It’s no secret that humans have naturally evolved to be self-indulgent.
Snap a group picture and you’ll likely look at yourself. Walk by a reflective surface and you’ll likely look at yourself. Find the video of that B2B panel you were on last month and—you’re not fooling anyone—you love looking at yourself.
So if the natural consumer cadence is toward self-promotion, why aren’t more organizations harnessing this?
Obviously a select few are, but these are mostly behemoth size consumer companies (with research departments the size of a small town) who have already figured out ways to use user-generated content (UGC) for their benefit.
In 2010 marketers spent 33% of budgets on content marketing efforts (up from 11% in 2008 and 29% in 2009)*. Because the need for raw content itself is sure to increase, larger brands are keeping up by turning to UGC to bear some of the content production burden. Lucky for these companies, this has 2 distinct advantages:
1) Consumers trust consumer messages more than they trust brand messages.
2) Brands can reduce content marketing budgets for reallocation elsewhere (i.e. staffing, creative, PR, etc.).
We can all agree that time is money, and it takes a LOT of time (and even more money) to produce the type of content that consumers will believe in and be entertained by.
So maybe—just maybe—if brands begin considering a consumer’s inherent incentive to share (re: self-validation), eventually they will only need to build the forum that motivates consumers to produce content on the brand’s behalf…
…and all in the name of consumer narcissism.
*2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey
– brs
Brandon Smith here–Marketing Communications Manager at thismoment. If you can’t find me dancing to the music in my head, you can find me here:
Email – brandon@thismoment.com
Twitter – @brs21
(Song stuck in my head today: Deee Lite – Groove is in the Heart)
