Of Twitter & It's emotions

Twitter posted an YoY growth of 48% and a $710 million revenue last quarter. Despite the seemingly stellar performance, Twitter got a lot of flak from media and other online pundits.

The reason: A flat MAU (Monthly active users) overall and a negative growth if one excludes the SMS users.

Problems with Twitter 

Many product experts & online gurus have written about the chink in twitter's armory & how they can overcome it. You can read about them here, here & here. The key takeaway from all of these blogs:

1. Confusing, intimidating and a scary product experience. This is the reason we see so many new signups followed by long periods of inactivity. 
2. Lack of effective measures to tackle threats & abuses
3. Lack of ego massage. Remember people literally start with zero followers, and find hard to build their follower base and eventually give up. 

Not the go-to channel for advertisers

Apart from the above mentioned problems, twitter does not compare favorably as a platform of choice for wide section of advertisers. Many (including me) see twitter as a platform for getting 'real time news & updates'. The nature of the product suits certain kinds of businesses and categories very well like news channels, businesses in service sector and personal technology products among others. 

But for many others, the necessity or need to give 'real time' information to their customers is not paramount. For instance, a consumer goods company may choose to use twitter as a broadcast medium as opposed to a communication medium.  

Inconsistent product experience

However, the core problem with Twitter has been the inconsistent product experience. I have been an avid user of Twitter since 2012 and I am addicted to the platform. I primarily see it as a source of quick, authentic, useful information & discussions. As a customer, everyone needs a consistent product experience. I wouldn't patronize or recommend a super-classy restaurant that has turned into a filthy highway joint.  Same is the case with twitter.

I would go on & classify the different kind of emotions/experiences with Twitter into the following buckets:

• Being informed: I share a lot of useful stuff on twitter. Links, tweets pertaining to things like marketing, content, advertising, trivia, hacks etc and I follow people who share similar things. I enjoy the process of finding stuff real time.

• Entertainment: There is lot of pun, humor around twitter which instantly puts a smile on my face. It comes as a welcome break in your hectic day. 

• Hopeful: I feel a lot more hopeful when I see positive initiatives from government agencies (Railways, MEA), NGO's (Chennai floods, Nepal earthquake, Mumbai rains). The spirit of individuals & celebrities was something very heartening to see. 

• Motivated: Quotes & insights from marketing gurus, startup founders , success stories are all sources of motivation. 

• And then there are certain days, when there is so much negativity by political parties, fans of actors over downright stupid issues (at least in India). Off late, tweets of this genre has dominated my timeline. "Influencers" with motivated intent make sure they bombard your timeline with tweets that are negative, and has overdose of a "brand messages".

As you had seen from the above example, the dominant feeling of using a product changes drastically during the course of a single day. If the dominant feeling is more negative or intimidating, one tends to stay away from the platform for most part of the day.

A quick poll on the various emotions a user go through on twitter has been enumerated here which pretty much testifies the pre-dominant feeling of using twitter for an average Indian user.

The onus of keeping the time-line clean, positive and buzzing with latest stuff squarely lies with the user. He/she has to follow the right people, be part of the 'right' lists, and be smart about who they want to be followed by. I feel that's too much of an effort from the user side. 

Sense this: You will still able to see tweets/posts of a person, his tweets will still be visible to you if the tweet is RT'ed by a person you follow. The whole point of avoiding negativity and consuming information "I want" goes for a toss. 

So, what problem of connectivity is twitter solving?

Final thoughts:

The strong and visceral emotions can take a toll on most of the people, including regular users. What chance will a newbie have if they are put off the bile on their very first day on twitter? Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn have their own short comings, but split personality & unpredictability is not one among them!

Your take?

Platform oriented businesses- What are the branding challenges?

Off-late, there has been rise in the number of 'platform oriented businesses'. Zomato, Ola, Uber, AirBnB are a few businesses who have emerged as unicorns from the 'Platform' oriented model. No, I am not going to talk about their success stories and how they have created a 'niche' for themselves. The article is going to analyse unique characteristics of platforms, and challenges from a branding perspective.

How is a platform different from a linear business?

Before we get any further, let's get the difference between a platform & linear companies straight.  A platform is a business model that ensures exchange of values (owned or created on the platform) between two or more user groups.  Uber, Twitter, Facebook, AirBnB are all examples of such platforms.

On the other hand a linear business creates & owns the value it provides to its consumers. PizzaHut, Hilton Group etc are examples of linear business models.  These businesses control every aspect of the end-user's experience.

With differences laid out, how is branding for 'platforms' unique and challenging?

1. A platform has less or no control over the user experience

The challenge is self-explanatory. Any major platform oriented business does not own or control the user experience. For instance, AirBnb- World's largest market place for vacation rentals does not own a SINGLE hotel or room. Unlike a hotel chain that controls 100% of the user experience (from booking to check-out), AirBnB probably controls 5-10% of the consumer experience.

Like any platform business, the brand persona is created  through users interaction with each other. Dosen't that give you jitters as a brand manager? But dosent seem like Midenhall- CMO of AirBnb is massively bothered.

A quick look at his Linkedin profile reveals how he sees AirBnb- 'World's first community driven super-brand'.  This shows that more than 90% of the AirBnB is dictated & controlled by its users and not the corporate leadership. This can be viewed as a benefit of the platform business model- Externalised brand building. Linear brands try to 'crowdsource' or 'get inspiration' for marketing stories. In a platform, the stories between two humans are stronger than the story of singular human/product/service.

Successful brands have emulated this to overcome the lack of control over user experience.  So build your story.

2. A platform is more momentary in nature

A platform is not an easy business to establish & run. The focus should always be on recruiting producers & consumers to solve each others problem, and ensure that they stick to your platform.  However, platforms are very very dynamic in nature. They are built on moments when everything clicks.

Product- market fit is one such example. Players like  Ola, Uber experienced product-market fit because the product enabled people to easily 'book a car' for committing and drivers benefited from the process of 'automated' revenue & incentives. Whilst Uber initially invested heavily on building technology, on-boarding drivers & consumers, it benefited from massive scalability thereafter.

So, now to the main question! How does disrutption and scalability make branding for platforms unique?

• A platform brand must always start with utility-driven brand positioning.

• The second challenge comes from the fact that any platform will go through three stages of branding within first 10 years of inception (elaborated below) and is evolutionary in nature. This is in complete contrast to what happens for a linear brand, where the positioning is always focussed on just getting 'being aspirational'. 

As seen from a lot successful platforms, there are three stages to platform branding to overcome the 'momentary' nature of platforms.

• Utility-  Any platform has to be disruptive. Introduce new  behvaiour among its users & suppliers (Remember how Zomato changed food discovery among consumers & hoteliers).  This phase of branding usually focusses on convincing users about the value of the platform,  and how to unlock best value, and opportunities  for its suppliers. 'Zomato' did this brilliantly helping users discover new restaurants at the push of a button, "Uber" did an exceptional job of having a private driver for all our commuting purpose, with just a couple of clicks. Both these platforms were vert utility focussed and provided just ONE thing that the user wanted. The problem they were solving was incorporated into their branding strategy! How cool!

• Incubation- This stage, the startups have reached a stage where they need to start thinking like a traditional brand.  All successful platform brands like Google, Amazon etc had a big incubation period, before they built a successful brand positioning.  When Google started out, it was all utility focussed, and offered an alternative to Yahoo search. Google then entered a period of incubation (or product innovation) and came up with awesome stuff like Gmail, Youtube (acquisition), Maps, Adwords which enhanced its core product- Search engine.  The incubation has paid off & how! Currently Google positions itself as 'Organizing world's information'. 

• Aspirational - The final phase of getting a successful platform branding is to become aspirational (After a massively successful incubation). Things like purpose of existence (Mission), Road map etc should be very clear. A good example for this is Facebook's positioning. It started out as a platform for "connecting" friends, and now is on a mission to "Connecting & empowering people around the world" through Facebook. All their initiatives like messenger, Free basics, etc are aimed to deliver this. 

 3.  Platforms have different interaction models based on platform types

Just like products, the  customer interacts differently with different platforms. Some platforms are purely transactional, some are purely for engagement purpose, and some are for utility purpose. The interaction model of each platform will determine how it starts to brand itself in stage-1.

Any other challenges you think needs to included? Feel free to comment in! 

Verbifying brand names: The good and the bad

We all FaceTime/Skype but we generally don't Facebook or Youtube. Similarly we Google & don't Bing (at least not me :D) The usage of 'Google it' subliminally cues the market leadership of Google.

So, why are some popular brands used in our daily conversations as verbs and other are not? Is it really a good idea to 'Verbify' a brand (Remember, not everyone is Google :P). Many may think that it's an ultimate compliment for a brand to be used as a verb and demonstrates the personal connection between the consumer & the company. However the 'intellectual attorneys' contend that using a brand name this way risks the 'Genricide', meaning losing the legal power to trademark.

Some prominent brand names that have been verbified:

Bikni: Trademark previously owned by the creator of Bikni- Louis Reard.

Xerox: A company that first introduced photo-copying machines in 1949, became synonyms to the word 'Photo-copy'. There are many reasons why Xerox lost it's market share to competitors, but they invested millions of dollars in fruitless campaigns to persuade people not to use Xerox as verb. Xerox did win the battle (Not in India though ) but lost the market!

FedEx: A US- phenomenon to indicate sending parcels via courier.

Photoshop: A software by adobe. But many people use it to indicate any modification of images.

Escalator: Product of Otis, which owned the trademark previously. 

Harpic: A substitute used to refer to toilet cleaners. The trademark is owned by Reckitt Benckiser Group plc

From what we have seen from the above examples, some brands have become so 'Genricized' that we no longer associate them as brand names in our mind. From the example of Google, it would be safe to say that brand name as verb in a virtual monopoly situation actually beneficial.  However, Google has repeatedly warned people against using their trademark as a verb, for if google becomes synonyms to 'search' (which it already has) Microsoft could advertise "Use Bing for all your complicated googling" :P. 

When the verbification happens in a segment consisting of many small players, there is no benefit  as seen with cases of Xerox & Bikni.  The verb usage doesn't really matter, as the brand name connotation has well & truly disappeared, indicating that the branding managers did not do enough to protect their trademark from becoming generic. 

Any more examples of beneficial or detrimental brand names as verbs?