Is Your Brand a Living Entity?

A few companies are using Twitter to converse with followers in ways that build a new kind of connection to the brand.

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What is Twitter communicating about your brand to young adults?

If your company is like many major brands, not all that much. But through focus groups we conducted with undergraduate students who were avid Twitter users, we found indications that effective Twitter strategies are helping some companies, such as Starbucks and Whole Foods, give their brands a special status and personality among these young adults. These brands transcend their status as things and become seen, through their Twitter presence, as living entities with thoughts and feelings; such a brand becomes, in effect, what we call an “entified brand.” We see brand entification as a new and more powerful adaptation of “brand personality” for the microblogging, social media environment. Entified brands enjoy a special status among members of the “millennial” generation of young adults; these brands are viewed as authentic personalities and attributed with an elevated, celebrity-like social status.

Entified brands are not just lovable objects; they are seen as exalted entities that return the love — as can be seen in some of the tweets from their followers. In 2013, a Starbucks follower tweeted: Do you know how I know @Starbucks loves me? They’re open on Easter! Happy bunny day lovers. Status elevation is a strongly emotional outcome. Starbucks is seen not as just coffee. It is not even just a person; it is a “hip and cool” person. A follower tweeted: @starbucks Thank you for being so hip and cool and edgy and independent and non-corporate and young. Another follower tweeted on the same day: @Starbucks, please follow me, I love you so much, I had you yesterday :(. Twitter users even want the brands they care about to be happy. One Intel fan tweeted: @Intel congratulations on your 10^6 followers that should bring u mega happiness. Wishing u all the best for giga happiness :-). Nerd-speak perhaps, but the sentiments represent homage to an exalted individual.

As college professors, we first became interested in how young adults relate to Twitter for a simple reason: We had a hard time separating undergraduate students from their smartphones in class.

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Comments (2)
Warren Whitlock
This article has some interesting observations about what has been obvious since we covered it in our book "Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online" back in 2008.

It's good to see that academic research is supports our position that all business is personal. If your brand is not reflecting the humans who work for your company, you're literally dead.
Ted Rubin
This is great feedback validating what I evangelize... Return on Relationship and Looking People in the Eye Digitally. When people ask me what’s the ROI of Social, I ask them… what’s the ROI of Trust, and what’s the ROI of Loyalty. The answer, when used to build relationships the results will be… longer lifetime value of a customer, larger average order value, and increased frequency of purchase. All measurable and all lead to increased sales and profits.