A New Era in Branding
It’s a new era in branding. Your brand is no longer a mark on the corner of a business card or a sign on brick and mortar. It’s more than that. Seth Godin, in his book Linchpin, talks about how branding is changing. Seth writes,
Years ago, someone decided that there was a predictable, scalable, industrial solution to marketing. They asserted that coupons and incessant advertising, combined with distribution and aggressive pricing, were not only sufficient but essential to growing a brand. Now, as we’ve seen over the last decade, none of that by-the-book marketing shtick works so well. Now, it’s more common to see the success of a brand like Jones Soda-not because founder Peter van Stolk followed the rules, but because he’s an artist. He broke every rule in the book… He put his customers’ pictures on the bottle. He made mashed potato flavor. He answered the door when people came to visit. People came to visit. Do you think many people go visit the local Pepsi bottler?
Whether you like it or not, the environment in which your brand lives is changing. We must adapt if we don’t want to get passed by. We need to answer the call of comments on our blog. We need to offer relevant and engaging information within our Twitter accounts. We need to create platforms of interaction between our brand and our brand’s customers. It is obvious we cannot just try and condition the market to our Unique Selling Propositions. Merely showcasing functional attributes hasn’t been enough since the 80s. And now selling techniques locating and staking claim to emotional territories isn’t enough. In the 80s Nike’s tagline “Just Do It” evoked an emotion. That was good enough back then. Not now. So now Nike has Nike+ where customers can interact with the brand.
And then there’s this YouTube video displaying a new take on their well known product. These musicians are creating a whole new experience of Nike’s shoes.
Today’s audience demands branding built around an experience. How the audience interacts with your brand is crucial. We must understand how all of the elements of the brand interrelate to create the total user experience, or our brand will fail.
A brand’s marketing has to have the capacity and flexibility to engage different platforms in order for the brand to be best brought to life. If we can agree that brands are living breathing organisms, then inevitably we can agree that these organisms thrive and grow in the wilderness of the internet. Digital marketing is absolutely vital. We are already seeing examples of this in today’s new branding strategies. Take Wolff Olins’s branding technique with aol. Yeah, yeah… they have been taking considerable heat for their aol. branding strategy, but that’s to be expected with cutting edge ideas. People are afraid of change. They will fight it tooth and nail. I was one of the first to hate on aol.’s new brand. After I thought about it a bit more I started to realize the brilliance behind the design. It’s all about the user interacting and connecting with the brand. The premise is that each user will create his or her own idea of the identity by uploading his own image to post behind the aol. wordmark. These customer connections can develop organically online, on platforms specifically set up to be the perfect environments of customer interaction. On the internet your brand can do this:
Are you having a hard time agreeing with this? Well, lets take a look at the new AT&T branding. It isn’t a coincidence that some of the most recognizable brands in the world are making moves in this direction. The playing field is evolving. The laws of design are being shattered right before our eyes. Logos are constantly changing and morphing. And company names are being dropped from their logos. I think time will show that people are ready for this change, and are demanding more from their brands.
Ultimately, we must understand that people experience brands in so many ways, including social networks that allow for an interaction that is much more intimate and human. Brands are now able to learn from their consumers and respond quickly. There’s a huge opportunity to identify issues and develop solutions, while cultivating that crucial bond with the customer simply by listening and responding.
Answer the door. Your customers are knocking.
Joe says:
March 23rd, 2010
Branding is dead, long live branding… Seems to be the case. I do think that many companies that never had the budget to do the “traditional” approach of branding are now able to take full advantage of directly talking with their customers and it’s making for a more competitive market in their favor. Part of that also seems to be related to people moving more toward green and local living, but that’s for a different discussion.
As for aol, I think they understand the new concept of branding, but it’s always seemed to me that they don’t understand the first rule of branding that applies to new, old and every other method of branding ever. Understand your target market and go toward them. aol seems to take a very general approach. Maybe they think their target market is everyone? That’s all that I can come up with for explanation…
PJSullivan says:
March 23rd, 2010
Joe: I agree with you that aol. initially dropped the ball understanding their target market. Why did they limit themselves to just America? I mean the Internet back then was even commonly referred to as the World Wide Web.
In an interview with Fast Company, Paul Worthington (strategy at Wolff Olins) was quoted as saying, “A lot of people are saying why didn’t you change the name,” he says. “The simple answer in the world we live in today is that’s the lazy consultant answer.”
Wolff Olins explains in more detail on their blog why they didn’t scrap the aol. name. Here’s the meat of their reasoning:
“The world we live in today is more transparent than ever. As a result, changing names has become a much more sensitive topic than it used to be. It will never be the ‘fresh start’ as is often claimed, as the court of online opinion will be swift to point out who you really are, and to ask the question “what have you got to hide?”
AOL is a controversial brand for many reasons. Against this, changing the name would simply have been perceived as a defensive move, a weak position from which to enter life as a newly independent company. Had the name have been changed, the very same people who today say it should be changed, would instead be highlighting the name change as a “desperate move” to break with the past.”
Protecting Your Brand Experience | Adding An Edge says:
June 23rd, 2011
[...] also lose the very thing that separates them from every other pub on the block. Setting up brand experiences and protecting that experience at all times will carry more weight than a pretty design every [...]