🍣 Trends are sugar, not protein

Hey friend – Rob here.

So the first Salmon Theory panel (featuring Salmon Crew members) was a wild ride.

And by wild ride, i mostly mean pretty successful, with tons of positive feedback along the way.

Thanks again to Pollyanna, Alexi (subscribe to Idle Gaze!), Sheeza, Jaskaran (subscribe to The Social Juice!) and Berk for helping make this the epic vibe session it was.

The aim of the session was simple:

To look at five under-discussed brands (Wealthsimple, Curry's, Flex, Starface, immi)
To reverse engineer the strategy behind their work
To keep things hella practical, not platitude-y

If you couldn't make it, worry not, i got three things for you.

First, the video recording.

It's about 2h packed with great conversation, good vibes, and an important discussion about female anatomy.

Oh, and you can also have access to the deck that we presented – it's almost Christmas, after all!

Second, some follow up reflections by yours truly.

We over-think ideas, and under-think strategy.

Most social teams would benefit if they spent proper time studying the commercial and communications objectives for a brand (and where social can play a role), and the practical ways in which you're going to measure them (surveys not just sentiment, etc), than simply deciding that today is the day we're going to be so demure.

It sounds boring, but the real boring thing is when you need to justify whether your work worked 12 months later.

Don't copy other famous brands, try and be a more dramatised version of yourself.

It's lazy to say we should be more Duolingo, when it's nothing to do with what your brand personality is about.

Maybe you're a more understated brand, and this is ok.

Your job is to find a way to dramatise that understatement.

Trends are sugar, not protein.

They're a tactical nice to have on top of a healthy social strategy diet, which is made up of:

Simple and clear objectives that flow from what the business is talking about
A vivid description of your target audience, their problems and how you can solve them
A distinct enough tone of voice that (probably) shouldn't use the words "unhinged" or "adorkable"

But they are not the protein that gives you sustainable energy and makes your brand stronger.

They give you highs, but also can make you and your team come crashing down real quick.

Educational does not mean boring.

Brands like Wealthsimple, Go Fund Yourself or Dr Becky show you can educate while retaining your personality.

In fact, i'd argue the best educational content is indeed full of personality, because that's what sticks with you.

That which gets remembered is more likely to be understood, but the other way around isn't always true.

Split strategy from creative ideas.

There is a bias to jump to ideas real quick, especially if you have both strategy and ideas in the same presentation.

Of course, strategy and ideas should be interlinked, but there is merit in arguing for them to be presented separately.

It means you get people into the right headspace to discuss things, instead of muddling everything together.

For that to be an effective use of time, though, you should...

Have a summary you can shop around.

If you have someone who struggles to pay attention to longwinded strategy documents, then do this instead.

Use the 4 Cs framework (culture, competition, consumer, company) to frame the context where your brand plays in.

Then have a simple set of statements that describes how your brand can add value through social.

Shop it around different teams, different people within teams, refine as you go.

This is criminally underrated, because we think our jobs are to have these mammoth theatrical presentations.

But also, don't take this literally.

Doesn't have to be a one pager.

All i'm saying is have a summary people can buy into.

Even if you have a full deck backing all the decisions you made to get into that summary.

On which note...

Network internally like your (professional) life depends on it.

Because if you work in marketing, and specifically in social, it probably does.

We like to complain that social is too siloed from the wider organisation, and often this is true.

But how often have we proactively spent time getting to know other departments and teams?

The top social pros i've ever worked with excel at this, and the results show.

Everyone else just moans that those other people "don't get it".

Diversify thy references.

A lot of the brands we study seem to over-index US or UK.

Which means we tend to assume only a few styles of humour work on social!

But if you study brands in Germany, for example, you see much darker and drier humour, and it performs well.

Which means these sorts of brands give us a much wider palette of tonal attributes to play with.

It's worth learning from them, especially because they don't look or feel like the brands we're used to.

Also feels like a good starting point for a meta analysis for effective humour levels across markets!

Last but not least, a modern classic...

Stress test trends before stressing about jumping on them.

A classic but bears repeating, just because something is trending today doesn't mean it will last for a long time.

Much more powerful to understand the underlying motivations behind why certain trends actually take off.

Less reactivity, more root cause thinking.

"Demure", for example, is a short term trend.

What's a potential root cause behind why it worked?

A renewed embrace of modesty, restraint and introspection as a counter-response to influencer culture, for instance.

And this, friends, packs far more meaning when thinking about what "demure" might mean for our future comms.

Don't start with the trend.

Start with the psychology behind the trend.

Third, a cheat sheet of what our social strategy deconstruction led to.

We asked, they deconstructed, here's a summary of where we got to.

Wealthsimple

Objective: Demystify financial products and build confidence around money management
Audience: Smart people who feel stupid when it comes to investing, regardless of age
Tone: Light-hearted, absurd, knowing

Curry's

Objective: Show extreme customer service dedication while modernising brand perception
Audience: General consumer electronics buyers, skewing younger on social
Tone: British self-deprecating humour, playful yet helpful, banter not bullying

Flex

Objective: Normalise period care discussions while demonstrating product superiority
Audience: Women who want to feel educated about their bodies but don't know which sources to trust
Tone: Direct, educational, reassuring

Starface