Never fake a blog touting your brand.
That seems like an obvious rule to me, but in the light of recent attempts at faking blogs, it’s worth clearly articulating. I’m not talking about “blogs” clearly associated with a (usually humorous) online marketing push. Rather, it’s those clunky, ad copy interpretations of typical blog style masquerading as an enthusiastic consumer’s heartfelt ramblings that are the problem here. Invariably, when a fraudulent blog (frog) is exposed, it generates a heated backlash and negative press. Of course, that is exactly the opposite of its intended, brand-furthering purpose. Worse still, it deepens bloggers’ already deep mistrust of marketing.
Why do marketers continue to shoot themselves in the foot this way? Well, one reason seems to be that blogs are a genre. Like most genres, they have easy to mimic tropes and stylistic peculiarities that we all recognize and that collectively say “blog”. Apparently, in the light of all the hype about the blogosphere’s brand-messaging potential, faking it proves way too tempting for some marketers.
What they’ve failed to notice, however, is that beyond style, blogs also have intentional conditions on their identity. That is, a site’s being a blog is partially determined by the author’s intent. Just mimicking the genre’s style is not enough to make your fake blog acceptable. Blogs are a genre founded on the slippery notion of “authenticity”; and authenticity is particularly important if your blog is supposed to be of the “personal blog” sub-genre.
So, when a marketer attempts to sell something by mimicking a genre founded on the idea of authentic, personal communication, the impression given is fraud and deception, not just witty, post-modern appropriation of a popular genre. It’s just this sort of perceived deception that led to mistrust of all forms of marketing in the first place. Obviously, a solution is to avoid deceptive practices, to utilize a means of marketing in which you don’t have to hide your real commercial ends. Be above board and think a little, please, for your own good.
Blogs have made this particularly apparent. Sure, word of mouth is as old as language, and people have discussed products as long as there have been products (such discussion is probably the “brand primordial soup” after all). But never before have individuals been able to attack or praise your product and potentially have their opinions heard by so many. Of course, the vast majority of blogs never get read, and the vast majority of blog readers read only a handful of blogs. So, the rhetoric of blogging as a liberating means of getting your singular voice heard like never before is more or less ridiculous. What’s so powerful about blogging is the potential for the mass audience, THE consumer, to assail your offering with a collective voice much louder than the individual voice.
So it’s not so much that some individual is the medium and if we find and convert that one, well-connected dude the digital agora will be ours. Rather, there’s a constant buzz of conversation and referencing going on in the blogosphere. Linking and forwarding from one blog to the next drives messages, gripes or goofy content from the scarcely read periphery to the closely followed center overnight. Your brand message, or angry accounts of your brand’s failure, can be amplified by this medium, or it can be drowned out. You will be successful only if you provide consumers with a genuinely relevant, memorable and differentiated set of ideas or experiences. After all, this medium, the collective consumer, is two-way. You’ve got to listen, address and please the medium to get your message spread. It’s our job to figure out how...
Effectively, it means that the brand – the collection of sentiments, concepts, ideas, myths, whatever, surrounding your product or commercial offering – is beholden to the needs, desires and tastes of consumers. Your brand had better be able to adjust or it becomes irrelevant.
Let me unpack these ideas a little bit. A huge part of what makes a successful brand is the relevance of both the actual, physical offering, or product, and the manner in which that offering is presented to consumers. Having a relevant offering obviously is a necessary part of being successful. However, branding is fundamentally a struggle against commoditization, against the classically conceived market’s natural tendency to defeat premiums and reduce all competition to mere pricing. A considerable part of that mysterious quantity called “the brand” is how relevant the message communicating your product’s relevance is. In other words, if you don’t speak your target’s language, if you don’t surround your offering with ideas, concepts, stories, etc. particularly resonant with your target, then you’ve just got another more or less useful product. It will sell if it compares relatively well with others like it, but only if it’s lower priced.
Getting back to brand interactivity, what your target consumers consider a relevant message is even more shifty and unstable than what they consider a relevant product. That is, people’s taste in jokes or sentiments or aesthetics, etc. tends to change faster than their taste in products. Coke has been largely the same sugary stuff for years, but the manner of speaking about that stuff’s place in people’s lives has changed dramatically throughout that time. Your brand, the message transmitting or communicating your product’s worth or value in people’s lives, is naturally unstable. In one day and out the next.
So what, right? How are brands interactive? Well, they’re interactive in the sense that the web in general, and blogs in particular, are making the feedback loop between consumers and marketers incredibly tight. But the only thing new about the situation is its immediacy; the loop has shrunk from a traffic circle to a wedding ring. The “brand stewardship” model of marketing, in which the brand is dictated to the consumer and only grudgingly changes course under threat of absolute ruin, has always been wrong-headed. You can’t completely and totally manage, control and broadcast your brand or its perception. Immediate feedback and reactionary blogging have only amplified what has always been the case. Brands are creatures of relevance and relevance is incredibly unstable. If a brand can’t intelligently react to maintain relevance (in a way consistent with its history) then it will fail.
It’s our job to look ahead, determining relevance and the appropriate means of communication for our clients. But first we must understand that it’s interaction, not broadcast.