Collective Bias Expands to Keep up with Growth

Understanding a consumer is not the same as understanding a shopper.

Armed with that awareness — and an army of socially engaged shoppers — the nameless company John Andrews helped begin just two years ago is quickly making a name for itself.

Collective Bias LLC is an advertising and marketing firm in Bentonville, with its efforts focused on the relatively new trend of shopper marketing through social media.

The company was founded in May 2009 — and operated without a name for a few months before adopting the current moniker — and its growth has been quicker than expected, if not rapid.

Andrews, the company’s CEO and formerly the senior manager of emerging media at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., reported total revenue that approached $2 million in 2010. This year, he said the firm expects to triple that figure.

Mirroring that climb is the company’s workforce. Last year that number was five, Andrews and co-founder Brad Lawless included.

Now, Andrews said Collective Bias employs “19 or 20” people. It has added a CFO in Matt Lawrence, a sales person in Los Angeles and New York, as well as account management and project management teams.

Ted Rubin, formerly with e.l.f Makeup & Cosmetics, OpenSky and the most-followed chief marketing officer on Twitter with approximately 51,000 followers, also recently joined the team as social chief marketing officer. He is considered one of the leading social marketing strategists in the country.

The Collective Bias client list is split roughly 70-30 between brand names and retail clients. Retail clients include Sears, K-Mart, Murphy USA and The UPS Store.

On the brand side, the firm works with ConAgra Foods and several of its portfolio clients, which include Nestle and Elmer’s Glue.

The company’s only office is in Bentonville, a 3,100-SF space on South Main Street just off the downtown square. The move there was made within the past month.

Previously the firm shared office space with Mars Advertising Inc., its sister company whose CEO (Ken Barnett) is best described by Andrews as the “angel investor” of Collective Bias.

“We are growing,” said Lawless, the firm’s communications director and business development officer. “But there are things that we need to really help support our community and help them be the best at what they do.”

 

Valuable Insight

The company’s aim is to bring together consumers, brands and retailers to create a continuous, real shopper media conversation.

That involves every possible aspect of the shopping experience. Not just the product that’s being bought but where, when and how it’s purchased.

In other words, the marketing efforts aren’t being tailored to a consumer (i.e. the goods and purchases that are being consumed), which has been the traditional method.

Rather, Collective Bias and its 1,100 Social Fabric community members are able to take the temperature of a specific target audience and collect real-time feedback of shoppers (i.e. consumers who are in shopping mode).

The real-time angle is the twist that retailers and brands are finding invaluable. What used to take weeks can now be produced in days and even hours.

It’s a valuable insight, Andrews said, as well as a new and effective way to create conversations between shoppers and brands.

“The thing we love about Collective Bias is the level of engagement they have with the blogger community,” said Andi Pratt, a shopper marketing manager for Nestle. “The bloggers they work with are really known in the social space. They do a great job of becoming brand ambassadors and talking about products in a genuine way.

“And we utilize [Collective Bias] just to listen as well, to hear what shoppers are saying about our product versus what us marketers think is going on.”

The whole goal, Andrews said, is to put the voice of the shopper into every part of the shopping process. Focus groups can’t achieve it and neither can a shop-along.

“If Mom isn’t shopping at 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon with her kids and one is running off in the store and the other is grabbing items off the shelf, it’s just not how they shop,” Andrews said. “It’s not a real environment. What you can learn from the other ways can be skewed.”

 

Social Fabric

The company’s exclusive, proprietary community known as Social Fabric has grown to approximately 1,100 members. They are bloggers, but Collective Bias refers to them as influencers.

Collective Bias facilitates the connection of these influencers to the brands and retailers they have an interest in, ranging from food or fashion to babies, parenting, travel, dolls or crafters.

Within Social Fabric, there are approximately 250 communities.

One of those, for example, is a crafting community called Glue & Glitter.

It has 343 members and each one of them averages about 25,000 followers.

That’s a reach of 8.57 million for that particular community, which can provide a perfectly tailored conversation of particular interest for, say, Elmer’s Glue.

“That is the reach of People magazine; or the cyber base of People magazine,” Andrews said. “Now you have a media property about crafting. And it is continually producing content.”

Membership into Social Fabric is only by invitation. The group’s website (www.socialfabric.us) ranks as the 2,450th most visited site in the country, according to alexa.com rankings, signifying a membership that is “very engaged in the [social media] community and shows great passion when it comes to what we do,” Andrews said.

 

Close-Knit Community

So who are the members of Social Fabric?

Going by the alexa.com data, based on Internet averages of the web traffic to the group’s private website, they are predominantly females who are in the age range of 25-34, have children, received some college education and browse the site from home.

It’s a close-knit community with members throughout the country.  Many of them have met in person and each plays an important role, Andrews said, whether it’s sharing shopper insights with other members, promoting and supporting fellow bloggers, participating in paid “shoppertunities” or becoming a campaign or project leader for a specific project.

On average, Andrews said each member has a network of about 25,000 followers on a wide variety of social media platforms — blog or Twitter followers, Facebook fans or YouTube subscribers, to name the most popular avenues.

Melissa Garcia of Edmond, Okla., runs a blog called consumerqueen.com. Its message board has about 25,000 registered users, Garcia said, and the website averages just more than 1 million page views every month.

Throw in her Facebook page (15,000 fans), Twitter account (11,000 followers) and YouTube channel (1,100 subscribers) and it’s evident that Garcia has quite a reach.

Tonya Staab lives in California and has more than 4,000 Twitter followers and 900 subscribers to her blog at tonyastaab.com. She also uses other social media engines including Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.

Her “shoppertunities” focus specifically in the craft and food niches. She’s currently a campaign leader for a Safeway promotion being developed.

“You find opportunities that are relevant to you and what you blog about,” she said. “I’m obviously not going to apply for every shoppertunity that is promoted because I blog about only a handful of topics. I’m on the lookout for those I feel I can bring something of value to.”

 

Building On a Fast Start

Andrews said because of the high engagement level of its bloggers, the size of the Social Fabric community is just where the company wants it.

Collective Bias, he said, is on a four-year path and “we really just finished Phase I, which was to get the community to critical mass.”

What’s next for Andrews’ formerly nameless company is to keep building its name.

The immediate translation of that is starting the technology development phase, which seems apt considering the Bentonville office has just one landline phone and to date Collective Bias hasn’t built a single piece of technology.

The company has recently hired a second developer and is currently in production on its first mobile application. When launched, it will work on the three dominant platforms — iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

That should facilitate an even bigger scope for a company that’s gotten pretty big, pretty quick.

“Our community today has a total reach of 26 to 27 million people,” Andrews said. “That’s a pretty powerful tool.”