Qualitative Researcher: The Not-So-Secret Way To Make Your Brand Viral

No one cares about your hashtag. Here's what consumers really want

 How do you get shoppers to care about a brand as un-sexy as stovetop pasta and cheese product? Hint: It’s not in the hashtags. Megan Weisberger, qualitative researcher at Miner & Co Studio, tells PSFK about her experience in breaking through the delusions of companies to get to the heart of a market: Real people.

No one wants to use your brand hashtag. Honestly.

It matters to you, The Marketer, The KPI-Achiever, The Chief Creator of Virality, and to you alone.

A few days ago, I received a brand gift out of left field, along with explicit instructions to use a four-syllable hashtag talking about how much I loved my new collection of CPG products. And, shockingly, I didn’t want to. I didn’t care about the brand, and it didn’t feel like the brand gave a damn about me.

Building a community is not about bombarding people with an innocuous marketing slogan that checks off your campaign boxes, but adds absolutely zero value to the lives of anyone who doesn’t receive a paycheck from a major corporation. It’s about loving your people, and about celebrating them as hard as you possibly can.

After a career spent building communities around the brands no one in their right minds would give one iota about (here’s to you, Hamburger Helper and Loctite Glue <3), I’m here to tell you that they’re built when you genuinely love your super fans. When you abandon the idea of being The Cool Brand and get weirdly, over-the-top enthusiastic about the product at hand, no matter how underwhelming or mundane it seems.

For the last five years, I’ve bounced between ad agencies—both traditional and ‘digital’ (whatever that actually means these days)—and huge corporations. Over and over again, regardless of the work environment, I watched brands and brand managers try to dictate who they want their fans to be, instead of embracing who they actually are. Every company on the planet wants to be the granola bar or car of choice of the young, white, liberal Millennial set with tons of disposable income to burn but, like the rest of us, these made-up unicorn people can only be fans of so many brands.

Building an excited, supportive brand community actually has a lot in common with your family, and your high school friends (you know, the ones who are probably littering your newsfeeds with posts about How To Make America Great Again right now). You don’t get to pick them, but you do have to love them. They might not be the glamorous fan archetype you were hoping for, but they’re YOURS.

Be kind to them. Love them. Tell them you love them.

At one point in my career, I was given the dubiously achievable task of getting people really excited about Hamburger Helper—the odd boxed dinner from the 1970s, light years behind the cultural zeitgeist of ‘shopping the perimeter of the grocery store,’ whose spokesperson is a four-fingered glove named Lefty. The company higher-ups were convinced that it was a dinner beloved by white, upper-class moms who drove Escalades. It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. But they blindly believed this because it was what they knew, and who they were. Many of them turned up their noses at the product, which, in turn, came through loud and clear in its marketing.
However, when you got outside of the glass tower, and had conversations with the people who actually eat Hamburger Helper, there was an enormous sense of pride associated with the product.

Lower-income moms were proud as hell of stretching a dollar to feed their entire family, and young men were shyly ecstatic about feeling like masters of the kitchen for the first time ever. These people were the exact opposite of ‘who the target was,’ but I started talking to them online, and celebrating their victories—no matter how minuscule—and telling them that they mattered to us.

When you hand out high fives (or, you know, ‘fours’) and talk to your fans like they’re actual people—people who you genuinely see and appreciate—they start becoming invested in the brand. When you give out an immense amount of love on the internet, it starts boomeranging back to you and, eventually, it turns into people who are willing to go to bat for your brand. They start talking about you organically, and those mentions and interactions are worth tenfold of the forced ones.

The internet is not so different from real life in that way. Be a person and be a warm, enthusiastic one. Worry less about ROI and being immensely polished. Worry more about kind, personalized interactions. Your brand community will start to grow in direct proportion to the karma you dish out, and it will be full of people who genuinely love you; not empty bot-friends who were exorbitantly paid to ‘like’ you.

Megan Weisenberger is a qualitative researcher at Miner & Co. Studio in New York. She’s spent the last five years in the NYC ad world, and gets excited about books, red wine, funny human beings and getting on airplanes.

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