"With the rise of chronic illnesses due to increasing sedentary lifestyles, it is no surprise that brands are looking towards engaging in meaningful conversations with consumers and encourage healthier lifestyles. For one such brand, going deep into product innovations to encourage healthier lifestyles was one such strategy." 

So says the co-authored (by Philips) 'case study'  with 'Marketing-Interactive' (link below) which allows 'Philips' to give itself a nice corporate style pat on the back for a campaign they ran in Asia last year around 'how they can effect change in consumer health'.

I have to say the initiative had all the right sentiments, its very well meaning, with a goal that can only be of benefit to us all. Its clearly aimed at cutting through what they acknowledge is a diminishing media landscape, which in plain english means they are struggling to get traditional the advertising message through to you and me.   

The issue I have with the campaign they ran is that, well, its too damn corporate, its all stage managed, extremely polished, and very much controlled by the 'brand police', to be honest it, in my opinion, it just lacks authenticity, and co-authoring a case study just hammers that home for me.

So, what could they have done differently?

How about using 'employee advocacy' to give it some reality, some authenticity, something that the ordinary person can relate to, engage with, contribute to, and add a voice that isn't speaking on behalf of the company, and use that process to start to listen to 'real people'.

Lets try an example;

Philips has 74,000 employees and probably millions of customers. 

Based on a Permission Marketing form of marketing they should have all their employees (or most of them) listening to them on social and they would have all their customers listening to them.  They should therefore have literally millions of followers on social.  They have a total of 347,575 followers on Twitter.

Something is obviously wrong.  It's wrong because they're broadcasting how great the company is and of course, nobody cares.  There cannot be much going on at the company as the last Tweet was in February and I'm writing this in May.

Let's look at an approach of using social media and activating their employees.  Even if they only activated 10% of the workforce and if that 10% of the workforce had only 100 followers, they would have a network of 740,000 first degree connections.  Double what they currently have.

If you activated 30% of the employees and those employees all had 500 followers, which is a more likely result, the first degree connects would be 11 Million.

We are active 'practitioners' of what we do, we already know and can evidence the ROI of a robust and internally aligned 'Social' strategy.

Part of that evidence it that you are reading this blog, just like many others - including your competitor!

We also don't do outbound pushy, salesy marketing, so if you would like to explore more, please contact the author of this blog.