Kumar's Blog

Is the same as building a brand.

When you go (un)prepared to a class, you are setting the expectation that even the basics ought to be covered and that there will be little conversation (as opposed to a monologue) in the class. Eventually, the teacher comes to class with this expectation.

When you turn up to and leave office at pre-defined hours, you are setting the expectation that you have more important things to do outside of work and that you have a clear demarcation of work-life and outside-of-work-life whose intersection is actively prevented by you. Eventually, your boss and colleagues will learn to expect this behaviour from you and it will reflect in your promotions and appraisals.

It is the same with how often you visit your parents, how often you go out with your significant other, how much time you spend with your kids, how dedicated you are to your hobbies, and everything else. Your behaviour sets expectations. This expectation defines how those around you will treat you and engage with you. No matter what you say or claim, eventually, it is your actions and behaviour that define what is to be expected from you.

You can charm people with your words and get projects, get assignments, get a job or get a date. But pretty soon, those engaging with you will be able to see through the words.

It is the same when it comes to brands. It is easy to gather users through tall claims and over-the-top sales and marketing efforts. But after the first sale, it is the product behaviour that will set expectations and not the claims made by the brand.

It is essential to be charming to entice customers into initiating that first sale. But it is even more essential to have the character to live up to the expectations set. For this to happen, the product must be remarkable.

This is the feeling every marketer wants to evoke in her target audience. Every brand wants to be the reason, the cause for the feeling of contagious excitement. But only a handful succeed.

The ones that do succeed almost never achieve this as a result of their marketing efforts. They achieve it by making remarkable products. When Apple is about to release a new product, there is contagious excitement. Before the start of the Barclays Premier League season, there is contagious excitement. Before a new Christopher Nolan movie is released, there is contagious excitement. Because the products coming out are expected to be remarkable.

It is the dream of every brand to get their audience feeling this way. It is the dream of every organization to get their employees feeling this way.

Steve Jobs made a name for himself by obsessing about focusing on making remarkable products. Focusing on the product first and the customers next.

Many brands, in the garb of engaging their audiences, are trying a host of things but are continuing to dole out products that are just about good enough. No wonder people are growing more averse to advertisements by the day.

You can find about 322,000,000 results when you search for 'how to make a video viral'. All nonsense. There is only one way to make a video viral, to make an idea viral, to make a product viral. That is to make it bloody darn good.

Obsess about making the product remarkable. All else follows.

When I was following fewer people on Twitter, when I had fewer Facebook friends, when I had fewer RSS feeds in my subscription list, when I had fewer people to call and catch up with, keeping up engagement levels was fairly easy. It was a pleasure. It was genuine. But, soon I began to realize that engagement doesn't scale.

Today, it is simply impossible for me to read every tweet published by the ones I follow, read every post that populates my reader application, or reply to every e-mail that I receive. If this is the case for me, I can only imagine the problem a popular brand will face. Be it a business blogger, a fiction writer, a consumer product or anyone/anything else that has a following and has initiated engagement at one point or another. It is impossible to scale the engagement that was seen at the beginning.

So how does a popular brand scale its engagement?

Hiring people to do it is, although a very popular practice, simply inauthentic. It is good enough for many brands, but not something that I would advocate. Engagement through blogs, through social media accounts are different from traditional advertising and will only show different results when treated that way.

Seth Godin is one of the most popular business bloggers, and an advocate of engagement. So it will come as a surprise when you notice that he doesn't have a comments section on his blog. Surprising as it may seem, it makes perfect sense. He simply cannot engage with everyone that comes in with a comment. Instead, he recently started accepting questions through e-mail, which he answers through blog posts now and then.

Of course, this is not a model of engagement that every brand can follow effectively. But, that's the point. Each brand has to identify how its followers would like to engage with it. And then identify a way to make that happen.

Engagement is the hardest to scale. But getting hard things done is the only sure way to success.