An influencer marketing activity without word-of-mouth marketing to complement, is like using your money for gambling: Brandie’s Pranav Kosuri & Douglas Andersson

An influencer marketing activity without word-of-mouth marketing to complement, is like using your money for gambling: Brandie’s Pranav Kosuri & Douglas Andersson

Brandie works in any vertical with products and services that people use and appreciate.

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Mumbai: Brandie is a Sweden-based word-of-mouth platform that enables brands to drive user-generated content at minimum cost by connecting brands with real customers and genuine reviews, thereby helping brands reach a larger audience and build a community.

Brandie democratises marketing by giving the benefit of the top one per cent of social media users to the other 99 per cent with an average engagement rate of 22 per cent and 6–8x better results than an influencer-led campaign.

For brands, this means they can harness the power of word-of-mouth on social media at scale. For users, this means that they can connect with their favourite brands and be rewarded for the content they share. Brandie has over 80,000 advocates on its platform whom brands can source and mobilise for their campaigns.

Founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Pranav Kosuri and Douglas Andersson, Brandie has activated over 76,287 content creators, reaching 130 million social media users via their campaigns.

The brands onboard Brandie are BookMyShow, Truecaller, Dominos, Nivea, P&G, Swiggy, Puma, Air India, Tata Salt, Fevicol, and Wellbeing Nutrition, among others.

Before commencing his entrepreneurial career, Kosuri studied at Stockholm University and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and holds an M.Sc. in Molecular Biology. He is a marketing expert and successful entrepreneur who has founded four companies in Silicon Valley, as well as in Europe.

He has taught entrepreneurship at the Royal Institute of Technology and at the Stockholm School of Economics. He holds a board seat at the Sweden-India Business Council and was recently named Sweden’s Top Entrepreneur Under 30 by Sweden’s largest business magazine, Dagens Industri (DI).

For three years since 2017, he has been invited to India to give lectures to 2,000 students from over 40 universities across India, with the vision to help Indian teenagers venture out and start their own businesses.

Five years ago, he created Scandinavia’s most successful crowdfunding campaign for his company, Flic—the world's smartest button. His venture rapidly rose to success and was named Europe's hottest hardware startup by Wired Magazine. Since then, Flic buttons have been used more than 30 million (three crore) times in 110 countries, largely through lasting partnerships with major corporations including Google, Volvo, Spotify, and Uber.

Andersson, meanwhile, has extensive experience in B2B sales and brand building. He has been pronounced Sweden’s Top Salesman 2014 (awarded by Hi3G). With an impressive resume in business development for both large corporations and rising tech startups, he brings extensive insight on how to do product development with a focus on design and sales.

Being the head of the business development team at one of Sweden's fastest-growing media companies, Newstag, he has been pioneering their launch into the Southeast Asian market. Douglas has been awarded multiple scholarships to attend China's top management and engineering schools, Peking University and Tsinghua University. He holds a degree in industrial engineering and management.

Edited Excerpt:

On the market gap that Brandie saw when it launched and its USP vis-a-vis competition

Prior to Brandie's launch in India, before micro-influencers and nano-influencers were a thing, influencer marketing was blooming with a hundred per cent growth year on year. We noticed that the number of influencers and celebrities (with massive reach) was minimal and only represented a fraction of the total social media users. With different brands approaching the same set of influencers and them promoting more and more brands, influencers and celebrities would/will eventually lose trust in their network. Even as brands look at new segments of micro and nano influencers, the problem would be less obvious but remains. We predicted that paid opinions would affect the viewers' trust as time passed.

The gap we saw was to promote word-of-mouth marketing from authentic people and use this opportunity to build trust in the activities done with prominent influencers. The solution was to build a technology that allows brands to work with their community of customers—people who actually use and love their products and already promote brands on social media daily. We never saw influencer or celebrity marketing as bad. However, for them to be trusted, the conversations needed to be balanced with recommendations from regular friends and family. In addition, we wanted the space to be more democratic so that the products that people actually love are the ones that get the spotlight on social media. However, the model for influencer marketing needed to be more scalable, as it's impossible to work on a one-to-one basis when handling thousands or millions of customers.

On the key verticals that Brandie works in like lifestyle, sports, food and beverages

Brandie works in any vertical with products and services that people use and appreciate. The more people love your product and service, the easier it is for us to generate thousands of UGC (user-generated content) recommendations. We have done campaigns with sports brands like Puma, food brands like Domino's Pizza, beauty products such as Nivea, and pharmaceutical brands such as Cipla. Other verticals that we have worked with are education, banking, and streaming services. Any brand or company that believes they have a product or service that their customers would recommend to a friend can work with Brandie's word-of-mouth marketing.

On how covid has impacted the word-of-mouth marketing medium

In the short term, it took a lot of work to develop a new product and market segment to fill a gap in the market. Then, as lockdowns went down and companies started slimming down their marketing budgets, we needed more time to pitch them on trying a new innovative marketing medium in these uncertain times. However, the feedback we got on the product was always very positive; it's just that the timing to test it out wasn’t optimal.

Now that the worst part of covid is over, we see considerable interest in Brandie. The pandemic has led more and more people to spend time on social media and adapt to online shopping. This means that trusted word-of-mouth recommendations on social media are more important than ever. We also see a trend that, globally, the trust for influencer marketing is going down, which is something we see as benefiting us as we allow brands to have the same presence and impact on social media. Still, instead of using paid opinions, they can rely on trusted recommendations from peers on a much larger scale.

On the challenges that brands face in using word-of-mouth marketing

It's challenging to make brands understand that UGC from trusted friends and family is more diverse and subjective than traditional marketing or advertising.

The best recommendations are made by each individual uniquely because each person knows what their followers like to consume best. Therefore, as long as the recommendation is positive, the customer should own the creative part to maximise engagement in their network. However, this can be hard since many brands still need to feel comfortable letting go of control. To counter this, we have built a technology that guides brands and screens content to guarantee brands' safety without compromising the users' unique opportunity to influence their network of followers.

Another challenge is to convince the brands that word-of-mouth marketing is not a ‘one-time solution’; instead, it should be a long-term strategy to ensure that brands always have positive conversations on social media throughout the year. So new prospecting customers can easily see that the brand is liked, active, and trusted.

On what Brandie's clients expect and how their ROI is defined

Clients often expect similar KPI and ROI as traditional advertisement or influencer marketing, which sometimes works very well, but for some brands, that's not always the case. It's important to understand that the conversation may not always happen at the moment the content is displayed. For example, when looking to buy a new phone, surveying reviews, articles, and trends is crucial, but on the day of purchase, a recommendation from a trusted friend has a greater influence.

We try to keep the expectations right depending on the brand and activity planned for awareness marketing and building trust. As far as traditional metrics such as reach, impressions, and engagement are concerned, Brandie has been over-delivering on every single campaign. However, we try to avoid those metrics and instead focus on the story itself, as consumer recommendation has the most value in the content. We want the brand to not mistake Brandie for another tool to deliver huge numbers but instead value all the valuable word-of-mouth recommendations coming their way.

On the importance of word-of-mouth marketing for early-stage startups

Brandie was initially created to counter the unfair advantage of large companies' marketing budgets. The big brands can always pay to get their products displayed through paid ads, but what startups have is not money but rather loyal fans. So instead of spending valuable resources on expensive ads, we created Brandie so that startups can work with their community of customers to drive meaningful marketing and grow the company without having to waste money on paid ads that no one likes anyway.

On the role that word-of-mouth marketing plays in the overall marketing mix

All marketing channels serve their purpose, and we don't try to replace any other channel per se; instead, we see Brandie as the tool to create more conversions and boost the value of the brand's other marketing activities. Furthermore, Brandi is the tool for increasing trust and conversion in all other channels. The likelihood of someone clicking on, buying, or engaging with an ad they don't trust is small. However, the likelihood of conversion increases drastically when a close family member or friend recommends a product or service. In addition, adding Brandie to the marketing mix ensures that the brand's other expensive investments (such as a celebrity influencer) are well-spent.

On recent work that Brandie has done with clients that stands out

There are so many that we would like to highlight, but to mention a few: Cartoon Network, Domino's Pizza, Nivea, Fastrack, Prasuma, Redrail, and Truecaller. However, if we are forced to highlight something, it is working with causes, as we did with Truecaller, where we engaged their customers to shed light on harassment against women in their #itsnotok campaign.

On the importance of getting customers to be advocates for brands

We usually give the example of the saying, "The crying baby gets the milk." That means that brands today have routines and protocols for how they should interact if a consumer talks negatively about them on social media: they apologise and compensate the person. However, the same is not the case if regular but happy customers write about them on social media—then brands do nothing. By doing this, brands positively reinforce the behaviour you don't want to see and do not encourage positive word-of-mouth, which will increase negative word-of-mouth. This is an enormous missed opportunity since even people who don't have a marketing degree understand the power of word-of-mouth in our daily purchasing decisions or personal lives.

On Brandie's business model

We currently offer two models. The first is that the brands pay per unit for how many consumers we activate. The second is a B2B SaaS solution where brands can leverage the power of Brandie’s word-of-mouth technology to drive their consumer advocacy campaigns with their community. The first model is preferred by brands who want to work with our Brandie community, while the second model targets brands who already have a community or want to build their own community to drive word-of-mouth marketing on social media at scale.

On whether word-of-mouth marketing complements influencer marketing effectively

Marketers will soon realise that an influencer marketing activity without word-of-mouth marketing to complement it is like using your money for gambling. The modern customer is not easily fooled (less than four per cent trust influencers today) and will look for second opinions after seeing an influencer promote a product or service. If the brand already has plans to complement its marketing message with word-of-mouth, they don’t have to worry that its marketing message feels one-sided. Imagine a celebrity promoting a new drink flavour, saying it’s the best they have had, and at the same time, you see thousands of regular customers also giving their view on how they like it—that’s how you build hype from the top down while building trust from the bottom up.

On Brandie's plan to grow into 60 markets in 2023 and the game plan to get there

Brandie will go live globally much faster now that we have started to offer the Brandie software as a B2B SaaS solution. This means that any brand in any market can use our technology to create meaningful relationships with customers while driving effective social media marketing. We have a lot of global brands that we are currently working with and are well on track to hit our goals.