The Emoji Test

Emoji culture is hitting an all time high among consumers. Emojis express tone, voice, and emotion where words simply cannot do justice 😩😃😐. Emojis are personal. They are employed in a variety of circumstances conveying a range of emotions within their context. As is the case with most elements of popular culture, brands are also starting to explore where this new asset fits in their marketing toolbox.

The truth is, they don’t fit – at least not for brands that haven’t earned the right ✋

Social media has given brands unique opportunities to engage with their customers on a personal level. But that level of interaction hasn’t really extended beyond asynchronous messaging and content on a few dominant channels (twitter, facebook, instagram, pinterest). These platforms are each unique opportunities to build trust with consumers on a seemingly personal level.

Building and keeping trust is the challenge for all brands. Understanding customers’ behaviors and willingness to engage is incredibly difficult. Relationships between people are intimate; they have nuances that are impossible to explain or comprehend 👫👬👭. The relationship between brands and people should not be underestimated. As such, the days of mass produced, generic messaging to consumers are gone. Even the best targeting cannot begin to account for the needs and desires of every customer. Brands employing a social first, mobile enabled customer engagement strategy will continue to see greater success in developing trust with their most loyal customers.

And these are the brands that are most likely to pass the Emoji Test; brands that have built enough social capital, enough customer knowledge, and enough trust that they can use emojis conversationally with their customers. These brands have earned the freedom, bestowed on them by their customers to publicly or privately get personal.

As marketers, these are the key questions we should ask ourselves to gauge whether or not the brand will pass The Emoji Test.

1. Does the brand have an engaged and active customer base on social channels (measured in likes, RT’s, comments, posts, shares, etc)
2. Are you already actively responding to your customer on these social channels?
3. Are other branded marketing efforts centered around a mobile-first strategy?
4. Can you measure the nuances of customers (their opinion to relevant topics, their general lifestyle and routines, their reaction to your engagement)
5. Do you use and understand emojis in your own communication with friends, family and colleagues.

Ashley Stewart is an example of a brand that passes the Emoji Test with flying colors. CEO, James Rhee, has led this formerly bankrupt brand down a path to build authentic relationships with their customers. As he says, “we are a mission-driven business — we believe in advocating for a woman who could sometimes use more advocacy. Everything we do is to serve her. Period. And she has led the way forward for us”. Rhee has championed an effort to make the Ashley Stewart customer the centerpiece of the business. In doing so, every employee across departments (marketing, ecommerce, sales, design, etc) moves as one to do what is right for their customer. They invest in their customer as if they are investing in a friendship. And it’s paying off. Previously bankrupt, their sales are up 80% YoY and they have one of the fastest growing social presences among fashion retailers. Most importantly, they’ve built a wealth of social capital with their customers. When Ashley Stewart responds to customers with a 😀or a ❤, it feels authentic.

Ashley Stewart is as much a person as she/it is a brand. Her use of emojis extends beyond just  comments on facebook to every touchpoint she has with her friends. Customers can even chat with Ashley from their phone as if they would any other friend.

And they are not alone on the list of brands engaging consumers this way. Doves’ Curly Haired Emojis and Dominos allowing customers to order a pizza by tweeting 🍕, are both great examples of how brands can genuinely utilize this form of visual communication.

Yet there are still many cases where brands have failed the Emoji Test. Take Chevrolet’s campaign for the 2016 Chevrolet Cruze. The announcement for the vehicle’s launch occurred through an entire press release written in emojis with an accompanying video series titled Emoji Academy.

While the campaign was a clever attempt at garnering the interest of the press, the gimmick can hardly be described as marketing to an audience that the brand really understood 😓. Chevrolet is screaming to be cool but by over utilizing this language, they actually create an inverse reaction to the brand. Their overuse is then compensated by an extremely tacky video series poking fun at this marked shift in consumer behavior 💩. Ironically, Chevrolet should have enrolled in their own Emoji School prior to embarking on this campaign.

Brands must continue to create mobile-first, social relationships with their customers. Those that do it right will pass the Emoji Test. 👏👏👏👏👏

The New Media Revolution: Content Inspiration from Asia

Different formats work for different mediums. From the era of silent films to television and blockbuster movies, Hollywood has the length of content formats down to a science. Film premieres average just over 2 hours, television shows average between 30 minutes to an hour, and television ads have shrunk from 60 seconds down to 15-30 seconds.

Over the past decade YouTube has played a central role creating a content revolution – fostering the imaginations of millions of new producers to create quick streams of video on their platform, shared instantly, worldwide. As online video content is reduced in length, brands and producers have been forced to move away from the rigid formats of traditional television and movies. New channels like Vine, YouTube, Snapchat and more, don’t leave room for producers to engage audiences with traditional storytelling techniques; there is no room for scenes or long-form character development. Producers have to bring characters to life in seconds rather than seasons and are forced to use new tools to supplement the viewer’s experience.

Let me rewind.

It’s the early 1900s. You walk into a cinema, sit down, the lights dim, the film begins and then.. silence. In the era of silent films, audiences had a tough time staying engaged and finding context without any sound. Fast forward a century, film and television is drawing from it’s roots for inspiration.

Directors of silent films used mimed, muted gestures, and onscreen intertitles (text cards added in between scenes) to amplify empathy within their audience. Today, many TV shows and movies are using captions, emojis, thought-bubbles, caricatures, animations, and other graphics to decorate films, television shows, and internet videos and create a similar empathetic sentiment.

Asian soap operas, pop star videos and mobile apps, particularly those of Korea and Japan, are driving the resurgence of these quirky layers on top of normal footage. They do this because consumer’s attention spans are shrinking. In an age where there is always something new to watch or read, it’s difficult for producers to break through the noise of the internet and even more difficult to hang on to a consumer in the fleeting moment their attention is captured.

The first time I went to Korea, I found these video enhancements quite chaotic, but I soon found that they added new layers of entertainment to an otherwise standard piece of content. Take the two cooking shows below for example.

In many ways media in Asia feels more social. The formatting relies less on the personalities of the actors or Reality TV stars and more on the post-edit additions to the videos.The content appears as if it were created quickly on a phone, rather than by a big multi-million dollar studio.  Just look at the above clip of a popular Korean cooking show with famous chef, Baek Jong. The scenes are overly dramatized, yet the quirky layers, captions, and animations make it entertaining and accessible to any audience. The American cooking show, on the other hand, offers no supplements. With sound, the viewer is entirely reliant on the chef’s raw entertainment. Worse, without sound, it’s utterly boring.

The use of this type of media has extended beyond just television. Apps like Kakao Talk, and WeChat have pioneered a phenomenon of chatting beyond just text. Gifs, animations characters, stickers, emojis, and more are the new standards for conveying emotions without face to face (or voice) communication.

Platforms like Snapchat are bringing the same culture to America, helping to evolve consumers’ expectations for entertaining content. Snapchat’s latest release of Faces is a great example of the fun, playful features it’s giving to users to create more entertaining photos and videos.

Taking queues from its Asian counterparts, Snapchat gives users more tools for personalization and the ability to create entertaining content beyond everyday life with little effort. What’s more, Snapchat isn’t just changing American’s content tastes, it’s also training brands. Just as YouTube forced brands to bridge outside their comfort zone of television ads, Snapchat is changing the way brands engage a new generation of consumers. The movement has already begun with brands creating content for Snapchat Stories and Discover. As brands continue to adopt this new medium and utilize the video formats consumers expect to watch on Snapchat, it won’t be long before we see animated caricatures and other graphics make their way into mainstream media.