Key Takeaway
OnePiece rose to fame by leveraging mass influential social media users. Founder Thomas Adams recognized the value of empowering everyday fans and eventually turned this insight into a new form of social media marketing: brandbassador.com.
The new social influencer
Move over, PewDiePie and Michelle Phan. There’s a new influencer on the block: you.
Brands are finding ways to leverage the relative influence a large group of everyday social media users can have on product sales, without the hefty price tag that comes with hiring an established influencer. According to Norwegian entrepreneur Thomas Adams, the brands that are getting ahead with social media today recognize where quality vs quantity really matters and are finding ways to empower their biggest fans.
Adams started ready-to-wear brand OnePiece in Norway in 2007. “I had just broken up with a girlfriend at the time, and I was going out to town and wanted to get some attention. So I decided just to wear a purple onepiece.” People took notice. The first thing everyone wanted to know: where did you buy it?
Hack the price
OnePiece launched at a time when social media was really taking off. Adams and his team found ways of using it to quickly get attention – from asking people to change their Facebook profile to a photo with the OnePiece zipped all the way up, to their #HackthePrice campaign that gave fans the power to bring down the price of a OnePiece by sharing on social media.
You empower the individual - that’s what makes it interesting to the millennials.
Social currency
In 2014, after Adams moved to NYC the team decided to launch their first popup store. “We thought we really need to create a lot of buzz around it; we can’t open a store like any other store.” The team wanted to launch this with a social media and PR-driven campaign that would once again put power in the hands of everyday social media users.
“We came up with Social Currency – the idea that people could come into the store and leverage their social media accounts. They could connect their Facebook, Twitter, Youtube…and would get a discount based on the amount of followers they had.”
It’s multi-level marketing on social media steroids - that’s social currency.
Adams today: Brandbassador.com
“A lot of the biggest stars – they already have agents and fly around on private jets. It’s a different class. But everyone else – someone with 500 followers, with 1000, with 5000, 10000 – might not get stuff for free, but the engagement rates that they have are often higher than the very big influencers’.”
Fans began contacting Adams and team, asking for free product in return for posts and shares. These influential ambassadors were given the name PieceKeepers and the brand created their own platform to reward them for the sales they helped drive. When he noticed the platform was bringing in around 10% of their revenue Adams thought, “If this is working for OnePiece, can we white label and sell this platform to other brands?” That’s how Brandbassador came to life.
The concept of brand ambassadors certainly isn’t a new one, but Brandbassador aims to make it easy for brands to reach everyday fans and reward them with small items for spreading the word to their close circles, and for fans to have access to rewards for sharing about all their favorite brands in one place.
By allowing multiple brands on the platform, Adams argues, users are more inclined to keep coming back and working with brands they like more often. For brands on the platform, Brandbassador is quietly gathering data on tomorrow’s rising set of influencers, from the best incentives, to the way they share, to what they’re saying about the products they love.
“If you’re able to reach out to 10,000 people with 100 followers [rather than 1 person with 100,000 followers], you reach a lot of people with much higher engagement rates.”
The real influencers, according to Adams, are “the normal guys – your friend that you trust. You know if he’s posting something even if he’s getting a free hat, he does it because he thinks that hat is cool. It’s just more real.”
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