Mutual Purpose: Smart Social Media Marketing

What is Mutual Purpose?

Mutual purpose is the engagement marketing tactic for encouraging consumer participation and engagement around a topic that is mutually beneficial to your brand and a target consumer segment, often without the need to even mention the brand.

The goal of mutual purpose is to indirectly influence the perception or mind-set of consumers regarding a certain topic, such as a lifestyle habit, product category, or even public policy. By choosing and promoting a topic that is mutually beneficial to consumers and your brand, your brand also can indirectly benefit.

For example, consider a frozen foods CPG manufacturer that wants to promote and sell the benefit of its frozen foods. The target consumer segment is, of course, the key purchaser of everything in the household: moms. One of the benefits of frozen foods is simple and fast cooking, which means less time at the stove and more time with your family. That’s a message moms can appreciate, and the frozen foods CPG brand wants to be seen as an enabler of.

Mutual Purpose is Not Brand Awareness

Note that your brand doesn’t necessarily need to be mentioned or prominently displayed. Oftentimes, a smaller branding footprint can achieve more influence than a strong brand presence. The goal of mutual purpose is not to target brand awareness directly, but to seek the generated influence and  “partnership” of the consumer.

Most consumers are turned off instantly by strong commercial brand presence, so while you might achieve awareness with a heavy branding, you also are likely to achieve low influence.

The tactic of mutual purpose isn’t new. The political world has used it (you’ve hearad of “spin”) to influence public policy for ages; however, what is new are the tools and media format that can help to enable the effective use of mutual purpose for marketers.

Social media is, perhaps, the most effective tool to leverage mutual purpose. That’s because to create true influence, you need to engage and involve your consumers in the purpose, not just advertise to them. Purpose requires action and participation; social media offers marketers the opportunity to engage and foster participation like no other media format.

Conversation Involves Consumers

Conversation is a key driver for engagement, and social media is the best tool to enable it. By encouraging conversation and consumer involvement, your brand becomes not just a product or service, but something embedded in the lifestyles of your consumers. Consequently, mutual purpose is emerging as one of the most effective ways for marketers and PR professionals to utilize social media and social networking. Finding that mutually beneficial cause or purpose is the key to influential reach.

Gather.com is the premier social network for the over-30 crowd, and is the leader in implementing successful engagement marketing campaigns. For more information about starting your engagement campaign, contact sales@gatherinc.com.