Over the past decades technology has
wrought many changes around us.
The most important change has been is the
way we communicate with and relate to the world around us and thus, at the
deepest level, perceive our external and internal reality.
What has remained unchanged is that
consumption continues to be the building block of our economies and also the
building block of the self-image of the average individual (some may ask if not consumption than what - to
my mind in a different world it could have been learning, self-discovery,
exploration - a host of other “higher-order” things where consumption of goods
and service would be relegated to the basic and the trivial).
Brands are an important part of the
consumerist society. They are an important part of the productivity of a
consumption-based economy. It is my thesis that the number of viable brands can
be, in a circular fashion, both the cause and the result of economic growth (I have toyed with the idea of applying for
doctoral research on such a thesis).
Brands are also an important part of the
self-image of the average individual. This is because with the average
individual, his or her perception and actions as a consumer, constitute an
important part of self-image.
In advertising planning and creative
development, at the simplest level, brands are defined by drawing a picture of
the consumer who is or would be loyal to them.
In my personal toolbox as a brand strategy
planner I have taken this a bit further. I have added a dimension that maps the
individual as a composite of brands that he is loyal to. Such a composite
picture leads to fresh insights of brand dynamics that can be useful in
devising effective strategy.
While brands remain, as they have over the
past eight decades, an important part of the self-image of consumers, the
process by which brands become important is changing rapidly over the past
decade or so.
Traditionally building a relationship with
a consumer was a one-way ascending ladder captured so succinctly by the
self-explanatory Awareness–Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA) model.
Under this model brand communication is one
way and the brand, in the minds of its managers, has a singular goal – to get
the consumer to act (buy) and then keep toggling between desire and action -
while they got busy with getting more and more consumers up the AIDA ladder.
However, I believe that the AIDA model of brand
building (there are many other, more complex, models of brand-building extant
but all them reflect the core linear, one-way structure of the AIDA model) is fast
loosing its touch with the reality of how consumers relate to brands.
The process of brand perception formation,
in this age of the Internet and the mobile phone, is a negotiated, two-way
process. It is a process in which the first step happens when an individual
shares her views on and experiences with a brand with her peers.
While this might also have been happening
in previous decades, there are two tectonic changes. Today the peer group is an
ever-growing and amorphous cohort instead of a steady group of “meat space”
friends. And the sharing is instantaneous and 24x7.
The content of this humongous river of 24x7
sharing almost inevitably has a substantial stream of views and stories about
brands. Brands are ubiquitous and this incessant sharing has a voracious
appetite for all kinds of issues and topics. If a brand does not have
substantial number of views and stories floating about it in social media feeds
and the blogosphere than, simply put, in this day and age, it is not a brand.
The views and stories extant in the
interaction of consumers among themselves –chiefly on social media, the chat
rooms, the messenger apps and the blogosphere – form a stream that can be
termed as “Brand Narrative”.
The study and modeling of this “Brand
Narrative” is going to be key to the next generation of brand-building theory
and practice.
To my mind there are two key dimensions to
Brand Narrative – Strength and Coherence.
Strength is a measure of the sheer quantum
of brand mentions in the universe of consumer interactions.
It is to be noted that this measure of
strength has little to do with the traditional measures instituted by the AIDA
model. It’s a Big Data measure and not a
measure resulting out of traditional sample-based consumer research – an early
indicator perhaps of the rise of Big Data and the fall of traditional market research
in the domain of marketing and brands.
It is my hypothesis that the strength of a
brand’s Brand Narrative is more strongly correlated with interactions with a
brand that are actively sought by an individual – the pulling up of a video on
You Tube or Vine, the browsing of a shop or a shop window, the voluntary
participation in a category or brand related activity – than with brand
activity that is intrusive which includes all kind of advertising including
digital advertising and that current darling of below-the-line warriors – brand
activation and event sponsorships.
In my hypothesis the second important
measure of “Brand Narrative” is
Coherence. A brand might have a great amount of mentions, views and stories
floating about in the consumer interaction universe but is this content
cohering around a few themes? In fact these themes around which consumer views
cohere are to my mind the brand’s ruling narrative.
Let me exemplify the above hypothesis by a
hypothesized illustration. Take the case of Samsung and Apple.
The strength of Samsung’s brand narrative
is probably fast catching up with that of Apple. But the coherence of the brand
narrative of Apple is much greater than that of Samsung.
Apple’s brand narrative coheres around
themes like Steve Job’s genius and American arrogance (reflected in the price
of Apple products) and at a more stratified level the role of design as
reflected in the relationship between form and function.
My hypothesis is that the strength of
Samsung’s brand narrative does not cohere and that is one of the key reasons
why Samsung’s brand equity -as reflected in the anticipation of products from
the brand and the price premium they command- has plateaued.
What are the themes that Samsung’s brand
narrative could have cohered around? Which brings us to the question – can
brand management- decide and promote the themes around which brand narratives
cohere?
Can Samsung decide and promote the themes
around which the brand narrative will cohere – say “innovation the Asian way”? My hypothesis is decidedly not.
Can Apple after the death of Steve Jobs
decide that their narrative will now have a theme centered on the genius of
Jonathan Ive – their design guru?
Apple seems to be trying, going by the
high-decibel PR around Ive reflected in stories about him in high profile media
outlets. I am not sure whether currently
one of the themes that the ongoing brand narrative of Apple is cohering around
is Ive but if that is the case, the hypothesis is, that it would not be
directly co-related to the intensity of the PR effort around Ive.
So what is the role that brand management
needs to play with respect to their brand’s narrative?
My view is that they must Listen and
Synchronize in the case of positive themes and Listen, Source and Counter in
the case of negative themes.
Listen by putting into place the right Big
Data and Analytics streams.
Synchronise by harmonising the brand’s
controlled messaging with the positive themes around which their brand’s
narrative is cohering.
In the case of negative themes – themes
that hurt a brand’s equity - brand management need to run a “detective”
operation to trace back to the source of the theme. The source could be a
feature of the brand’s product feature or marketing strategy. The source could
be a negative experience of an individual or group with a high Klout score (a
measure of the influence as an opinion former). Once the source is determined
the brand management can run a counter measure that could be as easy as
modifying a product feature and as tough as trying to subtly influence an overly
sensitive, opinionated and thorny individual or group of individuals.
Let me end with a commercial plug.
At Aqumena (www.aqumena.com)
, a strategy consulting outfit that I founded with two of my college mates
Vinay Hegde and ND Badrinath, we are putting in place an interactive
asynchronous consumer probe platform and one of the first uses that we will put
this platform is to further explore the issues that have been stated in this
piece.
You are welcome to send suggestions in this
regard and, if you are in the business of brand management, participate in the
research.
