What is your best friend’s personal brand? How about your spouse’s?
Those questions came to mind as I read through The Death of Merchandising in an Online World, by Dana Blankenhorn, who is reliably wise. In that post, Dana correctly observes that brand value is declining as merchandising shifts from stores to online services, and to influencers who are also stores.
I think there’s also something else going on at the same time: the shift in media from real advertising to the online equivalent of junk mail, which is what you see with nearly every ad you encounter on your browsers and apps. To marketers, browsers and apps are boxes for junk mail, which at its most ideal is personalized by surveillance. As I put it in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff, ” Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself.”
I wrote that a decade ago. With AI today, that alien replica is the real thing. Madison Avenue is now AM radio, with a whip antenna and tail fins.
Brand advertising worked best when “the media” were mostly print and broadcast. Sources of both were so few that they all fit on a newsstand and the dials of radios and TVs. To operate a source of either, you needed a printing plant or transmitting towers. Publishers and broadcasters are still around, but now their goods are mostly distributed over the Internet and consumed through glowing rectangles. And they’re competing in a world where the abundance of other sources of content is incalculably vast. In that world, the only places you can still reliably create and maintain brands is by sponsoring live events. Especially sports. That’s why I know fifteen minutes will save me fifteen percent with Geico, even though Geico stopped saying that years ago. I also know that you only pay for what you need with Liberty Mutual. And I’ll never get the Shaefer Beer jingle out of my mind.
On the whole, however, branding has finished running the same course as the broadcasting it paid for.
It helps to remember that the words brand and branding were borrowed from ranching. They applied especially well when people had few choices of media, and few if any ways to avoid ads meant to burn the names of companies and products onto mental hides.
What we really (or at least should) mean by brand today is reputation. How a business obtains that in our still-new Digital Age (now with AI!) is an open question.
I believe the answer will come from the natural world, where markets have been working far longer than we’ve had digital media, broadcasting, or print. It was in the natural world that two very different people—one an athiest and the other a pastor—separately explained to me, not long after The Cluetrain Manifesto came out, that markets are not just about transactions and (as Cluetrain insisted) conversations. They are about relationships.
Marketing prevents those. Or shortcuts them. Especially as it continues to devolve into funnels at the bottom end of which are transactions alone, or entrapment in a company’s “loyalty” system.
The Internet and the Web were both designed to support maximum agency and independence for every entity using them. We can have far better markets and marketing if demand and supply both work with maximized agency, and scale in ways that are good for both. That’s the idea behind market intelligence that flows both ways.
Making and maintaining those kinds of relationships will be VRM+CRM, What those together will make are wholes that exceed the sum of either part.
Reliably wise? Reliably following Doc Searls, I think you mean. But I know you’re too modest to say that. (Hey, someone tell my son I’m reliably wise. Watch him laugh his head off.)
I suppose I think everyone who shares my opinions is pre-qualified as wise, but I don’t think of most of them as exceptional. You I read as much as I can, so I suppose that’s a sign of something.
Also, speaking of sons, I once asked one of mine if my giving him advice would take it off the table. He thought about it for a minute and said, “Probably.”
Brand has always been about reputation as well as ownership. I tend to lean more on flag (identity) than brand (ownership mark). Think about barber poles and tavern signs or billboard ads and blue highway signs, flag and flagship being the see it before you see it signal. It’s been there for a long time as a way to grab attention, announce presence and connect with buyers. (Kate Kaplan at NNGroup.com has an interesting article that starts with Edward Teach’s Jolly Roger as branding strategy. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/brand-experience-ux/)
I don’t know if it’s a win for the future of branding, but in my web analytics class at CUNY (primarily BIPOC, GenZ & younger Millennials), students are very interested in fashion brand collaborations or “collabs”. Think Nike/LEGO, Balenciaga/Under Armour, Louis Vuitton/Murakami). Uniqlo has rotating collaborations as well. They want quality they can afford and a caché they can project and carry (and yes it’s a BFA program so there’s probably more of that here than in the building maintenance dept). They also want sustainability. My own GenZ kids are rejecting fast fashion and hunting for quality items at thrift stores. They went through an Amazon/Shein phase but got tired of the flimsiness and you can’t show your face at a cosplay event if your “coord” isn’t “brand” or at the very least, homemade.
So, yes, indeed, we may be seeing the rise of a discerning, if not brand-conscious then certainly quality-conscious generation, right at the moment when VRM is getting its press notice.
Thanks! Good points.
The meanings of brand and branding have changed a lot since Procter & Gamble made it a discipline early in the last century. Now both are more tied to reputation and how it’s made, and there is more interest by both companies and customers in participation.
Our challenge with VRM is to create much more symbiosis between customers and companies than is possible while industrial age practices, such as trapping customers in walled gardens, persist.