Why She Buys (27 page)
Authors: Bridget Brennan
Woman as hero instead of product as hero
does
—not how it works
Consider the Source: Public Relations
S
USIE
, a mother of three in the San Francisco Bay Area, wasn’t sure what to do about all the plastic water bottles in her home. She’d heard stories in the news recently about chemicals leaching from certain brands of bottles that posed
a potential health hazard. She and her kids have an active lifestyle, and water bottles are always with them. She needed a trusted opinion on which kind to buy. So she turned to her local parenting group, the Marin Parents of Multiples, where she learned about a Swiss brand called Sigg that was 100 percent aluminum and leachproof. She immediately went out and bought four bottles, one for each member of her family. Her trusted source—a local parenting website and its community forum—had come through for her again.
The way Susie discovered Sigg is increasingly common. With so little time left over from work and family responsibilities, a busy mom like Susie can’t and won’t easily absorb marketing messages. She uses shortcuts to discover what she needs to know. Women are seekers of help, and they’ll zero in on their most credible sources for advice, from girlfriends, mothers, and pediatricians to their favorite magazines, websites, blogs, and TV shows. Women’s propensity to ask people for product advice comes both from a lack of time and from the importance placed on third-party credibility.
Women constantly have their antennae out for tips and advice and are happy when someone they trust has done the product research for them, whether it’s a neighbor with a recommendation for a contractor, a magazine editor with a top-ten list, or a friend on Facebook who’s just become a fan of a cool new band.
Third-party credibility is powerful with women. The reasons stem not only from living in an oversaturated marketing environment but also from childhood, where young girls learn that bragging is frowned upon in female culture. Girls learn fast that it’s better to have someone else do their bragging for them. This applies to products as well as people:
women would rather have someone else tell them how great your product is, not necessarily you—hence the enduring popularity of
Consumer Reports
and the more recent successes of websites such as
TripAdvisor.com
and
Yelp.com
, and recommendations from sites like Amazon, iTunes, and CNET. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global study of consumer influence from one of the world’s largest public relations agencies, one of the most credible sources of information about a company is a “person like yourself.” The least credible source cited in the study was corporate or product advertising.
When you combine this information about trust with two other aspects of female culture—that product knowledge is a form of social currency, and that women feel compelled to tell their friends about new finds—then it’s easy to see why women place so much value on credible opinions.
All of which leads to public relations as one of the most effective ways for women to learn about your product or service. The power of PR comes from the third-party credibility of having
other
people say great things about you, which makes it an excellent marketing vehicle for reaching and influencing women. Just the mention of your brand in an environment that your customers consider credible can have an impact. This is why everyone in the world wants to promote a book on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, give away a product on
The Ellen Degeneres Show
, or get featured as an editor’s pick in a magazine.
The problem is that while many companies dream of getting third-party endorsements from experts and influential people, they aren’t prepared to commit the resources needed to get them. While “free” publicity seems free, it rarely is, since there are significant, hard costs in terms of
the labor and proactivity it takes to get your product or service in the hands of the journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and producers who sway opinion. The perception that publicity is free is a false one, yet it persists.
The other reason it’s difficult for some people to rationalize public relations spending is because there are no guarantees. You can send a product to one of Oprah’s producers, for example, but you will never know if Oprah herself will ever do anything with it, or even see it, unless you’ve developed a relationship with that producer. The same is true with most public relations efforts. Putting energy and resources behind proactive relationship-building with the media and people who influence your target audience can pay off substantially—especially when it comes to working with bloggers, who many women feel are the very definition of “a person like yourself.”
Spreading the Message Through Women Bloggers
T
HE
courting of women bloggers is a public relations strategy that has exploded in importance in recent years. There are about thirty-six million reasons why. This is the number of women who participate in the blogosphere weekly: there are about fifteen million women who write blogs, and twenty-one million who read and/or post to blogs on a weekly basis.
9
That’s a lot of women. People always ask me, Who are they? What are they writing about? And who reads them? The majority of women bloggers are between the ages of twenty-nine and forty-four, and a significant percentage of
them are in the life stage of early motherhood. These so-called mommy bloggers write about their lives and the juggling act of managing households full of babies and young kids. They seek community with other mothers who are doing the same.
“Blogs are the new back fence,” says BlogHer cofounder Jory Des Jardins, who runs a network of more than twenty-seven hundred women’s blogs in a business based near San Francisco. Take a drive through a suburban neighborhood in the middle of a weekday and you’ll see what she means: in many places, you’ll find silence and empty streets. With most women working outside the home, those who choose to stay home and raise their kids can feel isolated and alone. Blogging is a way for them to meet their “neighbors”—whether it’s a few streets or a few states over. Women who work outside the home can feel isolated, too, and may be uncomfortable sharing their parenting issues at work. These women use blogs as sounding boards for stories and advice along the journey of motherhood.
Because bloggers write about their own lives, their opinions are perceived as authentic—and therefore credible—and carry weight with readers. They write about the everyday aspects of their lives, such as going to visit their kids at school, trying a new brand of diapers, or shopping at their favorite online stores. Often, they talk about their feelings and the challenges of getting through the day with their sanity intact. Since moms are such a powerful spending force, marketers are wooing the mommy bloggers accordingly.
Enter networks such as BlogHer, which serve as a clearinghouse for companies looking to place their ads on women’s blogs on a mass scale. BlogHer sells space on its
members’ blogs in the same way other media sell space—on a cost-per-thousand basis. Every blogger who allows an ad to be placed “above the fold” on her blog receives a small stipend. It has become a media vehicle that agencies buy in virtually the same way that traditional advertising is purchased.
From a public relations standpoint, many companies’ strategies with bloggers run deep. More and more companies are developing full-blown blogger relations programs. Major players such as Procter & Gamble and Disney have invited mommy bloggers to meet with executives, discuss products, tour their facilities, and provide feedback, in hopes that the bloggers will walk away with a positive experience of the brand. “Field trips” to company headquarters are becoming quite common. Most of the companies that fund these all-expenses-paid blogger trips don’t require the bloggers to write about their experiences—that approach would likely backfire—but the presumption is that they will write positive stories, and most do. The bloggers will often show pictures from these corporate events; they’ll discuss their interviews with executives; they’ll Twitter directly from the event as it’s happening; and many will rave about being treated like queens. For women who are out of the workforce, an all-expense-paid trip is often a welcome break, and a chance to feel valued by high-profile corporate executives. In return, the companies get a grassroots audience exposed to their brand in an authentic and credible way.
For companies in the business-to-business space, industry bloggers can be hugely influential, particularly when it comes to technology. Adam Schokora, a Shanghai-based
social media strategist who studies bloggers for Edelman Digital, gives some practical advice on how to reach the world of industry bloggers. “It’s not how many people you’re talking to online, it’s who,” he says. “Ten people might influence hundreds of thousands of people, so focusing on those ten is the smartest strategy.” In the United States, one way to determine the most highly trafficked bloggers is through ranking services such as Alexa and Technorati, which compile lists of the most widely visited sites.
The best way to approach bloggers is to read their entries over a significant period of time so that when you approach them, you can tailor your pitch to what interests them—and their readership—most. It’s the same way that most companies approach journalists: knowing their beat, their past stories, and their topics of interest. One company, baby products manufacturer Graco, started its own blog in which parents on the Graco corporate staff write about their experiences with parenthood. The Graco corporate blog links to dozens of other mommy blogs, and the company hosts blogger get-togethers across the country so that these scribes can meet each other in person.