Friday, January 20

Brands are Interactive

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.

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Posted by Shannon Bain at 11:12 AM
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