Can marketers reap the spoils from online battlegrounds?
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Tracking the conflict between two online communities was fruitful for Toni Eagar's research.
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Over the years there have been some classic battles of household name brands: the time when Michael Jackson grooved and moved for the benefit of Pepsi as it looked to topple Coca-Cola, or the ongoing polarising campaign between Apple computers and Microsoft.
But nobody could have predicted that one of the great brand battles, one fought on a whole new battleground, would be between rival groups of fans of fantasy literature.
When JK Rowling, best-selling author of the Harry Potter books gave an interview to the British Sunday Times in 2005, saying she was unaware she was writing fantasy when she began the series and gently mocking the genre her books inhabit, it started a fight that was to play out on Internet pages with combatants drawn from every region.
First to take up arms and enter the fray was fellow fantasy author Terry Pratchett. His 38 Discworld books - a series begun with The Colour of Magic in 1983 - proudly proclaim their fantasy roots in a world of elves, witches, trolls and dwarves.
Pratchett took exception to the words of Rowling and the reporter who had penned the Sunday Times story, and fired off a letter to the editor. He then followed that with a broadside 'snarky' statement that Rowling should have realised she was writing fantasy.
Next on the scene was BBC Online, which published a story with an edited version of Pratchett's statement under the headline 'Pratchett’s anger at Rowling’s rise'. The story - published on JK Rowling's birthday - was the accidental misfire that let loose the wrath of online community fans.
It was about this time that an intrepid war reporter - or in this case researcher - Toni Eagar caught up with the looming clash ahead. Eagar, at ANU doing her PhD research, had built a friendly relationship with Pratchett after the author had come to the University as part of the public lecture series.
She said that as soon as the BBC published the story, the army of Harry Potter fans online sounded the war cry.
"The Harry Potter fans found the story and went berserk," she says.
"They were angry at Terry Pratchett, particularly as it happened on JK Rowling's birthday. There were a lot of online attacks. It got very personal and went on for about three weeks.
"What complicated the issue was that the BBC later rewrote the story, changed the heading and wrote an apology to Terry Pratchett. But by then it was too late."
The accidental exchange prompted a flood of posts on the online noticeboards for fans of both Harry Potter and Discworld. But, said Eagar, what was interesting from a marketing viewpoint was the different reactions from the opposing fans.
"Some Discworld fans said they found Terry Pratchett's letter disappointing, but that was a minority of responses. In general, they saw the whole issue as something against the reporter.
"For the Harry Potter fans, though, there was a lot of emotion, they took it very personally. One person said 'Harry Potter is my life, how dare he say that?' The fans wanted to defend JK Rowling.
"Then there were a third group of people who weren't fans of either, but were 'anti-fans' of JK Rowling and said things like 'it's about time someone told JK Rowling'. So you had all these different responses to the media," she says.
And on and on went the messages like missiles flying in all directions. At one point one of the bulletin boards being monitored by Eagar had 10 pages of posts, each containing 15 comments.
From her study of the bulletin boards, Eagar produced a paper analysing the interaction between the groups of fans - When Brand Communities Collide: Moral Judgements and Psuedo-Relationships in Cross-Community Conflicts.
In the paper, she breaks down the behaviour of the online fans into moral judgements, and what effect that had on the group. The differences were stark. In the Discworld community participants tended towards a positive moral judgement towards Pratchett's letter, leaping to his defence and uniting in disparaging the Harry Potter books. This, says Eagar, helped to reinforce group identity.
The Harry Potter community, however, saw a fracturing of views - with some fans fuming over Pratchett's actions, while others took a neutral standpoint.
Eagar said that those fans who felt the actions were 'bad' then applied attach behaviours and sanctions to people in the Discworld forums. Some even threatened to never read Pratchett's books.
She says the lessons for marketers from the whole episode is that the emotional attachment people form to brands can be much stronger than a preference for flavour in your fizzy drink.
One of the ways people define their allegiance to brands, she says, can be communities of opposition - such as the comparative advertising that saw the battle between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.
"The Pepsi taste challenge was classic comparative advertising. To counter that Coca-Cola introduced 'New Coke', which was a classic marketing disaster. The company lost market share through trying to taste better than Pepsi.
"The real problem with comparative marketing, though, is that you have to mention your competitor and studies show that people will mix up who the advertiser actually is. With the Panadol versus Herron ads, run by Herron, when people were asked who was being advertised a proportion said Panadol.
"The difference in the Discworld versus Harry Potter battle was that it was a particular argument at a particular time. The people on those forums didn't define themselves as being against each other - something happened and it was an all-in scrum," she said.
Once the dust had settled on the battlefield, however, it was the Discworld series of books that had won the war in a marketing sense.
"It left Discworld strangely positioned," Eagar says.
"The Harry Potter fans had heard about this new brand and wanted to know about it. All that negative stuff had encouraged people to find out about the opposition brand.
"For the Harry Potter brand the experience was probably more negative. The ones ranting had embarrassed the ones that weren't; there was a lot of telling people to calm down. Plus, Harry Potter was already such a huge brand that it had no effect of increased awareness."
But for those marketers thinking that provoking an online fight between fans might be a good way of generating publicity or purchases, Eagar warns that although you can start the battle, once it's happening there's little you can do to control it, or the eventual outcomes.
"There's only so much marketers can control and you don't know when these things are going to happen. They're opportunistic, so it’s hard to study what the triggers are."
It's more important, she adds, that marketers have a clear idea of who buys their products and why.
"What happened throws up the issue that traditional segmentation methods, such as income, age and choice, aren't necessarily the only way to group people. Marketers need to go back and check their strategies and targeting," she says.
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