A
troubled history
Stephen King's brief, urgent paper,
"What Is A Brand?" was produced 40 years ago at the dawn of the
seventies.
Even then, branding was struggling
for its seat at the high table of commerce:
I wonder whether all top management
are involved deeply enough in the nature of their brands. Do they realize fully
enough that it is from the success of brands rather than as products that the
profits will come? Do they fully understand the nature of brands? Do they set
company objectives in terms of brand positioning or simply in financial terms?
The answer – then, and perhaps all the more so now – is an emphatic “No”.
Now the unforgiving context within
which marketing and advertising must operate, along with a number of questionable
assumptions that have come to prevail, have forced branding’s role and value even further into the background.
One of the least satisfying
developments since digital advertising has so radically disrupted the industry,
is the current demand for ROI at every turn. This has pushed brand managers
into a position so defensive that they can often only point to e-commerce
conversions to justify investment in anything digital, other than perhaps the
most meat-and-potatoes search program.
The assumption seems to be that the
lion’s share of brand building is still
best achieved by blanket messaging via above the line advertising, and that
digital investment sits – as it
perhaps always has since its inception – further down the pipe, alongside direct marketing and
retail.
Such developments, given particularly
that the balance sheets of many of the world's biggest businesses continue to
list brand equity as a dominant line, are surely an immense concern.
At a time when swathes of quality
consumer attention are lavished on social and smartphone, can we seriously
continue to imagine that brand equity – like
royalty at a rugby international – watches
from comfort and safety in a warm hospitality box, while every other
significant aspect of the connected consumer’s life, including our own products and services, is kicked
vigorously around the chilly playing field of digital?
No. Brands, for better or worse, are
being actively, constantly and irresistibly constructed and deconstructed in
digital. We are fascinated and bewildered by capricious shifts in the tribal
sentiments of connected consumers: utter indifference to our most exquisite,
flattering siren calls one moment, and the next, their inexplicable rush to
engage en masse, triggered by an apparently tiny flutter of influence in a
corner we never knew existed.
We have to date gained no convincing
idea of how to play under the ever-shifting goal posts of 21st
century marketing. Certainly the performance of advertising in digital – while spend increases every year, the bulk of the
investment is still in the “defensive”, hygiene-factor area of search – continues to vex all but the most dedicated of advocates.
Here we revisit and review this
important element of Stephen King's substantial legacy, the argument for advertising’s key role as architect and builder of the brand equity
that translates as preference and premium prices, through the unsentimental
lens of post-digital culture and commerce.
An
evolving role
…
whatever people might wish to call the process of creating a property that
combines tangible and intangible attributes, can be symbolized in a trademark
that creates influence and value if properly managed … Well, that is branding by any other
name.
Rita Clifton, Chairman and CEO,
Interbrand
Adaptation is, as it happens, part
and parcel of branding's story. Stephen King wrote in terms of its “waves”, or
evolutions, within the broader history of marketing.
He wrote about branding very much as
a defensive imperative, first used by consumer product manufacturers to push
back against the wholesalers that dominated consumer product marketing from the
late Victorian era, and second –
starting in the 1950's – against
the retail chains whose dominance of brands' channels to market, alongside
their aggressive own-brand programs, created a game of cat and mouse that
continues today.
The latter in particular challenged
manufacturers to investigate sources of value, beyond the product itself, to
sustain both preference and margin.
So Mr King completed his paper by
pointing to the need for advertising to build and sustain new forms of ownable
added value around the consumer brand.
First, we can recognise that in the
1970s it may well have a different role from the past. Added values and their
effects on profits will become more important …
Secondly, we can improve our methods of setting advertising’s objectives, by thinking of them in
terms of the advertising’s contribution
to the added values of the brand … And thirdly,
we can recognize that advertising itself is a totality … If we try to produce it by the
atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand … (which) will never come to life.
As we read his words, we have
feelings of both familiarity and regret. His argument could live very comfortably
in any seminar in 2012, but what have – indeed
since long before they were written – always
been common sense marketing rules to live by, remain curiously, stubbornly
peripheral to current marketing practice.
Nevertheless, we also realise that a
large element of the historic role performed by branding, before we arrive at
the generally accepted creation and attribution of added value, has in sharp
contrast been defense against an ever-threatening – and ever mutating – diminishment of perceived value.
If wholesale and retail have been the
source of such threats to date, has digital introduced a new player?
Shifts
in power
Branding has always been just as much
about power as about value. This is even more evident, at a time when connected
consumers are still in the early stages of flexing newfound powers of “mass self-expression”[1], co-created meaning, identity and
belonging, and their own tribally-based, direct influence over which ideas
attain currency, and which fade away to nothing.
These are the kinds of cultural tasks
of search and selection that brands have performed for us until recently. Do
they still deserve their rather exalted position? Because viewed through a lens
of global connectedness, brands are (until we intervene … whether and if so, how we do so is the subject of our
enquiry) merely “yet more ideas” floating among a cast of literally billions.
As Umair Haque, the economist and
media theorist, has correctly pointed out[2]
from 10 years ago, where media, pre-digital, were scarce and thus highly
valued, and consumer attention was plentiful, now media are overwhelmingly
everywhere and consumer attention is the new gold.
We see a dramatic shift in power
here, one that overturns the brand communications apple cart once and for all.
It's the power of the connected
consumer that sets the scene for branding's next, “third wave”
challenge. Along Stephen King’s
branding timeline, first wholesalers and then retailers have historically set
the challenges that great advertising has met, time and again, shoring up
meaning and value not only around products and services, but crucially, within
consumers’ own daily lives.
We now have a third protagonist,
globally connected consumers themselves.
And while the battle for control of
meaning and value remains the focus, we are today severely handicapped not only
by earthquakes on our playing field and goal posts that never stop moving: we
now learn that our star player is injured and may never return to top form.
The
moving goal posts
Advertising, brand-building’s primary weapon of mass communication, is today in
trouble. At its root, uncertainties about its role and value boil down not to
its effects – arguably more measurable than ever
before – but to a growing doubt about what it’s actually for. The strident insistence on ROI at every
turn, points in the end not to questions about what is achieved in any given
campaign or tactic therein, but about what it’s worth. Not so much what are we doing or how, more why.
We’re reminded of the familiar description of an accountant as
one who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Measurability
per se is, at least in digital channels, not a challenge. To the contrary, it’s the struggle for advertisers to reach some post-digital
equivalent of the impression, of familiar, trusted reach and frequency, that
underpins this crisis.
While ad spend remains stable for
now, there's an emerging sense among brand owners that, even when bullseyes are
consistently hit, they're shooting at the wrong targets. That somehow, the game
has moved on.
I think this is close to the truth.
Consumer presence and consumer attention have – a key and rarely-acknowledged legacy of the digital
revolution – become uncoupled. The implicit value
exchange that has underpinned advertising's very successful partnership with
media is fractured, when formerly precious content is commoditized by sheer
volume and choice.
Why else would we be hearing
incessantly about the challenge of "engagement"? Behind all the talk
about this still-elusive concept, is the sense that while the consumer eyeball
may still drift over the messaging, the mind is elsewhere, “otherwise engaged”.
The fragmentation that so concerns
advertising and the media that serve it, is happening just as much within a
single consumer’s field of attention, as it is
amongst a brand's target audience. And attention is a zero sum game.
So what has happened to cause this? And
if branding is,
as we noted above, concerned with building associations around products and
arrives, then how, in this age of consumer empowerment and tribalism, are these
often far richer and more plentiful associations being built. And perhaps more
vexing, by whom?
Macromedia and Micromedia
Think of today's powerhouse brands.
Coke, Mercedes, and the remaining handful of other great legacy brands were
built, and continue to thrive, on the back of enormous advertising budgets.
They are, in fact, entirely constructs of media. Ever since its rightly-famous “1984”
campaign, Apple has marched in that number too. Steve Jobs was in many ways an
advertising man more than a technologist. But do we feel that the Apple brand
resides in advertising? Or is its victorious brand nourished by some other,
deeper source?
Think now of the 21st century
barbarians at the gate. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter are
representative. For their billions of daily users, life without these brands is
unthinkable. And yet, Facebook only began to advertise in September 2012, and
Google only some 2 years previous to that, launching its now-won Chrome browser
war against Explorer and Firefox.
Without contradicting Stephen King’s core premises, the new powerhouse brands of the digital
age are clearly being built without any direct dependence on the media and
advertising system.
This, perhaps, is not big news for
most of us. But where does this leave the FMCG brands whose products and
services are not, as the technology giants are, hardwired into daily consumer
culture? How are they to argue their way over the threshold into the party?
It helps if here we divide media into
two constructs. Visualize them as two separate circles, like you’d see in a Venn diagram. Consumers and brands map across
both, but as we’ll see, the power of advertising – digital or otherwise – to create and distribute brand meaning and value in both
is highly restricted.
Let's call these circles “Macromedia” and “Micromedia”. Big
TV, Big Web, and Big Advertising are all largely moored in Macromedia. It's
corporate, it's about big stakes, big budgets and big risk. But these days, it also
has a fair amount of nose pressed up against the window of Micromedia.
Micromedia is that personal, “me and mine”, tribal
zone of intimacy that is the most fascinating and troublesome consequence of
the connecting of consumers.
If Macromedia is about the heft and
swagger of Big Media, Micromedia's ruler is the powerful, often ruthless
consumer (increasingly a troubling word, in terms of its assumptions). If
Macromedia is about consumption of media by consumers, Micromedia is about
self-expression by consumers to each other and, in some instances, back to our
brands.
We have to now largely acted as if
Micromedia were a new, younger, subordinate territory within Macromedia. We
have thus assumed that plain vanilla digital advertising would, as traditional
advertising has done so well in the past in Macromedia, build brands and drive
purchasing in Micromedia. But this is where the “digital is just another channel” school of thought has failed so crucially.
In Macromedia, digital is indeed “just another channel”. But in Micromedia, the very fabric of the environment is
digital, and furthermore the primary dynamic, the prevalent flow, is not from
industry to consumer, but quite the reverse: outbound consumer self-expression
and co-creation. These are the “extensions
of man” that McLuhan wrote about so
cryptically back in 1964, finally come to life in social and mobile, with
transformational results.
This is I believe why the consumption-based
advertising that has always ridden, with enormous success of course, on the
tails of content, has struggled so frustratingly in Micromedia. Advertising in Facebook
and mobile remain at the time of writing profoundly unconvincing in terms of both
consumer acceptance and brand acceptance.
We have long talked about above, below
and through The Line. I call this new challenge “Behind The Line”, the
line of course being the far-from-permeable membrane that separates Macro- and
Micromedia.
The technology giants that have
ridden the web to commercial dominance have without exception done so by
establishing a strong base in Micromedia, by empowering our already
power-hungry self-expressing, co-creating connected consumer. While they do
advertise, they sustain their brand equity above all by further empowering
their customer Behind The Line.
Note, by the way, what happens when
any – and it doesn’t matter how dominant they may have been – of the new powerhouses steps out of line (another Line to
worry about here, perhaps!). Netflix (pricing), Facebook (trust and data),
Apple (maps) and plenty more have felt the freezing breath of the hostile
consumer tribe when their exhilarating new power is diminished or threatened
even slightly.
A brand built in Micromedia is thus a
still a house built on sand, that shifts along with the restless, capricious
moods and desires of the globally connected consumer. Even a luxurious palace
like Apple’s is intensely, incessantly
vulnerable. So perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.
Experience and Expectation
While we may now understand a little
more about the constructs and dynamics that make up Digital The Culture, as
opposed to Digital The Channel, the question remains, if we are to build brands
in digital, what must change?
I’m still myself in the early stages of developing planning
frameworks that bring Macromedia and Micromedia together to enable true “Behind The Line” brand
communications.
It’s my belief, however, that branding in the post-digital era
demands we move far beyond messaging, to take on the active management and
optimization of consumer experience across all key touchpoints, right along the
entire product lifecycle.
I also belief as a consequence that
brand equity can be viewed and ultimately valued as a sort of snapshot in time
of the sum of goodwill and otherwise that such experiences engender in what is,
remember, a globally connected, highly tribal consumer.
Brand building, which has till
recently lived almost exclusively in advertising, has been primarily a
brand-controlled system of linear, almost entirely one-way “Promise and Delivery”. In the digital age, a new and, for now, chaotic dynamic
has come into play, disrupting a lot of what we knew before, challenging all
the rules and roles of marketing.
In contrast to the regimented lines
of Promise and Delivery, we have in Micromedia a corresponding but very hard to
reach cycle of consumer Experience and Expectation. Our brand Experiences – good, bad, indifferent – drive our brand Expectations (and also, note, our own
brand Expressions via social to our hundreds, thousands or millions of
networked cohorts). And round again of course.
But what matters most here is that
the cycle is driven not by brands, but by consumers in tribes. Advertising
(digital or otherwise makes no real difference) holds little sway here. To
revisit McLuhan, the medium is in this case not just the message, it’s also the product or service itself. There is no time, in
digital, between the Promise and the Delivery. Indeed, there is no longer
effective difference between them: what we say and what we then do are held up
for public scrutiny
So the dynamic between Experience and
Expectation, how that plays out across the network, and how in turn we choose
to invest in engaging the attention of the consumer, will I suggest be the
future of brand building in digital. Advertising’s more precise role has yet to unfold, but clearly whether
it’s digital or not, branding’s traditional vehicle has, in Micromedia, a secondary role.
If digital is indeed to build brands,
and one way or another we must find out how, my last point is that less focus
on Return On Investment, and more focus on improving the powerful consumer’s Return On Attention, would be an excellent departure
point.
With this imperative in mind, I’ll leave you with a final, wise thought from The King.
How to measure advertising and its
effect is not terribly hard if you work out in advance what sort of response
you are trying to get, because the basic question then is: Are we getting that
response?
[1] Manuel Castells, Communications
Power
[2] Umair Haque blog, Bubble
Generation
Posted with Blogsy