Brands and Social Media
The Advertising Show Across Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries
Brands are ubiquitous in social media for the few last years [2]. This presence in linked to different aims
and accompanied by a string of commentaries. Mainly, the professional point of view has been focused
on the idea that social media provide the possibility of conversation supposedly based on transparency,
equality of places and proximity. Common word running through these professional discourses
(interviews and papers) whenever it comes to social media marketing is the idea that these devices are
supposed to enable brands to "speak directly" with "consumers" and to avoid communicating only with
"classical" advertising, in this case called "paid media".
This paper intends to question the common, professional, sense about brands on social media through
the socio-semiotic and semio-linguistic analysis of some of the most popular brand pages on Facebook
in USA and France and some of their homologues in each country.
We will first analyze how marketing and advertising professional picture the opportunity social media
are supposed to be for brands and how conversation happens to appear as a new Eldorado of pacified
and non-hierarchical communication. We will then go towards the semiotic questioning of the Facebook
pages taking into account everything posted on a lapse of one same week. This will enable us to qualify
the relationship and interactions occurring or not in the space of this social media system.
This fieldwork analysis has already been made, as a test, about "Oasis be fruit" and "M&M's" brand
pages. They both show some interesting converging features. First there is no real "conversation" in this
web pages, that is to say that contributors are not interacting with one another, and that the brand is not
really interacting on a goings and comings basis between people leaving posts and the brand.
What we can observe is much more a one-way messaging system, comparable to stimulus/response. The
brand initiates something and people are reacting, individually, without any brad feed back. The is a
one-way system.
At the same time this does not mean that nothing happens, communication happens even if it is not
conversation. People tend to react to the brand proposal considering that this is an advertising show. We
can say that first because most of the posts are in fact the written equivalents of cheers, claps, and
laughs. In other words, what people usually do when they enjoy a show in order to express their positive
appreciation. Secondly, we can state that this show is acknowledged as advertising because they
consider that (they write it openly) the discourse produced by these brands on their Facebook page is
fathered by advertisers and marketers.
Here lies several interesting points:
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The followers of these specific Facebook brand pages register in order to receive on an almost
daily basis an advertising product they enjoy. This point is quite questioning when we know that
people are supposed to be repelled by marketing and advertising. This is one of the main
argument of conversation. Here some participant are freely asking and enjoying the show of
advertising.
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Whenever they register, they freely accept to enter a state of "willing suspension of disbelief"
(Coleridge) that prove they fully consider advertising as fiction putting an end to the idea of the
manipulation of consciousness. Advertising cannot lure people whenever they qualify it as
fiction.
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These very same people commonly give their opinion about the value of this show, on its
aesthetic aspects, its cohesion with the brand discourse and what there are waiting from these
brands in terms of advertising quality.
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That leads us to understand that people rely on a true advertising culture that needs to be defined.
1. THE MYTH OF BRAND CONVERSATION
1.1 Back to professional roots
Marketing and advertising people commonly speak about market as conversations. This idea was first
published in 1999 in what in now widely known as the Clue Train Manifesto. First published on the web
by four professionals it became a book one year later. Whenever it comes to brands and conversation,
pros always quote this text as the "beginning" and, up to a certain point, as the one that put into shape
the setting of marketing conversation.
This is why it appears necessary to analyze this specific piece of business literature in order to
understand the roots of the idea of conversation between brands and customers. It gives us access to
what advertising producers think and/or claim they do with web conversational brand content. First they
try to "transform" the mass of consumers into a collection of individuals in order to go towards the next
step: re-gather them in a new mass, an audience they will be able to observe and qualify.
Actually, they try to profit from the opportunities they imagine enclose in web 2.0 systems. The
professional metadiscourses tend to present these productions as an Eldorado of brand-client
relationship, especially those that are described as "conversational": blogs, conversational spaces,
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and so on. Social media appear, in this point of view, as the acme of
conversation, the best of it.
1.2 Conversation: an ideal of communication
Then we get a glimpse of collective professional image about conversation, reinterpreted in a nostalgic
way, from a pre-industrial fantasy of an Eden of communication: the old famers' market place. This precapitalistic conversation is depicted as true and direct. Unlike the description of linguists who speaks
about conversation, even on an everyday basis between friends, as a "battle for dominance", always
giving place to an agonistic relationship, the marketing conversation is a hybrid production, highly
consensual and paradoxical in the fact that is at the same time innate for consumers and to be learned for
brands. The marketing definition of conversation seems to be based on the idea of horizontality
abolishing hierarchy. That is to say: instead of speaking of a "top-down", vertical way, imposing the
brand and its advertising discourses, marketing conversation is given as a prodigy enabling brands and
consumers to be equals on a "person to person", horizontal way.
Thus, marketing and advertising professionals redefine the concept of conversation eliminating from it
balance of power and hierarchy. It becomes an irenic idealized mode of communication, paradoxical of
influence communication: it appears literally as vox populi.
1.3 Conversation versus advertising
In this respect, professionals give a new demarcation between a good, transparent, non-manipulative
communication, not far from information and a bad, opaque and manipulative one, in other words
advertising.
This is not exactly a new turn in contemporary communications, especially regarding brands. Nowadays,
brands and people managing them are confronted, especially in developed countries where advertising
started back in the middle of the ninetieth century as a professional activity, to a social, economic and
social representations context we can describe as complex and unfavorable both on a qualitative and
opportunities point of view. People tend to be more and more defiant and even opposed to classical
media advertising. Brands are judged regarding what they do, how and where they produce and how
they speak. More and more people declare they don't like advertisement; they try to avoid it and don't
believe in it. It's mainly an anti-advertising feeling we can describe especially in countries like France
and USA.
At he same time, we live in societies where advertising is ubiquitous in everyday life. We wake up with
eat, have breakfast, go to work, watch TV, surf the web and so on with advertising. According to
different studies we come across, maybe we should say meet, numerous advertisings in on single normal
day. This situation produces basically what we can call a saturation of space with advertising. Every
single media, or so-called media seems literally packed with advertising.
1.4 From Advertising to Unadvertising
In this double context, at least to solutions have occurred in professional uses: one is about erasing a
maximum of classical advertising features, we call it "un-advertising"; the other one is about optimizing
advertising quality and/or trying to find new media or transforming things into a media for advertising,
we call it "hyper-advertising".
Brand conversation is currently a case of unadvertising and brand content is another one. To be more
precise unadvertising is applied to communications tactics used by advertisers whenever they want to
avoid advertising or to minimize it. They can do it in three ways1:
[1]
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They can enter an already existing media production as in product placement in TV shows, and
series, movies, games. They also sponsor broadcasted program.
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They can imitate existing media products as we can see with consumer magazines, branded web
series as Ikea Easy to Assemble, brand games, or imitate existing cultural products as brand
movies ("Prada presents A Therapy, by Roman Polansky, starring Ben Kingsley and Helen
Bonham Carter), books as Recipe books around Philadelphia, Oreos and so on.
1Patrin-Leclère,
V., Marti de Montety, C. and Berthelot-Guiet, K. 2014. La fin de la publicité. Tours et contours de la
dépublicitarisation. Le Bord de l'eau, Paris.
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They can try to benefit from new forms of communication supposed to redistribute
communicational parts such as blogs, co-produced content and social media.
Brand conversation takes place in this last instance.
2. BRAND CONVERSATION OR COEXISTENCE OF SOLILOQUIES?
2.1 Brand conversation: free or imposed program
Whenever we did a long term semiotic analysis of web 2.0 branded productions, we demonstrated that
instead of a true exchange between brand and people, supposed to be consumers, on an equal basis,
branded blogs and dedicated conversational devices (ancestors of social media) appeared to be both
completely masters by brands and far from erasing brands' advertising attributes such as logotypes,
claims, signature and visual charts.
Figure 1. Former Dannon's French "Conversational space" (October 2011).
For example when Dannon had an owned conversational platform for French consumers before
migrating towards Facebook, it was fully ruled by the brand. All themes were decided and initiated by
Dannon, people were only supposed to talk about yoghourts, flavors, recipes, and a few other things like
that. They were able to do it only in the predetermined visual frames. Nobody was really talking with
anybody. At the same time, semiotically, Dannon really appeared as the really authorial authority.
Visually the all system took birth into the logotype of Dannon, extending its shapes and main colors
(blue and white) everywhere. It was a first clue towards the idea that whenever they try to erase
advertising features from communications, brand managers and advertising professionals tend, in fact, to
extend the main signs of the brand everywhere ending in hyperadvertising instead of unadvertising.
2.2 Is Facebook the ultimate brand conversation?
At first Facebook seems to be a good candidate to enable brands to have a true conversation with people
on the web. As a so-called "social" media it reaches the double ideal of humanization of brand
communications and conversation seeked by marketing people. Whenever someone, a consumer or a
brand, register on Facebook, the automatically disappear under profiles, and the archetext of the device.
An artchitext of a software or a social media designates what elements inscribed in their computer
codings that oblige users to use them in a certain way. For example if you use Word you are supposed to
write down a text that looks like a page of book or a letter. On the contrary, Powerpoint makes you think
everything and present it in the "slide" shape that is more visual and makes us use mainly "bulletpoints".
A semiolinguistic analysis and content analysis of some Facebook Branded Pages will enable us to
determine whether they happen to enable conversation between a symbolic, market entity, the brand and
some people, maybe consumers. Its seems that these actors of the drama are both on the same
"enonciative space" but they don't always interact. Most of the time, brands are proposing while
consumers are reacting more than interacting. It looks more like a classical stimulus-response system
than a real polyphony. Even people do not interact with one another. The brand gives the kick: a photo, a
video, a motto, a test and people answer or rather react in parallel but not together and the brand don't
react in return. Hence comes the idea of parallel soliloquies.
Let's go towards a more precise analysis of "posts" on two analogue Facebook brand pages: M&M’s and
the French brand Oasis (fruit drink). M&M’s USA brand page exists since 2008 and has currently more
than ten millions followers; Oasis brand page is names OasisBeFruit, it was launched in 2009 and has
been for several years the French brand page with the biggest number of followers (more than three
millions). They are similar in the cheerful tone they use in their regular advertising discourse and they
use their product or a part of it (fruit) as characters in their commercials.
A content analysis of the posts on the two brands Facebook pages puts into full light their very poverty.
People mainly "like" whatever the brand has posted, they "share" it in some case and their much more
rarely "comment". That is to say they prefer to press a button rather to write down something. And
whenever they choose to write it usually goes up to three/four words on average. As a matter of fact,
most of the people's reactions on these two Facebook brand pages do not appear as a dialog with the
brands or even between participants. And the architext of a Facebook page isolates the exchanges by
automatically closing the direct access to their content and offering instead the counts of the numerous
"like", "share" and "comment". In the best case, a glimpse of what is presented as "best comments" is
available. In a way the architext create the contrary of conversation when it transforms everything into
numbers showing plainly an audience counting system rather than a dialogical one.
Figure 2. M&M's Facebook brand page (March 2015).
2.3 Let the brand show start
Anyway, many people participate on these Facebook brand pages so it is important to understand what
they do if the do not dialog as in a conversation with these brands.
If what we find inside these brief comments cannot really be qualified as conversation, it looks more like
answers to the brands' various stimuli: written laugh (LMAO! Hilarious, lol, mdr, hahaha, etc.),
enthusiastic appreciation or should we say gusto as one can express during a show (« Aaawwww I love
it! », « Yay », « i like it!!so gooodddddddd*** », « cool », « bien ouej' », « excellent »), short answers
inspired by theses brands advertising mottos (« Go yellow », « You go RED!!!»« Ça va défruiter !»,
« Toutes nos fraizelicitations au papaye et a la mamangue»), short declarations of love (« Love m&m »,
« my favorite is still the one where red takes it all off I miss that commercial », « The best ever M&M
commercial is the one with Santa, "He does exist!" "They do exist!" Simultaneous faint, candle falls to
the floor.... the absolute best M&M commercial ever!!!!!! », « Vous êtes trop forts avec vos jeux de mot
», « j'adore les jus de mot oasis », « à chaque fois ça cartonne... vous êtes des fous chez les publicitaires
Oasis »).
Figure 3. M&M's Facebook brand page (March 2015) – Comments once open
We can conclude from these extensively done analysis (we can only share a few examples here) that
people participating on M&M's and OasisBeFruit Facebook brand pages react and behave much more
like spectators, an audience watching a show than like people interacting with brands, in dialog with
them.
2.4 The hyperadvertising show of brands on Facebook
M&M’s and OasisBeFruit Facebook brand pages appear to be some hyperadvertising devices where we
can observe a really strong omnipresence of these brands names and logos and the part of the discourse
undertook by brands is highly linked to their TV commercials, people can watch those commercials and
related content. For example the French brand Oasis uses its commercial catchword "OasisBeFruit" (in
English !) as Facebook brand page name.
Figure 4. Oasis Facebook brand page (March 2015)
The advertising show is so obvious that participants directly qualify the "authors" of these pages for
what they are : marketing and/or advertising professionals : « Simultaneous faint, candle falls to the
floor.... the absolute best M&M commercial ever!!!!!! » « à chaque fois ça cartonne... vous êtes des fous
chez les publicitaires ».
Yet, while being hyperadvertising these communications still attract many participants willing to get on
a daily basis an advertising show delivered on their own Facebook personal page "journal" section. We
cannot now for sure that there are consumers or customers of these brands but they consume their
advertising discourses freely. They seem to have met an audience on Facebook, who during an few
minutes everyday enjoys the commercial worlds offered, they a "momentary suspension of disbelief"2
and they enter the world of fiction offered by these brands which have the specificity of being playful
and very coherent themed advertising closes worlds3.
Figure 5. M&M's Facebook brand page (March 2015) – Comments about advertising
At the same time, participants give their evaluation of this advertising discourse and this point
enable us to speak about demonstrations of aesthetic judgment and areas of waits about what can be
considered as a good commercials depending of the brand concerned. Advertising show comes with
amateur advertising reviewers who demonstrate a true advertising culture.
[2]
2Coleridge
[3]
3Gottdiener,
M., The Theming of America, Westview Press, 2001.
Figure 6. M&M's Facebook brand page (February 2014) – Comments on Super Bowl commercial
TV
2.5 Advertising must go on
We will now go towards new Facebook brand pages in order to be sure that the previous analysis were
not magnifying effects related to the kind of brand/product. We selected the largest audience fan pages
in 2014 US ratings.
Even if the rankings change a little according to the source they commonly give Disney, Coca-Cola, Red
Bull and Starbucks among the top five. Then the weight of advertising show becomes obvious.
First Disney is the homeland of themed worlds and products going with them and they are definitely
show makers, master of entertainment. Coca Cola contribution to Facebook is called "Coca Cola
journey" and gives mostly place to the idea of happiness, the brand-advertising motto and displays proof
of the brand integration to popular culture. Starbucks tends to drive its brand towards heritage showing it
as a piece of coffee culture.
We will end this paper with the Red Bull case which shows the largest extension of their advertising
claim "Red Bull gives you wings" into a global entertainment factory extended towards sport shows and
music production. This brand goes so far in the idea of advertising show that we can even wonder about
its true activity: producing and selling energy drinks or producing shows?