There's nothing I like better than a good argument in the office. A good argument anywhere, basically, but in the office it saves having to do work. I had a good one this week with a colleague on the nature of 'brands'. Now, I am one of those who distrust the 'black arts' of the marketing industry, its funny jargon and its premise of making people want something they don't really need. I know that's a rather biased and one-dimensional view, and I attended a strategic marketing course which was out to persuade me it was all about understanding the customer and developing the product around their needs. Which I wholeheartedly support.
But branding, and brand association is something I regard as altogether more ephemeral, and in many ways outdated. I subscribe to the view that a brand is, in all cases reductive to a promise of some kind. The promise that every can of coke will taste like a can of coke. That every issue of Heat will give you all the most relevant gossip of the week. To me the rise, continued success, and eventual failure of brands is nothing more or less than the product or service's capability to repeatedly deliver that promise.
Everytime we have a flat can of coke, every time we wait in a long queue of McDonalds, the promise is not delivered and a little part of the brand dies. When it happens systemically, the brand withers. My colleague begged to differ. Brand association, she said, was more complex than a simple promise. There was moonlight, magic, mystery and probably a large advertising budget.
'Take BMW', she said. That's not just a promise about function. That's about the brand itself creating the association with Status, and about the customer (and more importantly the non-customer) buying into that concept of Status.
'Aha', I said. It's about the promise of Status. If I was to buy a BMW, and it didn't confer me the Status, would I be fully satisfied? I think not. I was promised the Status and if failed to deliver. Brand damaged.
But that counter-argument made me think of something else. If the brand promise/association is about Status, where does it exist? Reliability may be said to be abstract, but quantifiable – it can be determined metrically. Status is abstract but unquantifiable and, most importantly, exists in the heads of other people. Status is what THEY think of YOU when you own a BMW. In that sense, a brand association like Status is not coupled to the object, but coupled to anyone who comes into contact with the audience.
Nevertheless, the idea that a BMW is a Status symbol is a complex one built up and distributed by a variety of clever means. But it doesn't primarily emanate from the object itself, but from the general population.
This is getting a bit metaphysical right?
Okay let's think of it another way, and explain the basis of the title for this entry. Imagine that the distribution of brand associations is like broadcast media, radio for example. Imagine BMW has one of those big BBC transmitters and it's broadcasting all those feelings you should attach to its shiny cars…success…reliability…taste…money.
People pick up those signals, absorb them and they tend to reflect off them. EVERYONE KNOWS a BMW means success, money etc. Or maybe not. There's always an awkward squad. They think BMWs are for derivative unimaginative wankers, with an inferiority complex to offset.
But historically, those views, and other dissenting brand views, have been drowned out by the sheer power of the signal and the lack of a competing broadcast platform.
Enter the internet.
Once dismissed as 'CB for the Nineties', maybe that's not such a bad parallel. Blogs like this are a bit like CB. Rather desperate and unheard attempts to communicate, with a minimal audience and negligible impact. But some become like pirate radio. They're cool, they have an audience, they develop a tone, they have the means to keep broadcasting. They begin to drown out the big transmitting marketing for a significant number of consumers.
Munich, we have a problem. Those brand associations are being challenged. Okay, they don't have the transmitting power of the programming budget, but the message is closer to home, more authentic. The brand is being challenged.
So, consumers are empowered, right? They are getting the real truth, not just the ad-man's version. Or are they getting anything, except noise?
When you layer too many signals on top of each other, you get noise. Radio Gaga, Radio GooGoo. Consumers are ready to hear a plurality of opinion across the internet, but it doesn't always translate into an opinion of their own. My view is that people generally wish to synthesize an opinion on any subject from the source material.
So where does that leave a media company. We are the media – the bit in-between. Our mission in this scenario is simple – reduce the noise. That doesn't mean reduce the signal back to one. It means offering the consumer access to the dial. Allow them to sample and select across the range of opinions – personal ones, group ones, corporate ones, expert ones, crazy ones, angry ones, fanboys and girls, news sources, consultants, creators, consumers. It may also mean offering the diffident ones a simple platform of their own – their first CB transmitter, to start broadcasting.
So how do they support the plurality, without the noise? Through tools. Through filters – automated and human. Through empowering the community to sort out its own noise. By simplifying the landscape by focusing on a niche area of branding and activity.
Media companies have become aware that the simple concept of 'broadcast' is now an outmoded one. But I think they believed in most cases the evolution was broadcast with a return channel. It's not – broadcast is alive and kicking. It's just open to everyone.
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