Ms Bendall illustrated our times with the unstoppable growth of Netflix. “Most Australians now don’t watch commercial TV; they watch what they want to watch.” Meanwhile, “the music industry has not died, but the way to consume music has changed.” From this we extract that the way to tackle the move to the digital economy is “to reinvent yourself while you still have an audience.”
The point is that, in this day and age, advertising is becoming more and more difficult, and in this context, Ms Bendall defends that the most effective and substantial social media strategy is based solely on advocacy. Advocacy has been defined as the skill to persuade, “to make sure people take our recommendation to purchase off you without an incentive to do so. It is all about that ‘I generally love you, and I will tell everyone about you’,” she explains.
Ms Bendall states that they took 900 characteristics of what they believed made an advocate to help them understand their customers better. Afterwards, they conducted an experiment in a call centre in Slough. “We analysed 300 people in that call centre and only 7 displayed the characteristics of advocates; we took them off the centre, we worked and built a relationship with [their] senior leadership team, put them back on the call centre, it changed the culture and we increased the profit by 28%,” she assures.
The bottom line is that, according to Ms Bendall, “76% of our decisions are made by our irrational brain; we are controlled by [expressions like] ‘wow, that is amazing! I must buy one of those’.” Customers not only pursue a good experience, but “they want you to recognise your relationship with them; that’s what they value.” If you understand who your advocates are, you have a greater chance of success.
Ms Bendall defends this principle as the cornerstone of social media today. You don’t only need some nice content, “you need to build an army of advocates; an army of recommendation; that is where your focus needs to be,” she asserts. “You don’t need an agency creating content that is very hygienic, when [your advocates] are going to talk to each other and create content for you.”
This level of advocacy is achieved “by investing in relationships and investigating different ways to communicate with people,” she concludes. There is no better example than Tropical Pineapples, one of Fi Bendall’s clients, which, with a mother’s network, has managed to reach 1.3 million people organically, and with a fraction of what it would cost to reach the same people with traditional advertisements.