The New Rules of Engagement
First of all let’s dispel some myths about what defines a brand.
A brand is not an icon or logo, it’s not even a product.
So what is it?
A brand is based on an individual person’s gut feeling, because people are emotional, intuitive beings. Individuals, not companies, markets or even other people, define brands.
Does a brand have value?
You bet, …and how!
Even in today’s global economic climate Coca-Cola is in the top slot, estimated to be worth over $70 Billion, beating IBM, Microsoft, Google and General Electric.
What makes Coca-Cola so successful?
The answer is: they stopped looking in the mirror and started to look out the window. It was no longer a case of the powerful preaching to the grateful masses.
They fundamentally understood the need to add value to situations in peoples’ lives; they became value providers not just product providers by creating ‘member’ relationships and experiences not product features. Coca-Cola tapped into the customers’ social network life and added “happiness” as the core experience of their value offering and linked that to loyalty rewards.
The other significant realization was to view media not as a billboard but as a ‘chat-room’ where friends meet and talk about their experiences not the brand. Coca-Cola’s lightbulb moment was that people don’t talk about the brand just because they like the product; they talk about the brand because they like their friends more.
Coca-Cola’s success in digital and mobile communication is proof that peoples’ experiences last much longer than the lifespan of the product moment.
Media is becoming less about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and more about creating an environment for bringing people together.
This reinforces the notion that marketing and advertising needs to be based on conversation and value in relation to context. The big mistake many brands make is to merely view the technological opportunity that digital and mobile platforms offer as yet another media channel that pushes interruption, when in-fact the goal is to create not fill media space.
Mobile and online digital technologies are tools, albeit a very powerful tools. They have the ability to make consumer behaviour forecasting a measurable science rather than an intuition, providing insights that brands can depend on and not something they are forced to gamble with.
In consumer marketing terms, we live in a crowded, noisy, fast-paced world where today’s main currencies are time and attention and brands that abuse them will suffer. By being able to forecast consumer behaviour trends we are able to understand what people are interested in and work back from there to address shifting trends.
Tags: Geo-location, Mobile Proximity Marketing, Mobile Vouchers & Banking, Social Media
