Soundview summary of "Cant's Buy Me Like"

How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results

by Bob Garfield and Doug Levy

SUBJECT AREA: MARKETING

THE SUMMARY IN BRIEF

Today's brands face an apparent choice between two evils: continue betting on their increasingly ineffective advertising or put blind faith in the supposedly mystical power of social media, where "Likes" stand in for transactions, and a mass audience is maddeningly elusive. There has to be a better way ...

As John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a half century ago, "Money can't buy you love." But in today's world, where people have become desensitized — even disillusioned — by ad campaigns and marketing slogans, that maxim needs an update to "Money can't even buy you like."

Can't Buy Me Like introduces us to the "Relationship Era," where the only path for businesses seeking long-term success is to create authentic customer relationships. Where do "authentic customer relationships" come from? The answers are honesty, transparency, shared values and a purpose beyond profit.

The good news is that some companies have already embraced the Relationship Era and are enjoying consistent growth and profits while spending substantially less on marketing than their competitors.

Blending powerful research, fascinating examples and practical advice, Bob Garfield and Doug Levy show how companies can thrive in the Relationship Era.

IN THIS SUMMARY, YOU WILL LEARN:

• What the end of the Consumer Era and the beginning of the Relationship Era mean for you and your company.
• How gaining and maintaining customers is now about establishing real relationships, not about persuading.
• Do's and don'ts in navigating the new rules brought about by the Internet and social media.

INTRODUCTION

If you are still selling goods and services by blanketing the world with advertising, trying to persuade or entertain or flatter consumers into submission, you are doing things all wrong. Because the world has changed. A lot.

The digital revolution and societal shifts have brought us to a new period. It is called the Relationship Era.

Human needs, human values and human connections will define success or failure. The currency of Relationship Era marketing is not awareness, nor even quality; it is authenticity. Trust. Loyalty. Pride. Relationship Era marketers do not see purchasers as conquests to seduce, or even persuade. They see them as friends — members of a community dedicated not only to the same stuff but also to the same ideals.

In the Relationship Era, your essence is transmitted in your relations with all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, neighbors and the earth itself. Across every function of an enterprise, corporations and their brands now can and must behave with their various constituencies in ways exactly parallel to human relationships.

In the Relationship Era, brands can no longer project the image of their choosing. Rather they must locate their inner selves and make common sense with the outside world.

The Four Forces

This shift is a temporary inconvenience for a permanent improvement. The most salient fact in accepting the ascendency of the Relationship Era paradigm has not to do with its benefits so much as its inevitability.

There are four forces at work:

1. The ongoing collapse of mass media and the corresponding loss of advertising reach and efficiency have turned the economics of marketing upside down. The cost of reaching consumers with advertising messages and promotional offers is rising unsustainably, even as consumer tolerance for such messaging declines. In the meantime...

2. The Internet has torn down the ramparts separating the corridors of business power from the teeming hordes. Once, corporations and brands could operate behind nearly impregnable fortifications. Now there is hardly an event that takes place — especially an ugly one — that doesn't become exposed to one and all, immediately and in perpetuity. Whereupon...

3. Thanks to the rise of social media, the news becomes conversational currency worldwide. And all of this happened at a moment in time when...

4. The public has decided that it cares not only about goods and services but also about the values and conduct of the providers. Trust now frequently trumps even quality and price.

This unprecedented disruption in the status quo has left brands an apparent choice between two evils: continue to squeeze costs out of their budgets at the expense of the media and ad agencies living in the same ecosystems or dive headlong into social media. There is a third way — a human way — that happily converges with present reality. Now marketers can and must define their brands by their core purpose.

GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT

First came what we call the Product Era, defined by focus on the intrinsic — or allegedly intrinsic — qualities of the product or service. We chortle at the naïveté of ad copy dating to 1659: "PANACEA, or the Universal Medicine: Being a DISCOVERY of the WonderfullVertues OF Tobacco Taken in a Pipe." How simplistic and hyperbolic! By the mid-20th century, nothing much had changed.

The second stage of that epoch — from about 1965 to roughly five minutes ago — was the Consumer Era. This was characterized by a shift from advertising and marketing focused on the product to getting into the head and heart of the consumer. The quintessential example is Nike's "Just Do It."

The Consumer Era could be broken into a four-step process: Ascertain through research what the public desires; offer it; create advertising designed to seduce, impress, entertain or flatter the target audience; and place that advertising in media favored by the target.

For three reasons, those universal marketing practices must be discarded:

• Chaos — Apocalypse Now: Enormous barriers of entry — the cost of a movie studio, or of printing presses and trucks, or of broadcast towers and transmitters — up to this point were surmountable only by a handful of heavily capitalized oligarchs. Now the cost of entry into film, publishing or videocasting is approximately the cost of an iPhone. The consequent glut has rendered these capital-intensive platforms no longer scarce and thus destroyed the revenue models of an entire sector of the economy.
• Ecology — You'll Wonder Where Your Money Went: Think of the marketing environment like the planetary environment. In the Consumer Era, businesses won customers by constantly, expensively burning fuel. That fuel is advertising. Now, amid the collapse of mass, the fuel itself is too expensive to produce. The future requires a sustainable alternative.
• Look Inward: In both the Product Era and the Consumer Era, businesses were slaves to consumer desires (actual and assumed), the competition's activities and the capital markets. A pillar of the Relationship Era is that it is better first to look inward than to define your business by your public's often fickle and shortsighted tastes. Genuine relationships are built on equality, not subservience. People wish to be listened to. They want attention and fairness and honesty and empathy and respect.

THE RELATIONSHIP ERA

Type "I love Apple" into your search bar. You will get 3.27 million hits. Starbucks: 2.7 million hits. Zappos: 1.19 million.

And "I love Citibank"? You get 21,100. AT&T Wireless: 7,890. Exxon: 4,730. Dow Chemical: three. Out of 7 billion human beings, three! Just to put that into context: If you type "I love Satan," you get 293,000 hits.

Citibank, AT&T Wireless, ExxonMobil and Dow among them spend $2 billion a year on advertising. Money, it turns out, really can't buy you love. It can't even buy you like.

The results dramatize three immutable facts of contemporary marketing life:

1. Millions of people will, of their own volition, announce to the world their affection for a brand. Not for a person, not for an artwork, not for a dessert but for a good or service. Congratulations. People care about you.

2. Your brand is inextricably entwined in such relationships. "I hate Exxon" gets 2.16 million hits. Each of those expressions of like, dislike, ardor or disgust has an exponent attached to it, reflecting the outward ripples of social interaction.

3. What used to happen in the privacy of your own boardroom, plants and C-suite is now extremely public and common currency on the Internet.

This is the Relationship Era, the first period of modern commerce when your success or failure depends not on what you say, nor even on what you produce, but increasingly on who you are.

Doing business in the Relationship Era has many requirements: ethical conduct, seamless customer relations, and constant contact and cooperation with all stakeholders. It must be an all-pervasive imperative to earn the trust of all concerned — not as a means to gain advantage in a sale or negotiation, but as an end in itself.

"It's always been about the individualized relationship," says Scott Olrich, CMO of Responsys. "A century or so back, the local corner shop lived or died based on the relationships they built. ... As new means of mass communications emerged, companies used their increased reach to try to advertise their way out of that responsibility. But today every aspect of the company's behavior is on public display. A relationship-first approach to every customer interaction has again become the imperative."

The relationships that businesses have mainly championed are those that are meant, one way or another, to grease the skids for a transaction. These relationships may be long lasting, and they may be mutually beneficial, but they are also superficial and opportunistic and sometimes even corrupt.

Though they may seem to yield similar benefits, relationships forged as a tool of naked self-interest and those forged in the natural course of shared experience have vastly different qualities.

Pure relationships are not transactional. However, this is another paradox. While cozying up to prospects for the sake of doing business tends to be manipulative and inauthentic, business cannot flow sustainably without the establishment of connections that are genuine and mutually satisfying. More than that, sustainable relationships built on admiration and trust create significant financial premiums. They represent goodwill that can be isolated as a component of share value. They result in higher share prices. They reduce the cost of promotion, improving ROI and bottom-line performance. And, perhaps most of all, they create an opportunity for transcendence — the state of being so admired as to maintain an aura of magic.

The proliferation of — and instant, perpetual access to — information from within the institution demands a total, irreversible embrace of Relationship Era practices across the board. The citizens formerly known as consumers now view institutions in their totality, and in a hyperlinked environment, everything you do is indeed linked in perpetuity. That means taking no relationship for granted, no matter how casual, because within each one resides the benefits of loyalty, labor, ingenuity and evangelism — not to mention entree into their social, professional and family circles. It means attaining full understanding of social media, most especially Facebook and Twitter, not as channels for sending out messages but as virtual salons for sharing what humans share: observations, discoveries, ideas, concerns, interests, opportunities and just plain cool stuff of mutual relevance.

So many marketers and other institutions believe that social media is just one maddeningly inefficient channel for selling their goods, services, politics or whatever. They see only the word media and ignore the word social. You cannot understand these technologies, much less benefit from them, if you do not first understand and internalize the idea that they are not about messaging; they are about relationships. Until you have established one, nobody much cares what you say.

TRUST ME

Trust is now the basis for everything. But we must define our terms. Trust constructed as a means to a mercenary end is not trust at all. People trust companies for the same reason they trust people. Institutions have joined the ranks of humanity.

But trust turns out to be a more multifaceted and ambiguous word than meets the eye. There is the most rudimentary dimension of confidence in a good or service: trusting that it will be acceptable and that the marketer will make things right if it fails to deliver. That level of trust is not nothing but neither is it much to aspire to. In the Relationship Era, trust is now the byproduct of genuine commitment to genuinely mutual values and interests. And it is now central to purchase consideration.

The Three C's of Trust

For the purposes of measuring brand sustainability, MEplusYOU broke the concept of trust down to three progressively complex components — the Three C's of Trust:

• Credibility: The presumption that at a minimum the marketer can be depended upon to meet the terms of the offer. A brand is itself essentially a proxy for that precise element of trust. Virtually all brands pay attention to credibility. They know they must deliver.
• Care: Through the Product Era and Consumer Era, marketers arguably cared about consumers. Indeed, the essence of marketing was to divine the needs and desires of the target audience, then to fulfill them. But a target is a thing that is shot at, and an audience passively listens. Neither concept has a role in the Relationship Era. Caring about consumers means actually caring about their lives and constructing your business to be as helpful as you can. And it means that, no less than the marketer, the buyer in every transaction should have succeeded.
• Congruency: People are increasingly reading the body language of corporations in search of the intangibles: beliefs, values, purpose. This demand for congruent values is the most difficult to measure, but also the most defining aspect of the Relationship Era. Prospering in the Relationship Era hinges largely on how well you find common cause with individuals on the same wavelength.

ON PURPOSE

In the Relationship Era, the starting point is the brand. The brand must know and be true to itself before it presumes to interact with the outside world. Marketers that thrive in the Relationship Era are clear on their purpose. A clear purpose defines what the brand or company stands for, beyond the financials, and inspires people not merely to patronize the brand, but to join it. Such brands (and other institutions) generate passion and loyalty, allowing them to be themselves instead of assuming a contrived advertising personality.

First Put on Your Own Mask

People know who they are. And people know who you are. You are being evaluated not just for what you sell but also by how you conduct yourself in the world with consequences that flow directly to the bottom line.

As an individual, you probably think about your purpose — the reason you get out of bed in the morning. We all want to provide value to the world, so why should we expect less of our organizations? Why are you in business? Why do you sell what you sell?

Rapid expansion, heedless acquisition, excessive cost-cutting, promotion-purchased market share and overextended debt can all pump up a stock, till one day comes the reckoning.

What is immutable — and priceless — is a company or brand guided by the answer to "Why?" This exercise not only focuses the organization from top to bottom, it announces with every interaction with every stakeholder what you are about every hour of every day wherever you conduct your business — from the boardroom to the call center to the loading dock.

To derive brand purpose, corporate and brand stewards must understand what motivates them, what inspires them, what role they see for themselves and what role they see for the goods they put out in the world.

SUSTAIN

Plant azaleas. Begonias, petunias and impatiens are lovely, but every year you have to start over with them. Azaleas are perennial.

Ad campaigns are trays of bedding plants. The Relationship Era is a garden full of azaleas. The most visible advantage of brand sustainability is the azalea effect — the diminished need to buy large quantities of advertising. Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich says his ad spending is 1 percent of sales. The casual-dining category as a whole spends 3 to 5 percent. The Zappos ad budget is near zero.

For the tray-of-petunias status quo, the place to look is AT&T Wireless. At the 2012 Ad Age Digital Conference, AT&T's VP for brand identity and design Gregg Heard wondered aloud why the company that delivers smartphone magic isn't more beloved. The very idea was met by the audience with skepticism. "What we want you to think," Heard continued, according toAd Age, "is that AT&T is an emotional lifestyle brand that lets you live your life more expansively and brings you new experiences and new value. But that's just not the perception."

The key words in that passage are "what we want you to think." In the Relationship Era, nobody cares what the brand wants us to think. We think what we think, which is largely a reflection of what those we trust think, and one entity whose customers do not trust it at all is AT&T Wireless.

The brand's solution is therefore retrograde and futile: changing the "Rethink Possible" advertising campaign. "We're shifting to focus on how technology is enabling our life," Heard told his colleagues. That means instead of announcing to an increasingly small and inattentive audience that AT&T offers the best coverage and connection speed, the brand will announce to an increasingly small and inattentive audience that the brand is part of users' most significant moments in life.

Yes, a telecom brand incapable of, ahem, connecting with its customers addresses the problem by changing its positioning. Someone needs to rethink impossible.

THE SECRET SECRET

Secret is no secret. It's been around since 1956, the first deodorant marketed exclusively to women. Through most of its history, the advertising themes have focused on product attributes, most famously: "Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman." With Secret, you can be active, get nervous, wear silk, lift your arms and generally live your life without fear of god-awful embarrassment over the fact that like everyone else on earth, you sweat.

Secret associate brand manager Matt Hollenkamp heard about a remarkable emerging story. Olympic medalist Diana Nyad, at age 60, was preparing to swim the 103 miles of open ocean between Havana, Cuba, and Miami. Was this something Secret could associate with? Well, yes — female fearlessness — not to mention that one of the newer items in the Secret Clinical line was a waterproof deodorant designed specifically for swimming.

All the team had to do was negotiate a sponsorship, develop a Facebook presence and visual identities for garments and gear, decals for the accompanying fleet of boats and kayaks, and other signage within one week.

Before the first day was out, the agency was at Nyad's California home shooting three promotional videos. Then Nyad postponed the swim. Then more delay until, with hurricane season upon her, she was forced to postpone her historic effort until the following year.

This gave the agency a chance to catch its breath. With the luxury of time the site was updated with a video of Nyad and was inundated with the encouragement of well- wishers, who were able to follow the progress of preparations for the historic swim.

Nyad took to the south Atlantic on what proved to be a doomed journey. Though kayakers paddled ahead of her with electronic shark repellent, this was no protection against box jellyfish; their repeated stings compromised her respiratory system. Breathing difficulties forced her out of the water. She tried again. She swam 49 miles in 40 hours pestered by barracuda and shark before stings from man-o'-war jellyfish put her at risk of anaphylactic shock. A third attempt ended prematurely for identical reasons.

Nyad had not conquered the Florida Straits, but she had won the respect of millions. Among them were those who followed intently on Secret's dedicated Facebook page.

Before Nyad even dove in the water, sales of Secret Clinical Strength Waterproof doubled. The only explanation for what occurred with the brand is the notion of membership: Women inspired by Diana Nyad's efforts wished to be associated with a brand operating under the same set of beliefs. In short, they wished to embrace a fellow traveler in the struggle.

There are questions for marketers to ask themselves when such opportunities arise:

• Does the effort exploit the plight of the subjects at the center of the initiative?
• Does the marketing material cheaply exploit the emotions of the target audience?
• Is the association between the brand and its third-party beneficiary genuine, or nakedly transactional?
• Does the effort conform with the stated or implicit purpose of the brand?

Clearly, Secret passes the, ahem, smell test on all counts. The swims were not stunts, they did not prey cynically on emotions or misfortune, and Secret's connection was a direct expression of its brand purpose.

THAT THING CALLED LIKE

The Coca-Cola Facebook page now has more than 45 million fans. Just to put that in perspective, the cost of reaching the equivalent audience with TV advertising — one commercial aired once — is about $1 million. Coca-Cola has access to the audience 24/7, for free.

Facebook interactions are worth more than the equivalent number of ad impressions. Engagement, by definition, is active. It is also charged with positive sentiment — sentiment that boasts far more authenticity than any claim of "happiness" propagated at extremely great expense by the brand itself.

Of course, nobody has barged into anybody's private space to make it all happen. On the contrary, Likers seek you out. The fact is a significant number of individuals with plenty of other things to do take the positive step of moving their cursor and clicking to register approval. The question is, as the number and growth of Likes are increasingly cited by brands, media and other institutions as evidence of consumer engagement, "What exactly does that approval mean?"

Expression of self is not the only instinctual aspect of Liking. Another is the human imperative to share, and it's easy to understand why that is hardwired; families and communities cannot thrive without it. But this behavior goes beyond mutual sustenance. According to psychology professor Samuel D. Gosling of the University of Texas, Like clicking exemplifies not just sharing but also the display of sharing. Sound primitive? Exactly.

At the Risk of Nit-Picking

"There's a very good parallel for this information," Gosling says. "Primates will groom each other and they will groom each other much more than they strictly need to from a health perspective ... they're just doing it in a public way saying 'we are connected and others can see that we are connected and that we are friends.'"

A human manifestation of this, he says, is when friends or acquaintances fuss extravagantly about one another's appearance or recent purchase. "It's about the social act of maintaining and strengthening the social bonds."

In a Relationship Era placing so much stock in consumer engagement, the Facebook Like seems like a plausible — if not ideal — unit of currency. It's spontaneous. It's voluntary. It's ubiquitous. Although what exactly it gives license for is not altogether clear.

Priority is given to Friends and brands you've a history of most interacting with. A second level of priority is given to richer content. So a Like is worth less than a comment, and a comment is worth less than a YouTube video and so on. None of which recommends a brand that you haven't much engaged with lately.

Researchers at the Australian marketing think tank Ehrenberg-Bass Institute isolated the People Talking About This results for the 200 most Liked companies on Facebook over a six-week period in late 2011 relative to the number of Likes and found that only .51 percent of Likers actually posted any brand-related content of any kind, including so much as a single comment. Even so-called high-interest brands like Harley-Davidson, Louis Vuitton and Jack Daniels all registered below 1 percent. Not eye-popping statistics — but ones that get right back to the basics of human behavior. Facebook is fundamentally a social mechanism; it is not a bazaar.

An ad is someone passing you on the street, someone you may or may not even notice. A Like is an encounter. It is an actual engagement involving at least a modicum of attention and emotion and presumption of ongoingness — a relationship, in other words.

Rather than falling into the (Consumer Era) trap of trying to convert Likes into transactions, dedicate yourself wholly to turning transactions into Likes.

THE SHIFT

We like to call the journey from the Consumer Era to the Relationship Era the Shift: the shift from mass to micro, the shift from top-down to bottom-up and the shift from traditional marketing to purposeful marketing.

The process begins with assembling the team and posing one central question: Why does the brand exist? It's helpful also to ponder a parallel question: If this brand disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, would anybody but financially interested parties care? If you are honest in your deliberations, this core purpose will be at the heart of everything you do.

To understand what a brand shares with its audiences, it had better know what those audiences have to say.

• Step 1. Listen. Brands have the capacity to monitor hundreds of millions of voices at the same time, to sift through all sorts of public chatter to discover who is saying what about what or whom at any moment in time or over any period of time. Through free applications such as Twitter Search or Google Blog Search, any brand can gather more raw material about its place — or its competitors' place — in the conversation than ever imaginable. Many private vendors offer sophisticated analytics, including sentiment analysis that divines the trajectory of public opinion about your company and brand. Monitoring this traffic is the bare minimum for any brand, company, organization, institution or individual. You find out where you stand in the public's mind. You can quickly address individual customer issues. You can learn more than market research has ever told you about the interests, values, likes, dislikes, passions and fears of those in your sphere. You get early warnings of opportunities or trouble ahead.
• Step 2. Define social personality. Relating as a brand is fundamentally the same as relating as a person. However, the brand's online persona will not be expressed by one individual. There may be a half dozen, or even in some cases hundreds of employees with responsibility for representing the brand's thoughts, observations, questions, interests, boasts, excuses, apologies and attitudes on Facebook, Twitter and so on. All involved must embrace a set of consistent characteristics personifying the brand. This requires imagining the ideal human front-line representative and listing his or her personality traits. Yes, a brand needs a social voice, but a brand is not defined by its social voice. D.H. Lawrence put it nicely: "I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities, but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality."
• Step 3. Join the conversation. Relationship Era thinking is not confined to e- relationships. However, as a percentage of the total universe of interactions, online is increasingly where the rubber meets the road. Enter the conversation not by calling attention to yourself with offers and promotion and fledgling schemes. First, simply share. Pass along items of interest. Share relevant news, information, videos, charts, quotations and other content with potentially interested parties. Do not attempt to gild the lily with some sort of brand spin. At least, not yet. If you gain credibility as a trusted curator, you will be taken more seriously when — and if — you presume to lead.
• Step 4. Lead the conversation. If you have any kind of brand profile, and if you have been a good social-media participant, at this stage you will have an organically accrued following in various online channels. Now, finally, you are in a position to be proactive. Your organization houses great expertise over a wide array of subject matter, your brand as a whole has a point of view, and you have significant numbers of interested parties prepared to take you seriously. But not by delivering ads or press releases disguised as content. You're still in the human conversation, and the rules of engagement haven't changed. What's changed is the readiness of your public to pay attention. That is a precious opportunity. Do not lapse into corporate speak.
• Step 5. Ignite and invite action. You have arrived at the stage where the brand has a chance to do something nakedly self-interested by means of doing something contrived to attract the interest of your followers and to attract more followers overall. This usually means giving them something — perhaps a freebie, a coupon or a fun online activity. An even better way is to ask for a favor. As counterintuitive as this may sound, human beings will identify with those they have been called upon to assist. Seeking help from your various stakeholders obliges them to align their thoughts, feelings and actions. Adam Ferrier, consumer psychologist, says, "You can have the relationship start by asking someone to do you a favor and invest something of themselves into you. If they want ownership, give them more ownership. Get them into your brand and your business as much as possible. Let them become co-producers of your brand and they become more loyal."
• Step 6. Inspire greater collaboration. Or, as we call it, nirvana. This is where nominal outsiders become your de facto marketers, PR agents, product developers, business consultants and production companies. It's not just collaboration; it's a role reversal. The audience now performs, and the artist listens. They represent the most intimate relationships achievable among nominal strangers in the form of extraordinary identification with the brand. You are a part of them, and they become part of you. They are not Friends. They are friends.

It is not about conquest any more than friendship is about conquest. It is about shared interests and shared values that can be the basis for priceless but utterly immeasurable lifelong relationships.

DO'S, DON'TS AND ... NO, REALLY, DON'TS

If you are cultivating community and conversation for the purpose of corralling cattle into the slaughterhouse, you are not engaging in a social strategy. You are engaging in a sales strategy, which is pretty close to the antithesis of social marketing.

In a social situation, the more you sell, the more you scare — or simply bore — people away. The harder you try to close, the more likely you are to be closed out. This central truth is not difficult for brands to understand, but for some reason it is hard for them to internalize and act upon. What is first required is to embrace social relationship building not as the latest marketing fad, or even as a new reality that has been forced upon you, but as a means to re-evaluate who you are, what you stand for and why you are in business in the first place. If the only answer is "more transactions," the future will not be kind to you.

It is a very good idea to listen carefully to Twitter, et al., to find out issues in order to address them. It is a terrible idea to stage a public rally and randomly hand out bullhorns. Your nastiest critics will grab them, too, and speak right up. The beast can turn on you.

To stimulate the spread of content, marketers are obliged to acquire first-generation viewers in strategically chosen online venues much as they'd make any media buy. It's called "seeding." Since 2009, Visible Measures has tracked 7,000-plus campaigns adjudged to have achieved some measure of virality. Virtually all were kick-started with an ad buy — a category of spending Brian Shin of Visible Measures believes exceeds $600 million annually. "Maximizing pass-along or virality of content," he says, "is really a combination of having both entertaining and targeted content, combined with focusing the distribution and the places where the content can be activated."

While creating so-called owned content can be useful, productive and trust enhancing, it can also be expensive, and due to that expense, marketers tend to err on the side of heavier branding. As we have seen, the more heavy-handed the branding, the more the resistance and the more likely the content will be seen as thinly veiled advertising, which is less trustworthy even than in-your-face advertising, because of the perception of sneakiness.

Goodwill can be accumulated over time by fostering a relationship exactly akin to ones with friends and loved ones. That means sharing relevant content that may have nothing to do with your brand per se but everything to do with the overlaps of interest between you and your public.

As marketers have discovered the hard way, you can't fake authenticity. The Internet will be on to you in a New York minute. So don't playact at sincerity, don't pander to customers, don't whitewash or greenwash, don't try to purchase goodwill, and give serious consideration to telling the truth. All of it.

RECOMMENDED READING LIST

If you liked Can't Buy Me Like, you'll also like:

1. The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk. Thank You Economy principles are about the way we communicate, the way we buy and sell, and the way businesses and consumers interact online and offline.

2. The Third Screen by Chuck Martin. Martin links the technological developments of m-commerce to the behavioral changes that accompany them.

3. Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki. All the tactics you need to prepare and launch an enchantment campaign to enchant your customers.

The Authors

Bob Garfield is the co-host of NPR's On the Media and a columnist for MediaPost. Previously at Advertising Age, he has been a prominent commentator on and analyst of advertising and marketing for 30 years. His previous books include The Chaos Scenario.

Doug Levy is the founder and CEO of MEplusYOU, a leading strategic and creative agency that believes authentic relationships fuel astonishing brands.