Wonderful, wonderful article by Neil Strauss on why we should all dislike the “Like” culture. Strauss maintains “Like” motivates us to compromise, to chase stupid metrics in a desperate search for acceptability. “There’s a growing cultural obsession with being blogged, digged, tweeted and liked,” Strauss observes, and it’s all about hitting the numbers, at the expense of having a distinctive point of view.
He has a point. Today’s buzzword – influence – is really all about cultivating a following – with the emphasis on cultivating. On the one hand, that’s a very positive thing. It brings people together, it generates and mobilises conversation. It has an outreach driver that is positive and convivial. It also provides real showcase opportunities to articulate individual expertise and authority in a subject matter, which can be important platforms if you’re looking to publish, speak or consult for example. But Strauss’s point is that, when our actions are influenced by our stats, and not the other way around, the search for approval becomes a straitjacket.
“Like culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem …” writes Strauss, “ … we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have.”
“Liked” is a false god – and it creates a false impression. It lures people into judging how true their thinking is and how valid their point of view is by what others say and how many of them say it.
The difficulty for brands looking to negotiate the social and indeed the wider marketing minefield is that cultivating a following – becoming and staying popular – really is core business. Without scaled approval at some level (even if they are cult brands), brands simply do not have the numbers to survive commercially. The dilemma is how to build enough personality and opinion into the brand to make it compelling whilst at the same time attracting enough people to the brand to ensure its viability; striking a balance between personality and popularity.
I speak often about the needs for brands to be magnetic: to draw people to them because of what they stand for, how they see the world, and the actions that they take. That’s very different from skewing everything you do to find the most common denominator – and that is clearly the gist of Neil Strauss’s concern.
For me, that’s why it’s so important to distinguish between liked and likeable. A brand that is “liked” is a brand people agree with – momentarily. A brand that is likeable is a brand people identify with. Following your “likes” is like valuing your company by watching your share price. Your esteem is totally at the behest of others, and in many ways beyond your control, highly volatile and easily driven off-course by what’s going on elsewhere.
Seeking to create a brand that is truly likeable is about bringing out the deeper qualities that customers see in your brand, that they are drawn to over the longer term and that actually come very easily to the brand because they are at the core of its ethos. A likeable brand is not necessarily top-of-mind all the time and is not necessarily the most popular – but for a customer or prospect looking to purchase, it is the most relevant and the most engaging when it really matters.
A lot of that comes down to other simple things like how often people buy in that category. I’m not a car fanatic, for example, so I would only be looking at cars every few years. What the car brands would be hoping is not so much to have my attention all that time, but rather to gain my attention when I was in the market for a vehicle. That doesn’t mean of course that they don’t need to continue to engage with them – in this day and age, that’s almost a given – but the fact that they don’t necessarily make the top of my “like” list every day is no indicator of preference.
Purchases happen at the intersection of need/want, preference and availability In that sense “Like” is an indicator. Strauss reminds us though that it shouldn’t be the validator.
