Spikes Asia 2015: Brand hashtags can become brand 'bashtags'...

... if you're not careful, cautioned senior execs from JWT and TNS Australia.

In a session titled 'Participation: Beyond the Hype', Angela Morris, JWT Australia's executive planning director, and Alistair Leathwood, executive director of market research company TNS (Australia), spoke about why marketing executives ought to be a lot more careful than they presently seem to be while inviting their consumers to "participate with brands online."

The crux of the session was: While technology enables brand managers to pull absolutely any trick in the book to get consumers to participate in their campaigns, especially online campaigns, the very act of inviting participation can backfire and convert brand hashtags into brand bashtags - where consumers speak ill of the brand or 'bash' it, online.

"Just because a consumer 'Likes' your brand, doesn't mean he/she wants to have a relationship with your brand," said JWT's Morris, hoping to caution all the brand custodians present at the seminar against blindly asking consumers to follow, re-tweet or promote the product in question, or even incentivising these actions with goodies. "People don't like that," warned Morris, "People feel annoyed when asked to do work 'for' the brand."

"'Participation campaigns' distract us from the actual goal. Participation of the consumer in your campaign is not the goal. The goal is growing the brand," she said, insisting that the campaign is a means to a greater end and is not an end in itself, as many brand managers and their agencies mistake it to be. "Participation is not why people connect with the brand..." she said.

Seconding that, TNS' Leathwood, in broad strokes, shared the findings of a seven-nation research study his firm undertook recently: "People are not as interested in interacting with brands as brands are in interacting with people." Sure, there are times during the customer cycle when people feel the need to interact with brands, and it is these moments that brands will do well to keep an eye out for, according to him.

In fact, his study shows that, in general, as many as 90 per cent of people are passive observers; they're happy simply consuming brands and the content/campaigns these brands release. While nine per cent may go as far as to share the content, only one per cent will actually end up creating content for the brand and releasing that "story" on social media.

So the message they gave the audience is clear: Brands should refrain from annoying netizens with too many 'participation campaigns', that is, campaigns that urge them to, in some way, add to the brand's effort to promote itself.

The solution, then?

Here's what the duo recommends: Stop assuming that consumers are interested in participating in your brand campaign. The participation has to be earned through creatively engaging content. Give (the consumer), more than you ask (of the consumer).

A penny for each time we heard that...