So we’ve introduced ‘socially intelligent research’, and talked about what social business means and the role of research within it.
In this post, FACE’s brand research manager Ludwig Duran digs deeper into the concept of ‘social intelligence’ – what it is, why brands need to demonstrate it, and what goes wrong when they don’t… Read on:
Social intelligence is very much a life skill for brands who must adapt and “come of age” in a new world. In many ways you could say brands are going through a new adolescence where they must learn new social rules and codes in order to be part of the socially influential community of consumers that now exists online.
Part of helping brands “come of age” in this way often means simply explaining to them what social intelligence will allow their brands to achieve.
What is socially intelligent behavior?
To explain this I’ve often reached back to my own tempestuous high school years in North America. Here I was learning to navigate a new social order that had dramatically changed from the comfort and warmth of middle school to a foreign place of different rules and norms I quickly had to learn. Brands need to learn in the same way.
If you think about walking into a party – be it high school or even now – you always try to adapt your behavior slightly to who is in the room, how you feel about them, where you are and what you ultimately want. This isn’t to say you are acting falsely, it simply means you are activating your emotional intelligence to navigate the environment you are in and connect to the people in that environment.
Like any party there are those who you won’t want to connect with and those that you want to be your best friend and others that are somewhere in the middle. There will also be the moment when you become a topic of discussion, potentially with people remarking about how great you look in your new Uniqlo jeans or how the cardigan you are wearing clashes with your shirt. In all of these instances your emotional intelligence will shape how you negotiate these relationships and to an extent how you come across when you become a topic of conversation that you are not directly influencing.
What does social intelligence mean for brands?
For brands, entering the world of influential, socially connected consumers the challenge is much the same. They are entering a world where they must navigate this new party. They will wish to form meaningful relationships in this “social party” and establish life long friendships. At times they will become the topic of discussion – a discussion that they cannot control. Even then these brands will need to use emotional or social intelligence to shape their behavior so that they stay true to themselves and who they really are shines through – clashing cardigan or in the case of brands, errant communications, not withstanding.
With this metaphor in mind my job often comes down to helping a brand navigating the party they want to play in, in the most human, emotionally intelligent way possible. With this understanding they can develop the coveted social intelligence they need to form the meaningful connections they seek with consumers – relationships that are mutually beneficial rather than transactional. It also means that when brands become “social objects” in their own right, they are able to negotiate this moment of exposure and stay true to who they are and maybe even find a way to reflect and comment on who their consumer decides they are in that moment.
When brands lack social intelligence…
A good example of where a brand is in desperate need of evolving their social intelligence capability is Abercrombie. Once the gold standard of American chic, Abercrombie didn’t make the jump when the world graduated from the middle school of the 1990s and early 2000s to the high school of the world we are in today. Abercrombie stayed behind, telegraphing a homogenous, white, middle class dream of life as aspirational while this was deeply at odds with how its customer base had come to define what aspirational was.
Like someone with no emotional intelligence Ambercrombie boldly stumbled forward telling the world they only want “the cool kids” and that they consciously alienate the overweight. Only 10 years ago it would have resulted in a temporary media storm followed by a well-paid crisis consultant shutting the story down and the wider public simply falling in line with what a brand told them beautiful was.
But in this new socially connected world it ended with influencers – in this case celebrities with high Twitter followings, artists and grass-roots activists – leading the charge to punish the brand for stepping too far out of a received moral code of big brands not marginalizing the consumer.
See the video below for how Ellen Degeneres reacted on her show:
How to build social intelligence? Research
What could a little investment in learning to develop some social intelligence have brought Abercrombie? Simply put: A lot.
From research into what customers believe is aspirational, to a brand strategy and refresh piece, to a social media listening and insight piece – all of these things could have helped equip Abercrombie for a fundamental point they had missed: the world has moved on and you are no longer the only person that matters in the party you want to play in.
Poetically, you are not “the cool kid” because today, everyone is and no one is. So it’s worth asking brands asking themselves the question: how socially intelligent am I? The answer will be worth it next time you meet your consumer at a party.
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