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Participatory Culture
What does “Participatory Culture” mean? Il means that
consumers want to participate.
Today’s consumers are no longer a static and inert audience. Facilitated by the digital revolution, they can comment, share, boycott. They can write reviews, publish images, create photomontages, spread ideas and news. They can express their opinions, both positive and negative, and it’s important for brands to start listening.
As the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto stated almost twenty years ago, ‘A vigorous conversation is underway worldwide. People are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge on the Internet with incredible speed. As a direct result, markets are becoming smarter and faster than most companies.’ Consumers, now elevated to ‘users,’ create conversations and content that have already assumed – for those who can intelligently leverage them – a very high commercial value.
User Generated Content (UGC) – What are User Generated Content
User Generated Content refers to all those amateurish contents created or reworked by consumers/users and then disseminated through media channels.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has established three requirements that User Generated Content must have to be defined as such:
- Publication requirements. UGC is considered only for publicly available content, i.e., made available to everyone through a website or a social network page. Content that is not published or shared via email and private chats is not considered UGC;
- Creative effort. The content must be a personal artistic expression of its creator, both in offering a completely new product (e.g., a review, a selfie, a short film) and in reworking and adapting pre-existing material (commonly seen in widely spread memes);
- Creation outside professional practices and routines. UGC is typically generated outside of professional practices and routines and does not have a commercial or institutional context. They can be produced by non-professionals without any profit motive.
This last point is in continuous evolution. Currently, some users are paid for their content, turning what was originally a non-commercial leisure activity into actual work, thus the famous “influencers.”
Why is it important to know all of this? Recent studies indicate the importance of integrating this phenomenon into one’s marketing strategies to increase brand awareness and boost product sales. UGC:
- Encourage greater engagement between brand and consumers (by 28% when used in a product video), doubling the likelihood that content will be shared;
- Build trust: UGC is considered more reliable by 51% of users compared to official brand information and advertisements, fostering a healthy and lasting brand-consumer relationship;
- Improve the brand’s SEO: More UGC about a specific brand generates more traffic to the official website;
- Increase the number of followers on various social platforms;
- Reassure consumers about purchase decisions: with UGC, the conversion rate increases by 4.6%.
Online sales site reviews are also UGC, significantly influencing user purchase decisions: 93% of consumers claim to have made purchases influenced by online reviews. It’s not surprising that major companies invest capital in UGC-focused campaigns.
Concrete Cases: Starbucks and GoPro
In April 2014, Starbucks launched the White Cup contest. This contest, aligned with Starbucks’ storytelling known for the creative atmosphere of its stores, asked customers to doodle on their takeaway coffee cups and post a photo of the result using the hashtag #WhiteCupContest. In three weeks, over 4000 entries were registered, and the winning design was replicated in a limited special edition sold in Starbucks stores, drawing attention to the importance of reusable cups. Starbucks harnessed the creativity of its customers, of which they were already aware (many Starbucks cups were redecorated, photographed, and posted on social media before the contest existed), to advertise a theme considered central to its marketing strategy. The campaign is considered a UGC marketing success.
Another brand famous for using amateur content in its marketing strategies is GoPro. The GoPro brand bases its marketing on emotions and people; it doesn’t showcase its product but what can be achieved with it. Since its inception, GoPro has encouraged customers to post videos shot with its cameras on a dedicated section of the website. The best videos are shared on official social networks, giving credit (and subsequently, gratification and popularity) to the original creators. Moreover, the free use of the #GoPro hashtag on private social platforms brings the brand significant free advertising. GoPro’s slogan, “Be a Hero,” focuses on the end consumer: how people experience the brand is important, not the product itself. These “free” UGCs, uncontrollable – also called earned media by social media marketing scholars – can be seen as the natural evolution of word-of-mouth. With the advent of the Internet, teenagers and millennials are driving this new era of Electronic Word-of-Mouth through social media marketing.
UGC and Millennials: Marketing Studies
According to a 2014 study by Crowdtap in partnership with Ipsos MediaCT, Millennials (who are now aged 18 to 36) spend 30% of their media time consuming content created by their peers, divided between social network content (18%), use of email, chat, and messaging services (6%), and discussions about news, products, and brands (6%). These data clearly show the enormous value that UGC holds for young users, who willingly “consume” them in their leisure time. As for UGC commenting, promoting, or criticizing a product/service, it has been found that Millennials consider them 35% more memorable and 50% more reliable than official brand or franchise advertisements.
An important finding from Offerpop’s 2016 study reveals that 53% of consumers want brands to tell them what UGC to create and share, but only 16% respond to this demand. This data highlights the backwardness of many companies that, in the era of Participatory Culture, fail to harness the strong desire for participation among consumers of the new millennium.
All these results show the constant growth of the UGC phenomenon as a marketing tool, users’ desire to create and enjoy amateur content (also following precise rules, as Starbucks did with the White Cup Contest), and the centrality of new media in this process.
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