Without the User on Your Side, Everything You Do is Negated
In the old days, you could yell at the TV if you disagreed with an ad. Nobody would hear you. Today, if you don’t agree with a company’s claims, you have a whole world listening. Over half the content online is user-generated. Posts on MySpace. Videos on YouTube. Blogs. Podcasts.
And the percentage will only increase in the future. General Motors and others are experimenting with user-generated advertising. Channel101 and Channel102 are experimenting with user-generated television. Users are going to talk, more and more, with each other.
Marketers have lost control of their message. We can’t control the monologue anymore. If users decide your product doesn’t live up to your claims, they have a ready audience waiting to listen. More and more people look to personal reviews before committing to a major purchase. And there’s simply no way to own all the personal opinions on the internet.
The bottom line? The traditional notion of branding is dead.
That said, long live branding. Truly sustainable brands aren’t created by an advertising monologue alone. They aren’t created by great products alone. It takes both, working together with user opinion, to create a great brand.
If the users agree with you, they become your best form of marketing. They’ll willingly go out and sell for you. They’ll talk to their friends. They’ll talk online. Because everyone wants to discover something truly wonderful, and they want to share. When the marketing message reflects the true user experience, everyone wins.
Of course, there will always be hotheads. When General Motors tried user-generated advertising with their new Tahoe, there were users who put together ads with less than complimentary messaging. In the old days of the “brand book,” these ads would be anathema. They’d put the product in a bad light. They’d reflect poorly on the brand. They’d have to be stomped out, immediately.
Luckily, GM was smart enough to realize that being an arbiter of user-generated creative would reflect on their brand even more poorly than the negative ads. So they played this from the new “brand book.” They did nothing.
This is a seismic shift in the way we view branding. If you could look at a brand as an equation, it might look something like this:
Brand = ((Position + Personality + Consistency)*Delivery)Time
A unique position and personality delivered consistently across the range of communications platforms, once was the key focal point in brand development. That was classical branding.
Today, you need to multiply these qualities by how well you deliver on your products’ promises. Don’t deliver, and the value of your brand goes to zero. Which perfectly describes what’s happening when user-generated word of mouth doesn’t match your claims.
And everything is affected by time. Deliver consistently across all your products and services for years, and the value of your brand increases exponentially.
(Of course, you may want to ask how Centric came up with this brand equation in 1999, years before everyone was talking about word of mouth. But hey, we like to be ahead of the curve.)
So, we say: Branding is dead. Insincere branding, anyway.
Long live the new branding!
