What is the holy grail for a brand marketer? Let’s take a marketing manager for a sports beverage – how about SoBe. Would SoBe’s marketing manager regard a Super Bowl ad as the ultimate marketing achievement? Even better, how about a hilarious, memorable Super Bowl ad, the 30-second spot for which was negotiated at a highly discounted rate? That sounds pretty darn desirable for a brand marketer, don’t you agree?

On the other hand, maybe something entirely different would be the brand marketer’s holy grail. Maybe the best possible marketing scenario would simply be this: the star quarterback on the Lafayette High School football team in St. Joseph, Missouri tells a bunch of his friends and acquaintances that he loves drinking SoBe.

Huh? How could that possibly be as impactful and effective as a Super Bowl ad?

SoBe’s marketers think it is.

PepsiCo, the parent brand of SoBe, recently shifted a third of its massive marketing budget away from “big brand” media such as the Super Bowl, and toward social media and word of mouth marketing. Frank Cooper III, chief consumer engagement officer for PepsiCo’s US beverage arm, explains why his company spurned the Super Bowl:

We found that our consumers’ social relationships serve as the foundation for our most effective marketing. One of the most valuable – yet underrated – assets any company has is the wisdom and passion of its most loyal consumers.

What exactly is it that is making the Super Bowl less desirable for leading marketers, and word of mouth referrals more desirable?

It’s the trust factor. Though a TV ad with a silly joke might make you laugh, and a magazine ad with a supermodel might catch your attention, neither of these is as likely to make you want to buy a brand’s product as when someone whose opinion you trust tells you the product is good. That notion is borne out by plenty of research.

But let’s not drink too much of the word of mouth marketing Kool-Aid. The problem with the star quarterback example I gave earlier is that, while I’m sure Lafayette High School is a fine institution, it’s too small. While high brand engagement is definitely desirable, leading brands like SoBe also need scale. The real holy grail is trust-based SoBe referrals happening thousands of times, in thousands of places, over a sustained period of time.

To date, that grail has been elusive, because trust-based referrals are like lightning in a bottle. Brand marketers have thought of word of mouth marketing as being outside their sphere of control. They haven’t been able to directly create trust-based referrals among consumers, and they certainly haven’t been able to create thousands of referrals and measure the brand affinity and product purchases they are driving.

But that’s beginning to change. Social media has drastically reduced the friction that had previously prevented trust-based referrals in high volumes. The rapid consumer adoption of social media, however, is not enough to meet brand marketers’ needs. The problems now have to do with too much noise and confusion, a lack of brand safety, and a lack of consistent measurement.

Dynamic Signal was founded to tackle these problems head-on. We think marketers will greatly value a platform that enables them to collaborate with influential, outspoken consumers who love their brand, in order to generate trust-based referrals at high volume and with precise measurement. The grail will soon be within grasp.