Tom Himpe gives a rich presentation on how to create remarkable products & services.
“The one thing all of these domains have in common, is that they float in between product development and marketing. They are as much about improving the products as promoting them. And as such, they are eroding the importance of traditional advertising. They are blurring the traditional lines between R&D and marketing.” - Tom Himpe
This is a valuable addition to the ongoing discussion concerning the enrichment of marketing, and brand building outside of the narratives.
The core purpose of any brand is to create value. But at the same time the communication of this value is of equal importance as it is only through communication that participants will be exposed to or experience the brand.
Therefore it is my proposition that the core purpose of any brand goes outside the creation of value and includes communication as well. I guess this is a no-brainer, but the way the communication part is played out today it seems to be open for new opportunities.
I would claim that a few “powerlaws” dominate when it comes to brand related communication. These limit the creativity of the marketer to storytelling through the publishing of narratives, creating anticipation before experience.
But looking beyond these powerlaws and exploring how to achieve success through new, unexpected or alternative arenas for communication will benefit brands of today, and be essential for the brands of tomorrow.
Branding isn’t necessarily narratives, and it isn’t “buy”-buttons. It is anything that communicates and creates a value for the brand. What we need now is to bring down the limitations of the powerlaw mindset and start using our creativity on how we communicate the brand.
The future of brands lies just as much in the creativity of the communication as in the uniqueness of their value.
People will be waiting for your product, anticipating it.
That is something else then launching a product on an unprepared or indifferent customer base, or having to drive their anticipation upfront with tons of messaging on marketing channels.
Participation is both innovation and marketing, which also, according to Peter Drucker, are the two fundamentals of business.
Three main factors identify the current landscape:
1. The consumers are moving forward (have anything ever stood still?), turning into ubiquitous participants. Nokia is portraying the next generation brilliantly with their advert The 4th Screen.
2. Starting in 2006/2007 and building momentum through 2008, brands and marketers are seeing game changing possibilities present themselves. Similar in consequence to what myspace, facebook and youTube did to consumer online participation.
3. Brands missed the first wave in online advertising. Sitting on the fence while consumers embraced and taught themselves how to avoid unwanted intrusion. But now there is a second wave, and brands can leap frog the first and be at the forefront of innovation. On the same playing field as the participants.
In part one: We are all Millenials, the presentation sets out to illuminate some of the changes that has taken place during the last eight years. Stating that changes in nine “ideas” during the last years has had such an impact on us that we are all a part of the digital evolution.
In part two, I am trying to present some ideas concerning the most important aspects of The New Brand Landscape: Digital is not a silo, Geotility and Spimes, MyMedia, Branded Utility, Arenas and participation.
The Manifesto is a quickly read 16 pages, and after a slow start kicks in a lot of beautiful quotes at the end, explaining what, why and how to solve it:
“Most enterprises are continuing to manage brands according to principles that have not changed for decades. Brand management is more like ‘brand maintenance’: It tries to control brands, creating consistency and predictability in a world that now demands businesses surprise, innovate, adapt and respond.”
“Today, brand momentum is brand management: Momentum that creates expectation and anticipation.”
Two articles published the last week both reference research by Gary Small claiming that the old “truth”; that the brain doesn’t change (just because we have a new kind of technology) is only partly true.
The point being that, as we know, the brain learns through trial and error - or trial and reward as the brain repeats action based on a “reward chemical” being released in the brain when doing something we should do more (read more).
So, the concept of how the brain works is based on how we learn stuff. And the people being brought up with technology learn stuff differently than people without. This doesn’t affect a lot of the primal concepts of the brain, but it affects how we communicate and connect with people - which certainly should be important for brands.
One of the best ways to define a target group for a branded utility is by using a verb. That simple. How?
Well, the traditional top-down demographic definitions like age, income, “rurality”, children, education, car etc. don’t really give any inclusive or exclusive understanding of who we are trying to talk to.
But if we identify the one thing we want them to do, the verb, we can start building our target from the ground up. Motivation, anticipation, aspiration, desire etc. . Including everyone who can be interested in doing what we want them to do. And excluding everyone else.
Concentrate on the verb, and build your targets from the ground up.
In this short video John Gerzema, Chief Insight Officer, Young & Rubicam explains the “problem” with brands today. From his book The Brand Bubble
“Consumers are falling out of love with brands”
“What we found was that consumers were looking not only for a brand to be different, but for to keeping different, we call this energized differentiation.”
“What do brands with energized differentiation understand, they understand a brand is not a place, it’s a direction, they understand that their positioning is no longer static. And that brands must constantly evolve. Their in peril if they stand still”
This gives a much better idea of the need for fluidity and constant movement for brands, it takes it one step further than “the need for change”, as Seth Godin, amongst others, discussed almost ten years ago.
The video was found on brand new which also includes this parapgraph.
They go on to argue that the exceptional brands that are valued by consumers have a common trait. They are seen as having energy and momentum. That’s a powerful conclusion as it challenges a lot of the assumptions that underpin brand management, marketing and communications. It argues that consistency is a false idol; change, momentum and energy matter more. And this leads to a very different kind of marketing and brand management.
According to Gilbert, humans avoid risk but admire the people who embrace it. The reason being our understanding of the fact that change is necessary for survival, and in order to evolve someone has to “look down the barrel of danger” :o).
As it is an embedded notion in species that we need to evolve i order to survive, it might be we are looking for the same traits in companies and brands that we want to identify with?
