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WHEN TIKTOK TAKES OVER YOUR BRAND

There aren’t a lot of things that brands ranging from Amazon to the NFL can agree on, but this week one thing that has everyone aligned is @emilyzguay’s TikTok account.

The deadpan designer started the corporate love-fest by publishing a video where she declared that she would put her college degree to use by redesigning logos for Starbucks, H&R Block, and Apple. If you haven’t seen it yet, we highly recommend clicking here before reading on. Don’t worry, we’ll wait.

Alright, now that we’ve all experienced Emily’s unique brand of design genius, we can talk about the overwhelming response that inspired her to create her next batch of creative insights for NASA, Target, and the app that made this all possible: TikTok. People had been flooding her comments asking for more and nominating the next victims, including one request directly from the Adobe corporate account, when something remarkable happened: TikTok embraced Emily’s suggestion and made it their profile pic to be seen by all 57 million of their followers (her response: "I've peaked").

The floodgates now securely opened, brand requests poured in, and some took it to another level. McDonalds adopted Emily’s creative spelling as well as the new logo on TikTok, then cryptically tweeted about it. Amazon showed how they had adopted her work to show up on their trucks, boxes, stores, and even airplanes. Perhaps the height of the mania (at least so far) happened when the Detroit Lions not only printed team merch with their reimagined identity, but invited Emily to visit the stadium to show off the new look (and updated team name).

What goes around comes around, as the NFL flipped the script to give Emily’s face the same type of reimagining that she had been dishing out. The resulting makeover is now featured as @emilyzguay’s own profile pic.

SO WHAT?

First, this whole exchange feels like a throwback to the early days of brands on social media; a time when corporate wasn’t paying much attention, there were few expectations, and social media managers were free to have some personality and fun with their communities.

That begs the question: What’s changed?

In the era of perfectly manicured IG feeds and tweets that are triple-checked by legal before they get published, we’ve lost a sense of what made these channels so powerful in the first place. It was inevitable that we’d professionalize the practice to a certain degree, and there were some truly shocking cautionary tales to be told along the way, but if we’re going to bother having a social media presence for our brands at all, why not allow ourselves to have little fun with it?

Now, we’re not suggesting that you run out and try to be the next brand that gets trolled by Emily, or even that TikTok is the right channel for you. But for just about every brand there’s an opportunity to look at our various channels and ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Is this the best possible reflection of our brand’s personality?
2. Is this how we interact with people face to face?
3. What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be a bit more human?

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting