How do you spend millions of dollars and months of hard work to create a brand story that stinks like a dead skunk in a dumpster?

Well if you’re Pepsi, you create a completely tone-deaf ad featuring Kendall Jenner that not only falls flat, but has people actively boycotting your product. Two years later, it’s still mentioned in board rooms around the country. “Guys…we don’t want a Pepsi Jenner on our hands here.”

WANT AUTHENTICITY? ASK YOUR FANS.

Brands need to adapt to the social media world we now live in, and that doesn’t mean looking to influencers who cash million-dollar paychecks.

It’s about the real fans (and honestly, it always has been). They’re the people who love your product or service, follow you on social media, talk you up to their friends, and want to be more connected to you. Think about that for a second. An army of people around the world, primed and ready to tell your story for you.

All you have to do is ask.

With an app like Cinebody, you can tap into that fanbase around the world and ask your biggest advocates to create content for you. You still provide the shot list, creative direction, and give feedback in real-time. The fans go out and get it for you. All it has to cost you is some free product, which is way better than a multi-million dollar bill. And as the fans are actively engaged with the content, they’re going to help share it, too. It’s a win-win.

WANT INSIGHTS? AGAIN, JUST ASK.

Cinebody isn’t just a great tool for getting User-Directed Content™ (UDC). It can also be used for market research and audience feedback.

For example, let’s backtrack to the aforementioned Pepsi train wreck. Could it have been avoided? Well, yes, if the marketing gurus at Pepsi hadn’t jumped on a bandwagon with four loose wheels. Clearly, they thought they knew their audience, but instead of playing guessing games they could have created a UDC campaign to know what millennials were thinking.

By creating posts on social media channels (which can also be geotargeted to get feedback from specific parts of the country), Pepsi could have asked their fans and ambassadors to answer questions via the Cinebody app. These answers could have been used to create a campaign that didn’t go down in flames like the Hindenburg.

What’s more, these answers could actually have been used in a campaign. People love authenticity. It’s quite possible the genuine replies could have formed the backbone of an ad that didn’t cost millions of dollars and the reputation of a massive brand.

By building a genuine narrative using your fans, you go straight to the source. And what you get in return is content that’s more powerful, more shareable, and more authentic than something concocted in an ad agency’s multiple meeting rooms.

Your fans are the key to a campaign that will build your brand. Reach out to them, wherever they are, and let them unlock some remarkable, and shareable, stories.