t seem to have anything to prove. Or how about politicians (let’s not name specifics here)—their reputations are directly linked to their power—they have to be likable in order to achieve, which is why they’re always getting caught with their pants down, literally and figuratively.
The same thing is true for businesses. They can be a Lohan or a Fey or a politician, but like celebrities they profit off of publicity.
Sun Chips compostable bag was great in theory, but they
canned it because people were “complaining” about the loud bag. Now, I don’t know about you, but I thought this was stupid—if anything, the machine-gun volume of those compostable bags seemed to give Sun Chips their day in the sun. I for one bought Sun Chips because I wanted to see how loud the bag really was and because clearly their heart (or at least, their representation of a heart), seemed to be in the right place, and because I like Sun Chips. I don’t think any of the complaints or the
Facebook groups were malicious or even campaigning to do away with the bags—they were just doing what online communities so often do, pointing out facts, making jokes, and forming a little temporary community out of a mutual laugh, before moving on to the next thing. Sun Chips could’ve been a Tina Fey, stuck to their guns in the face of
embarrassment, appreciating the publicity and coming out on top. Instead they pulled a cowardly politico move and got rid of the bags altogether, giving off the impression that they were hugely embarrassed by the whole affair and unable to cope with the ambivalent nature of a publicity they didn’t have control over.
But what if the key to success in today’s fast-paced, media-saturated, virtual world of excess is to always act like you’re in control? To take whatever reputation you’ve earned and just run with it? This is not to say that you shouldn’t work to craft the reputation you think will bring you the most business—on the contrary, it is about maintaining that reputation and sticking to your guns. Otherwise, you’re a flip-flopper. And nobody likes a flip-flopper.
Unless of course, you just screwed up right from the start—let’s look at Sketchers here—and their stupid idea to create a shoe and a
business model exactly like
TOMS. They called it BOBS, and people instantly responded in a way that any smart marketing person should have foreseen:
ridicule. I don’t know what Sketchers expected or how they thought they’d get away with it in a world as closely connected as ours, but the results were an epic business fail. Sketchers stopped promoting BOBS almost as quickly as they started.
This is like Lindsey Lohan starting her own sitcom called Forty Rock in which she unironically plays a character named Tiz Temon. Stupid. Lame. Kind of awkward. Plagiarizing is illegal people, even if you switch a few letters around.
Simon Mainwaring of
Fast Company summed it up best: “[Sketchers’ BOBS debacle] is a great example of where where so many brands go wrong. Consumers do not respond to the ‘how’ of what you do but the ‘why’. That's because the ‘why’ is emotional and something they can connect to. The ‘how’ is simply the expression of that emotion.”
This is exactly what I mean about how social media has made business personal.
This is also where we come in. Public Relations has always been about creating the face for a business, taking care of the personal touch, the bedside manner, the surface appeal. But whereas traditional PR is focused on forming relationships with traditional media outlets (who will then transmit the messages to potential consumers), social media PR cuts out the middle man and communicates directly with consumers. Social media PR is all about BEING the brand itself. Customers, consumers, and clients become fans, followers, and friends. Traditional pitches and press releases morph into the careful construction and vigilant maintenance of a “personality” that will draw in the kinds of customers—or, rather tellingly, “friends”—that the business is catering to; a kind of virtual camaraderie, if you will.
So I guess ultimately, what it comes down to is coming up with an original idea that fits with the personality of your brand and the demographic you’re looking to reach, and sticking with that idea through thick and thin—learning how to be flexible enough to evolve and grow. Learning how to laugh at yourself; creating the kind of personality that lets you laugh at yourself.
Toppers Pizza is a brand that has perfected their personality, and seen huge success as a result.
- Innovative product ideas? How about The Tall Boy, a pizza made out of their world famous Topperstix, which by the way came around 8 years before Dominos’ Cheesy Bread and Cinnastix (Toppers = TOMS, Dominos = Sketchers).
- Savvy social media campaigns? Check out Spank Your Pizza, going on now—an innovative way of using crowdsourcing and an unprecedented tournament-style format to let
Toppers fanatics literally create their own pizzas, and compete to have their personal pizzas featured on Toppers menus nationwide.
- A well-established, flexible personality? Check. From their strange evil baby mascot to their “Hangover Helper” pizza, Toppers has creatively captured the college demographic in a way that no other pizza chain has.
Results? Toppers Pizza is one of the top 50 fastest-growing chains in the country. They’re making an average of $966,000 a year per location, which is 35%-45% higher sales than their competition, and with only 28 units total so far, Toppers has managed to shut down more than 10 Papa John’s, Pizza Hut’s and Domino’s, just by opening in their markets!
“The reason for our success is simple: We are not one of the ‘Wal-Marts’ of the industry. The big chains have lost identity and brand connection,” said Scott Gittrich, founder and CEO of the growing Whitewater, WI-based 26-unit franchise brand. “Our customers are fanatical about our brand. Our quirkiness and edginess has given our brand character, thus we have been able to continue our growth and bonding with an untapped national demographic – the 18-34-year olds.”
Toppers knows what’s up. Which is why even when they were
featured on The Tonight Show’s “Headlines” for being the most disgusting ad for pizza Jay Leno had ever seen, they just took the Rhonda Farr approach—any publicity is good publicity. Their ads may be irreverent, but their pizza is delicious, and they have an
army of fanatical fans to back them up. Including
this guy…
A Blog Post By: Hilary Cadigan (@idacyral)Hilary is a member of the Public Relations team for No Limit. She graduated from Emory University and is a contributing writer for Lumino Magazine.
A Blog Post By: Chad Bryant (@chadATL)
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