This particular post has turned into a bit of a novel and as a result I am going to split it up into bite sized chunks - here is part I.
I‘ve had a number of troubling interactions recently at work related functions around online marketing. These involve conversations between me and senior marketing types who ten years ago so proudly stated “I don’t know anything about computers, I don’t have to, we have secretaries to do that sort of thing” but now have me cornered wanting to discuss a below the line campaign for one of the top three online verticals. The conversation continues:
Them (out loud): Don’t you know about the online ROI darling?
Me (internally): Oh gawd make it stop. *skulls remainder of drink in hand*
Me (out loud): I need to get another drink; please excuse me.
Despite their online conversion, and don’t get me wrong, I admire someone who can change their mind about things, their talk is buzzword bullshit and they still haven’t got their head around what the webs have done, particularly in decentralizing communication. The worst thing though is their misunderstanding about how we so called “online specialists” go about our working life.
A commonly held misconception is that we web people are privy to a single universal set of principles, which we apply and find the answer to any and all web related communication problems. Unfortunately there is no magic book here and communicating online cannot be distilled to a campaign specific recipe for success. Successful online communication begins by understanding the fundamentals, not the specifics, and learning the fundamentals will help you to understand the changing landscape of communication.
Comparing old brands and new brands
I have mentioned the difference between old media branding and new media branding before:
Branding is no longer about building a brand somewhere out there in brand-space and attracting willing … consumers to it, like a beacon lit by the fire of large advertising budgets. Branding is now about building trust and understanding with each and every individual customer.
And although this statement is true, it is pretty generic and I want to add some more detail to the difference between old and new media branding so we can start to understand what the fundamentals for communicating in the online space are and hopefully together work out strategies that can turn truths into insight and opportunities for everyone.
A theory of brands and branding
The idea of brands is a relatively new one for humans and is a result of how we think about the world and structure events into cause and effect. Let’s take the example of someone shooting you with a gun: as the bullet speeds towards you on its deadly journey into your soft flesh you can analyse the situation in one of the following ways:
- Physical level
At the physical level you can understand and think about the mass of the bullet, its velocity and trajectory. - Mechanical level
At the mechanical level you think about and understand the bullets flight on the basis of a machine, with gunpowder, lead, bronze casing, sights and a trigger. - Personal level
At the personal level we think about the person holding the gun; because physics and mechanics aside, he is the guy who wants you dead.
These three levels of abstraction are an intellectual adaptation to help us make sense of events and actions in the world with a view to recognising and avoiding potential dangers while cashing in on beneficial opportunities. We have these three levels of understanding because the human world is complicated, a falling rock can be avoided with a fairly basic strategy but escaping an army of angry rock throwers requires a different approach entirely.
Marketers use these facts
Successful marketing involves talking to people on the Personal level because marketers know communicating on the Personal level unlocks a powerful tool: emotion. Emotion does not exist on either the Physical or Mechanical level and emotion is the single biggest motivator in the human world.
Exercises in branding, be it advertising or media articles are designed by marketing departments as a Personal level interaction between people and brands. These brand exercises are successful when they instill in the minds of potential customers the idea that the brand exists as a single living entity requiring Personal level analysis.
These newly created beings, these brands are used by organisations in two ways:
- Attraction
Creating a brand a consumer can relate to as a person encourages the consumer to engage, relate to and value the brand. Having an attractive brand helps an organisation to sell goods and services to people who haven’t been customers before. - Retention
Creating a brand a consumer can relate to as a person reminds the consumer of the values expressed in the brand. Sure the last time they called the organisation behind the brand the experience was bad and the person in the shop was rude but the ad supporting the brand values washes the sins of real life interaction away.
In our brains there is no difference between the one bad Personal level interaction with the customer service representative and the ten television commercials (TVCs) they have seen since because the TVCs are structured so the brand interaction is also a Personal level interaction.
For our brains, it is all the same interaction with the same “person” and with the bad experience outweighed by good experience ten to one, the net result is positive feeling toward the brand – despite the fact there was only one actual and “real” experience.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I love your analogies, but I maintan that at the personal level there are two dimensions; intellectual and emotional. At the intellectual level we are dealing with declarative knowledge, facts about the brand. These require high involvement processing and are susceptible to direct communications via advertising, pr, word of mouth and all the usual tools of brand communications. At the emotional level we are dealing with values involving low involvement processing often at subliminal levels. So, in the bullet analogy while you intellect is processing the best strategy (cortical processing) your old brain (cerebellum) is already making you duck!
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:14 am
Thanks for your comment and I appreciate that this post oversimplifies the processes involved - the key point for me, however, is a subjective one. An effective brand exists in the minds of customers, not marketers, and a brand exists in their minds in the same way as other people do, a brand is perceived by people as if it was another mind.
This is to distinguish from your point about messages and the mind/brain dichotomy - which, at the end of the day, is an objective view of brands and branding. To my mind the key to communicating successfully in a new media environment is understanding the subjective elements; these are the fundamentals of social media interaction.
This is part I of what was meant to be a single post - so hopefuly my thinking in this area maybe clearer in part II (at least clearer than mud :).
As an aside an in case you are interested, the three levels approach is based on the intentional stance work by Daniel Dennett.
Thanks again for the comment; I hope to have part II up by the weekend.
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Very interesting, I have been considering your point of people viewing a brand as another ‘mind’… the brand as person model. Of course the brand has no conciousness, but observing the phenomena it often behaves as though it has - a sort of brand ‘Turing Test’.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:28 am
I think the first brands in this world were undoubtedly based on a single concious person, maybe a local leader or war lord. These personal brands would boost the reputation of that person beyond the individual personal interactions, and support broad brand values (for ruthlessness, compassion, justice etc). Ghengis Khan and the Mongol Invasion is a good example of this kind of effect.
Brands then made the jump to exist to represent and support other non-human things, cars, hamburgers, toothpaste, organisations and even countries (as you have thought about).
I think brands have achieved this by exploiting a quirk of the compression algorithms in our brains that relate to switching up to the intentional stance (Personal level) as a way of efficiently computing events into cause and effect specifically of other “mind agents” in the world around us.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
I like your definition. Is this your own?
Especially: “Branding is now about building trust and understanding with each and every individual customer.”
Very true. Working on some innovative ways to use social media for branding at the moment. I should send you some info about it in a few months.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:19 am
Thanks Ben. This kind of definition is unlikely to be completely unique (there are a lot of very smart people with great ideas here on the webs, particularly in this area), but I have not based it directly on any one thing. So yes I will claim it as mine, and then give it away. Think about it as a sort of catch and release programme for thoughts.
I was also fortunate enough to have Daniel Dennett as an Erskine Fellow at my university when I was a student and his theories on cognition and conciousness have heavily influenced my thinking on such things as a result.
Part II is a stab at a theory and strategy behind successful social media branding - specifically the impact of decentralised communication on brand marketing; which could be interesting for your own work. It should be published by Saturday.
I am always interested in good ideas and innovative practise - so it would be great to see what you come up with. Information should be free.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:20 am
I look forward to it!
Maybe you should look at getting some funding to do some formal research in this area?
I am returning to University to do my Masters (if i can secure funding) and am going to focus on this shift in Marketing through online channels and how it impacts strategy, brand building, communication channels and importance of advertising. Very interesting.
Totally agree on information. I share my research as well, with further stuff from my archives to be released. I put up Creating a Compelling Experience Online, which explores creating flow, and in turn how to stimulate that. The implication is that creating a compelling experience online is marketing for your website.
This parallels this shift your discussing of experiential marketing, helping your customers. Building brand value that way.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:44 am
Thanks Ben. I would love a link to the Creating a Compelling Experience Online if that is okay?
But no plans to go back to university for me; the lessons we are learning in this area are not learnt in classrooms they are learnt on the ground, applying ideas, seeing what works and improving results through conversations and idea iterations.
There are no hard and fast rules for online marketing communications, we discover the principles by applying our ideas and learn as we go (the most important lessons are learnt through failure). And, to be honest, I kinda like the “we are making this up as we go along” aspect of it.
July 23rd, 2008 at 11:53 am
http://blog.bwagy.com/challenges-faced-by-live-search-in-creating-a-compelling-experience/
PDF: http://blog.bwagy.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/challenges_faced_by_live_search_in_creating_a_compelling_experience.pdf
I agree. They are learned on the ground, but how can we share that?
I’ve found if you can somehow get a mix of academic research with on the ground, you can develop frameworks from a sound academic and experiential background.
My aim really is to provide the knowledge in a manner that future generations will learn from it. Rather than as we find in business people making same basic mistakes over and over.
I like to think academia provides a platform skill base and if we can build onto that platform more experiential learnings wouldn’t that be neat?
Getting off topic. Great post! I really look forward to the second part.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
A platform/framework that facilitates sharing lessons learnt in the area of online marketing and communications, particularly with agreed and congruent metrics, now that would be something.
That isn’t getting off topic - its hopefully where this is heading; or at least some of the ideas behind such an awesome thing.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
So the first step is to decide on metrics, which are relevant, which can be consistently measured.
I have been throwing the idea of focused attention around. Extrapolate how much (in time) attention your website gets.
Ie Facebook avg 6 hours/month (old data).
July 30th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
[...] Social media solutions Part I: a theory of brands and branding : pellacor.com This is great stuff. (tags: branding blogging socialmedia) [...]
July 31st, 2008 at 11:14 am
Great post!
I’m enjoying the conversation. I believe brands need to make a “human connection with their target audience. The new web 2.0 consumers are savvy. They’re also an opt-in generation of thinkers.
They want control of “everything” in their lives. No longer will they stand for brands telling them what to, when to do it and how etc
I’m a passionate believer in the customer’s experience of a brand that to me is the deciding factor of how well everything else (marketing, advertising etc) are put in place beforehand. Online word of mouth is rapidly growing and influential. A brand has one shot at connecting with their consumer if they can’t connect on a personal level they’ll go somewhere else.
I look forward to your next post,
Best,
Marie
July 31st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Thanks Marie, my day job is getting in the road of finishing my thinking here. I am speaking in Hamilton at the beginning of next week then start the new job on Thursday - unfortunately pellacor takes a back seat to everything else.
You are right it is certainly interesting times for communicators and losing the single point of control with mass media audiences of TV, newspapers, radio etc requires a smarter approach.