Who to talk to and what to say

Mike Redwood

Columnist

International Leather Maker

While writing this, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) in India could boast 26.6 million followers, making almost everything in the leather industry a rounding error. More significantly, this was three times as many as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and part of the reason, along with demonstrations, that a government minister resigned. This all happened in only three months and changed the political landscape in India, as the apparently impregnable popularity of politicians started crashing. CJP was a movement for the 370 million Gen Z Indians sparked by a botched admissions exam for medical college that is taken by two million students. The exam paper had been leaked, and the police had identified that insiders were the source.

Students were furious, as they study for years for these exams and this was not the first national exam with evidence of dishonesty. Not untypical for traditional authority, the country’s Chief Justice called India’s unemployed youth “cockroaches” and drove India’s youth onto social media, furious about the whole situation that exists for their entry into employment. The CJP was immediately founded by Abhijeet Dipke as a parody of the ruling party BJP and has stuck: “A political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth”, and one with the wit and intelligence peculiar to the articulate Indian culture.

There are major messages for the marketing community in this, particularly marketing communications which involve understanding your target audience and creating the correct messaging and tools to access them. This century, social media has become a vital medium as consumers’ time has been increasingly spent on the internet. Since its tentative origins in the 1970s, social media slowly transformed from early informative text-based communities to more defined networking, phone-based video and now AI-involved, fragmented and selling-heavy platforms.

From useful sharing to the wild west

Some say that the 1997 launch of SixDegrees was the first true social network, but for most, LinkedIn and MySpace, which started in 2003, marked the real start, followed by Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. The move towards sharing visual images was progressed when Instagram started in 2010 and the hugely influential TikTok arrived on the global scene pushing short videos in 2016.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 and the countering launch of Threads and Bluesky hugely damaged the more informational side of social media and since that time, we have constantly been bombarded with issues across all platforms of regulation, abuse and the dangers of AI.

So, from a world of simple profiles and relatively small benign communities, everything became professional and moved from informative notes to considered feeds driven by algorithms. We began to uncover the narrowing of thinking as the algorithms filtered what it pushed at users to hold their attention, finding that by reinforcing prejudices online, scrolling time extended and advertising revenues increased.

By around 2010, large numbers were using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for news and news commentary, further abandoning traditional print media, despite this causing a loss of integrity. Consequently, a clutch of trusted print papers and magazines have grown their readership.

With the arrival of Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, visual postings using photos and video largely took over and increased the potential for key opinion leaders (KOLs) and influencers, while Twitter, now called X, has largely been left for political announcements and hate speech.

In 2014, most of this dynamic growth had paused with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, working differently in the communications environment, and YouTube starting to replace websites for repositories for videos and webinars.

To help understand this changing world, I continued to talk with my long-term colleagues such as my friend and marketing expert, the American Rob Scalea, whose strategic analysis I have always listened to as his insight digs down to the most fundamental nuances in consumer trends. For marketing communications and social media, I have known no one better than Vivian Peters, who headed up communications for Stahl, in the exciting period when Huub van Beijeren was their highly successful CEO. I remember how, with exceptional clarity, she could define exactly how Stahl would address its many separate audiences – tanners, brands, designers and more, through each social media type that those variances groups inhabited and what they would be looking for. She disappeared to her village in the mountains of Austrian Tyrol, but we could do with her insights even more now.

Social media has moved from a relaxed social space to one of great pressure and high unpredictably where success can be found but errors are highly penalised. The volume of material is overwhelming and leads to mental health problems for many vulnerable people. The newer concept of the creator economy along with short-form video and absolutely everyone thinking they have the skills of an influencer, it has become the ultimate home of mundanity, among which the brilliant requires considerable search. There is a reason that the Chinese separated influencers from KOLs, as the KOLs were classed as having at least some knowledge about the subjects they were addressing, and their opinions were worth having. Most are battling for nothing beyond fame and wealth, adding nothing towards the improvement of our lives.

Social media now reaches over five billion people

Today, a new phase is evolving that adds AI into the mix, and various new regulations are being tried out to improve the sector, particularly with regards to the youth. Social media now reaches over five billion people on the planet, and as India found out, cannot be ignored. The leather industry will have to adjust to fit, perhaps with an updated form of digital magazine such as Metcha, Leather Naturally’s online digital magazine focused on leather design and culture, which successfully moved leather marketing from print to digital but was not given the support needed to develop further.

Simple social media is no longer simple, with mostly self-centred creators being able to extract cash directly, companies allowed to sell from within the apps, and target audiences widely dispersed. Most tanners still see social media as a free option, but in reality, it needs skilled manipulation with staff very well trained and keeping up to date. When external companies are used, which is often the better option, they must be very carefully trained and tightly managed to make sensible postings and replies. Leather is an incredibly special and unique material, and bland postings as though it was any other material will do harm. Hoping to simply use AI to recommend and moderate content in the leather world is taking an elevated risk and using it to generate material for leather for the moment is suicidal, as it needs human skills to express and manage the subtleties of leather.

Moreover, tanners will need some assistance in controlling areas such as privacy, governance and the whole issue of dishonesty and misinformation.

Within this framework, the leather industry must hone its messages, which have become clearer over the last few years but need the same sort of manipulation. Pushing an identical message to all audiences will fail.

We have seen some important successes as trade associations have battled over badly thought-out legislation and regulations, and used LCAs, carbon footprints and other well-researched science (mostly produced collaboratively with other industry partners) to support their arguments. They live in the lobbying world and at events like the COP meetings, working together with other bodies to cover major trade shows, fashion, agriculture events and the like. The sheer number of relevant sectors needed to be watched over at COP meetings is close to overwhelming, but it is in such meetings that the industry meets the individuals that matter.

An organisation such as Leather Naturally has already this year started to update its messaging from a promotional point of view which its members and others would do well to make sure they amplify and support fully. But within this, there is a message to tanners themselves that if leather is to be promoted for longevity, durability, repairability and degradability, it needs to be made to achieve this. Heavy PU coatings and other approaches often miss the mark on many points, as do general and wide-ranging claims about the patina. Tanners must be told not to make claims that their leathers do not offer.

Each tanner must be made to understand and accept this, and to have the ambition to make all their leather closer to these. It seems impossible but gets easier as you try, while the culture of your staff evolves to find new solutions and options beyond sandpaper and pigment. Accordingly, the tanner’s language about their leather can evolve as they are the only ones that can genuinely argue that their leathers truly embody a cultural understanding grown out of their unique history and community structure. Some tanneries are in locations or have histories that make this obvious, but all can make it true, often by nothing more than opening their eyes.

Leather is not a commodity, but a material that needs to be celebrated. This is not going to be achieved by getting angry over plastics, but by enabling, enhancing, evolving and fully exalting all its exceptional qualities with carefully crafted messages. 

mike@internationalleathermaker.com

You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.

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