It’s hard to say goodbye to a friend, especially when they have been the one you always turn to in times of difficulty, but this morning my team-mates and I mourned the passing of just such a reliable buddy. My colleague J, the social media Stig, relied on him most and on the company blog he posted a heartfelt and considered eulogy to a yellow, square-headed friend who had finally, like Elvis, left the building.
Unless you follow Novatech’s Facebook or Twitter feeds this won't make much sense, so a quick précis: We are a business and ‘pro-sumer’ IT company, but at Christmas-time we used to get in some tech stocking-fillers and seasonal gadgets to boost festive web sales. We’re pretty good at stock control and usually sell them all well before the end of December, but against our better judgement we bought a job-lot of SpongeBob Squarepants Digital Photo Frame/alarm clocks for Christmas 2010. They were not our normal fare; they were not a quality product and they didn’t sell very well. In fact they hardly sold at all. Unsurprisingly they became and in-house joke.
For the first year, a small pallet of them sat, lurking, close to the main staff entrance to the warehouse as a silent rebuke to imprudent purchasing. A bright plastic reminder of what happens when you forget your audience and forget who you are selling to. Reducing the stockpile was a very slow and convoluted process, but yesterday, almost exactly three years later, we finally sold the last one.
Over those three years, however, these unloved SpongeBob alarm clocks, in J’s hands, turned into something of a social media God-send. By pretending to offer the SBSP clocks as incentives/prizes and by featuring them in tweets and timelines, they gave us a gentle but unique way to send ourselves up. As he noted in his blog post, “They allowed us to make fun of the company, relating to a product that wouldn't damage our reputation as a business technology provider (even some of our most important business customers have had these added onto their orders of expensive servers), and all of our customers, no matter their history with us, could join in with the joke. It became our very own meme”.
Memes work by repetition and SpongeBob became a regular fixture in our timelines, mainly as J freely admits, when writer’s block struck and nothing else original was springing to mind..
Memes are strange and amorphous phenomena, but essentially they are internet in-jokes that are perpetuated and added to by anyone who cares to have a go. There aren’t any rules, which is way the internet likes it, but the best thing about memes is that when you know what’s going on, you’re in an exclusive club. When you understand that meme and are contributing to it, well then you’re a senior player in that club. You belong. You’re on the inside, looking out at the suckers outside who just don’t get it. It’s an understatement to say that that is really quite a precious position for a brand.
So by using SpongeBob to react to everything from world events and festivals to the weather and staff errors, J created a ‘I get it’ club of people who wanted to be part of our gang. Young gamers and PC-freaks frequently post, “I wish I worked at Novatech”, imagining that it’s some sort of technology Wonka factory with delicious rivers of edible code and endless testing tasting rooms of people playing 4D Splinter Cell, (alas no). Our social media lets them in the back door and they get to see that it’s much more real than that. They see what we’re all laughing at and it delights them because they are laughing at that exact same thing too.
The most crucial point is that using SpongeBob was absolutely without artifice or forethought, J just thought it was funny. All of this reflection and analysis came afterwards, there were no focus groups, no trend analyses and no brand positioning brainstorms; we just backed our own judgement and got on with it. The alarm clocks not only allowed us to show our passion for what we do but also allowed us to create an in-joke that everyone and anyone could get. And they did.
Customers' joined in
The footnote is that we sold all of the product and people are asking ‘what’s next?’. ‘Love pays well in the end’ as the brand gurus say, and that’s the best summary really. We sort of loved these hopeless, unlovable products and that brought a bit of humanity to a yellow plastic box, which in turn showed our own humanity. And people really quite like that.
Thanks SpongeBob. Hey J, what is next?
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