Friday, January 20

The Consumer is the Medium

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...

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Posted by Shannon Bain at 11:19 AM
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