Unveiling the C-Dimension of brand marketing: Conversations

Brands share a significant part of our lives.

When you buy candies, you get nostalgic remembering days when you used to share the same with your siblings. Or when you buy clothes, you want them to express some part of your personality. Brands are also a continuous part of conversations we have with our friends and family, and we constantly talk about them online. 

Whether you are discussing which car will be a great fit for the family, or shopping with friends for your next trip. 

What can the conversations achieve for a brand?

- To give a sense of community and belonging to your audience. 

- To make your brand seem humane. Both conversing with and becoming a part of user conversations makes a brand look more humane. 

- To keep them updated and engaged about new features and products. 

- To provide a personal experience and better customer service. 

Time and time again, brands have noticed that becoming a part of people’s conversation has been good for business in lifting both sales and the brand image. 

How are brands using the C-Dimension of marketing?

Social media marketing brings brands and people closer together.

One must have seen brands interacting with users on social media platforms to build a personal connection and to give themselves a humane image. 

From answering user complaints to making the most of topical moments, social media has helped bring people closer to the brands they love. 

But with rising social media marketing, users are finding targeted advertisements on social media platforms more annoying than interesting. 

The ability to reach billions of people with a single tweet is powerful and essential for brands, but even more impactful is a personalised marketing platform that can make them a part of authentic user conversations. 

Conversation media marketing makes brands a part of user conversations. 

The marketing technology brands are discovering and, in some cases, rediscovering in new ways is conversation media marketing.

Let’s define conversation media marketing first.

Conversation media marketing is when conversation media formats like emojis, GIFs, memes, stickers are making brands an organic part of the digital conversations their users are having. 

We don’t have to beat around the bush about the popularity of conversation media formats. We love emojis so much that over 10 billion emojis are sent every day. And our fondness for memes and GIFs of memes is escalating like never before. 

As texting becomes the go-to medium of communication around the world, these conversation media formats are enhancing expression in online conversations. 

Brands have found nifty ways to introduce conversation media marketing in their marketing strategy. 

1. In 2014, Taco Bell filed a petition requesting the Unicode Consortium named “America wants a Taco emoji”. The change.org campaign of Taco Bell received 32,802 supporters. The emoji was added across all iOS and Android platforms, making their brand a part of millions of conversations.

Many other brands have used emojis for branding in many different formats.  

2. In 2016, two years after the release of the Frozen movie, multiple Frozen-themed stickers were released on Facebook that people could share while they chatted with each other. It gave the already popular movie more reasons to gain popularity.

3. From 2016 to 2018, multiple brands (including Dove, Burger King, Starwars, and Toyota) launched their emoji keyboards. Emoji keyboards were a success for loyal brand followers. Due to having just one brand-specific sticker and emojis, they didn’t stand the test of time.

4. In 2019, Gucci collaborated with Genies. During their ongoing partnership, users can dress up their Genies avatars in the high-fashion label’s real-life collection of over 200 pieces. Creating custom stickers and picking from a variety of different moods. Snapchat has also done similar collaborations with multiple fashion brands over the past years.

5. From 2020 to the present, Bobble AI, a conversation media platform has collaborated with multiple brands (including Oreo, McDonald’s, Cadbury Dairy Milk silk, Yippee Noodles, and more) in India. During these collaborations, Bobble AI has created engaging branded content for its users, using conversation media formats like emojis, animated emojis, GIFs, and stickers. Being a suite of multiple keyboard applications, Bobble AI delivers hyper-contextual targeting to its clients without being intrusive to its users.

Conversation media marketing is strengthening, and it is in no way a fad. As people see brands in their everyday conversations, they develop a positive sentiment towards them.

The journey of examples mentioned above reveals that, with every passing year, brands are using conversation media marketing in a better way. And yet there are billions of brands still unaware of the enormous potential conversation media marketing carries.

It is time that brands in addition to narrating their stories also allow users to organically engage with them, and build lasting brand equity.