Trend Watching’s monthly briefing for March covered random acts of kindness from brands . They discuss how the combination of sharing social information online and the desire for brands to make a human connection is leading them to develop programs meant to surprise and delight customers out of the blue.

They are careful to point out they are not talking about gifts in exchange for an act of social sharing but unexpected and unsolicited gestures that show they care.

Random inaccurately describes these programs.

People are being selected to be recipients of these gestures based on a set of criteria. They might be mentioning the brand in a certain way or merely be connected to a brand online. I would also suspect consumers with higher influencer scores are more likely to be pursued in addition to whatever other criteria is used.

These programs feel random because the gestures are distributed incompletely. If everyone who says they drank a certain brand of soda received an unsolicited reward we would call that spam. The unexpected and incompleteness of these programs are how they preserve the delight.

Since we know we can retain the random, delightful feel of these programs despite the use of criteria to deliver the gestures, we can make better use of the targeting to make these interactions more brand relevant.

Word of Mouth prophet Spike Jones talks about how identifying people that are passionate about your brand is more important than identifying influential people in this video. Targeting only influential people often comes across as pandering. Increasing the conversation about your brand through passionate brand ambassadors will always have a more genuine feel.

So what if your brand doesn’t have an adequate supply of passionate ambassadors? What if you are trying to shift your brand in a new direction and you don’t feel the current brand ambassadors are appropriate?

This is when you focus on the passion not the brand.

You have to focus on the passions that you want your brand to be associated with and extend gestures to the folks that have those passions. This means a Caribbean seafood chain in the US might extend gestures to people that are talking about and preserving Caribbean art and culture in the US.  Your brand will get credit for supporting these people and activities. If you identify artists and community leaders that are actively participating in preserving and creating this culture, your brand will become know for contributing to this community. We won’t get into walking the walk here, that is a given.

Keep it genuine, keep it transparent, and accept the feedback.

How and what gestures are extended matters deeply to these programs being successful. The next post will discuss one of the ways to make these gestures sharable and the program a success; Giving Access.

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