User-generated content marketing

Overview

User-generated content marketing is an innovative and contested field. User-generated content marketing is part of a larger effort by companies and brands to maintain control of the messaging that circulates about their products and services. The interactivity of Web 2.0 has created an environment in which conversation and dialogue is the new currency of exchange (Campbell, Pitt, et. al., 2011; Keen, 2007). This has created both challenges and opportunities for marketers across a variety of situations. Among these are user-generated content marketing purposely created in support of a particular brand or product; user-generated content created for a brand through a partnership between brand and user; branded content created by professional marketers using user-generated content; and user-generated content harnessed to counter a user-generated critique or disparagement of a particular brand or product that has gone viral (Lawrence et. al., 2013).

The term "user-generated content" mean just that—it is messaging created by the users of a media or media platform. As such it could take the form of a do-it-yourself video created on a phone, but it could also be a still picture taken by a non-professional photographer. It could also be a professional-looking commercial created by a user/consumer with access to high-end equipment and the ability to use robust open-source digital editing software. It could even be the caption on an Instagram photo, a tweet, a comment on a YouTube video, or a message placed on the timeline of a Facebook friend. Regardless of the form, user-generated content is produced non-professionally by a member of the general public with no employment or contract relationship to the company or brand about which content is created.

Marketing is obviously messaging that is specifically designed to enhance the reputation or attractiveness of a particular type of consumer good and to encourage the purchase or use of that good by consumers. This can take several forms or be utilized to a variety of purposes, most often brand awareness and brand management. Brand awareness is marketing that informs consumers about a particular company's ethos—not a particular product or product line produced by that company. One example would be the marketing of the Volvo car brand as devoted to safety—an awareness that will presumably adhere to the individual Volvo models that are available. Brand management is the maintenance of the reputation of a particular company or product line. Most of the time this takes the form of ensuring that all new marketing messages comport with the identity that has already been established, but brand management also extends to protecting or repairing the reputation of a brand when the company receives negative coverage. Starbucks opted to close eight thousand stores for anti-bias training in May of 2018 after an April incident in which a Starbucks manager called the police on two African American men who were waiting for a friend in a Starbucks store.

User-generated content marketing in its simplest definition refers to branded messages/messages that are created about products or companies by consumers rather than ad agencies or professional marketers and which circulate via Web 2.0. The distribution and circulation (one could say "spreadability") (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2018) of the content via the web might be initiated by the company that owns the brand, or it may be the result of the particular piece of content hitting a cultural moment or situation in just the right way as to encourage its posting and reposting across social media without the brand's involvement or assent.

It should be noted that user-generated content marketing is not new. In fact, word-of-mouth can be seen as the original user-generated content marketing and the progenitor of social media posts and/or tweets. The Internet-based environment in which this word-of-mouth can travel is exponentially larger than its analog precursor and eternally archived (Scott, 2013). Brand or company-sponsored user generated content marketing is also not a recent innovation. The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio, Or How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less (made into a 2005 film by Dreamworks) is a 2001 biography of Evelyn Ryan, written by her daughter Terry Ryan. The book chronicles her mother's near obsession with entering (and winning) jingle-writing contests as a way of supplementing the family income during the 1960s. This illustrates one of the most common ways that marketers get and use user-generated content: they ask for it. A quick Google search for "contest marketing" results in about 77 million hits and links to websites for the actual contests as well as a substantial amount of business and marketing press about the effectiveness of contests and user-involvement in the brand establishment, awareness and management of products and companies (Feldman, 2018.)

All companies and brands must contend with some degree of user-generated content marketing. The most common forms this takes are at minimum the maintenance of social media profiles with which consumers can interact—by liking or following the brand or using its handle or related hashtags to engage it in public discussion on the web. Often these involve the creation of corporately owned and maintained accounts on popular social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the company's own website (Kumar, Choi & Green, 2017). The user-generated content on these platforms is controlled and shaped by the strictures of the platform, such as the image-based structure of Instagram and the 280 character limit on Twitter (now X) posts. This requires the company to engage with the user and the user-generated content on the user's and the platform's terms; owing to the interactive nature of these accounts, the company must monitor them carefully and amplify positive user-generated posts and address or minimize negative ones.

In May 2018, a burst pipe in the sprinkler system of a Carnival Cruise ship, spilling water onto decks and into staterooms from the ceiling. A passenger shot a video of the water pouring into the hallway, captioned it "Worse than the Titanic," and posted it to Facebook. As the video went viral and amassed hundreds of thousands of views (helped by its coverage on local and then national television news), Carnival informed the press that it looked much worse than it was, and was only an internal leak of water already on board, not a compromise of the ship's hull. Carnival then utilized the power of user-generated content to further contextualize the event and publicize their response. Carnival encouraged passengers to shoot and share additional video of their crew cheerfully bailing out the flooded hallways and staterooms and installing new carpeting. As a result, only two out of one hundred affected passengers, who were offered a full refund and a flight home from the next port, took Carnival up on the offer. The user-generated content showing Carnival's positive response went far more viral and superseded the virality of the original footage, turning potential harm to the company's brand image into positive publicity. Numerous other incidents of companies intervening in real time to complaints posted to X and Instagram, chronicle the importance of marketers and their clients paying attention to user-generated content on social media.

Among the most common ways that companies foster user-generated content is by reaching out and partnering with users creating content that is particularly popular on social media, for example, by encouraging bloggers to review a product (Oakley, 2016). Such relationships may involve giving free products to review or otherwise cultivating a positive feeling in the blogger, vlogger, or "influencer," in the hopes of receiving positive coverage in social media and online review and culture sites. This is not to be confused with professionally produced ads that appear before (usually unrelated) user-generated content on YouTube. Video ads are part of an essentially traditional marketing campaign and have the disadvantage of being transparently brand-sponsored sales pitches that users may, and frequently do, ignore. A review or other positive mention by a trusted expert online has the powerful advantage of credibility and an interested audience of likely customers.

A less-recognized form of user-generated content marketing may be the use of user-generated content that was created completely separate from the brand or company to fashion professional marketing messages. New York City's Hospital for Special Surgery ran a series of television ads in 2017–2018 that are comprised of a montage of various people dancing, running, walking, spinning, jumping, skateboarding, cycling, and doing gymnastics and parkour (the hospital specializes in orthopedic care.) A portion of the clips are clearly user-generated, and these are intercut with footage of athletes and actors moving in similar ways to augment and supplement the amateur footage. Compensation to users who generate amateur content will vary depending on the source of the content and often is substantially less than costs incurred by resorting to professional stock houses or original production.

Further Insights

The growth of social media has expanded the reach of user-generated content exponentially. In the same way that user-generated content positive to a brand or company can be used to enhance the company's reputation and encourage product sales, it has also empowered consumers to speak "back" to brands with user-generated content that is critical of company policies, procedures, or products. In the earliest days of the Internet, user/consumers such as Bob Garfield (2009) were empowered to create websites, such as Comcastmustdie, to circulate critical content about products and companies in the public sphere. Yelp and other consumer review sites create even larger communities and opportunities for users to weigh in on the quality of brands and services, a rich source of user-generated content that must be to some extent managed by customer service departments, even as it is beyond the control of marketers.

Issues about "pay to play" user-generated content have arisen and challenged both the authenticity and effectiveness of user-generated marketing content. This can be particularly observed in the "Mommyblogger" scandals of the mid-2010s, in which the very users who had come to fame and some fortune by producing user-generated marketing content exposed the contracts behind their reviews and advocacy of certain products and services over others on their websites and social media channels. This coopting of trusted influencers caused a certain amount of skepticism about the authenticity of user-generated content marketing, which is in keeping with a tradition of critiques of commercial speech that has dogged advertisers since the invention of modern advertising in the 1920s. This is further exacerbated by user-generated content that seeks to parody or satirize commercial messages, which can go viral and show up in search engine results just as easily as more company-positive, -created and -sanctioned messaging.

Informal usage of user-generated content also has consequences for the creators, who may not even realize that the personal content that they have shared with their individual social networks has been used by a company for advertising or marketing purposes. Many may not fully understand the deal they are making when companies reach out to them. For example, a user who generates footage of him- or herself using a bicycle because the individual enjoys cycling, may wind up contacted and contracted to be a user-spokesperson for the bike company and thus subject to behavioral or social media restrictions in the interest of professional brand management. Individuals who post pictures of their favorite products to Instagram might have their postings shared by the company and thus find themselves unwittingly advocating for a company whose other activities or overarching brand ethos may not comport with their personal beliefs or interests.

In the early 2020s, the coffee and donuts chain restaurant, Dunkin’, embraced user-generated content on social media as a primary advertising medium. The company aligned itself with popular influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and made them the faces of their business. One of the most popular was TikTok star Charli D’Amelio, whose dance videos garnered her 150.4 million followers as of 2024. D’Amelio often filmed herself drinking Dunkin’ coffee in her videos, prompting the company to reach out and make her an official brand ambassador. In 2020, Dunkin’ even named a drink in her honor.

Issues

Complicating all of this is that it is tremendously difficult to actually quantify the efficacy of social media mentions and advertising messages/campaigns that are circulated exclusively through social media. (Scott, 2013; Verklin, 2007; Vanderbilt, 2016). Some (Lawrence, Fournier & Brunel, 2013) argue that what they call consumer-generated advertising has demonstrated a high level of success because consumers perceive them as more trustworthy. However, this study focused on user-generated content marketing that was produced by sophisticated media makers who used high-end equipment to create 30-second ads in response to Superbowl ad contests run by Frito-Lay, NIKE, and Proctor and Gamble. Less clear is the effect that the sort of informal circulation of amateur user-generated marketing content and/or social media mentions or user-generated content circulated through those platforms ultimately has on achieving marketing goals (Roberts, 2014).

The most obvious challenge of user-generated marketing messages is the loss of control of and authority over brand management by professional advertisers and marketers. As the audience for all media becomes much more diverse and niche, the effectiveness and purpose of mass media market advertising is eroded (Turow, 2006). Advertising and marketing, once monolithically practiced as top-down messaging from the company to the consumer is now, like all media, a conversation between the message creators and the message receivers (Meeker, 2017). The challenge for traditional advertising and marketing firms is to develop departments whose special capabilities and focus is the seeking of user-generated content and, where possible, either to utilize it in advancing the brand or to marshal brand-positive social media professionals to neutralize the negative effects of disparaging user-generated content.

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