Branding Power to the People

Posted on | December 10, 2007 |

Marketers are all familiar with the underlying model of branding in the mass media. Depending on the author it looks something like Awareness>Familiarity>Positive Imagery>Transaction. We also recognized that it wasn’t entirely valid even in the mass media era. Behavior sometimes came before attitude. We had the high-involvement model (attitude precedes behavior) and the low-involvement model (behavior precedes attitude). Whether the models were valid even then is a moot point. That perspective is not valid in a Web 2.0 world. It looks more like this.

I’ve suggested a new media model on my own blog.

A recent article by Jason Fry in the WSJ Online (subscription required—at least until Rupert Murdock takes over, another Web 2.0 move) started me thinking about how branding is working differently in the new media. His basic premise is fascinating—visitors to our websites tend to see only a small sliver of our brand at one time because they enter as a result of search. According to Fry the dominance of search in the purchase process:

allows and even encourages brands to be built from the bottom up, with their overall identity far less important than the little slices of themselves returned by Web searches and their position in search rankings.

These bottom-up brands already exist, and here’s an easy way to identify them: You’re more familiar with individual slices of their content than you are with their home pages — some of which you may never have visited.

If you doubt the magnitude of the phenomenon, consider the behavior of online shoppers (2007 iCrossing study) and consumer packaged goods shoppers (2006 iCrossing study). Without parsing the detail, it’s clear that most of these shoppers began with search of some kind. That’s huge!

What should marketers do? For starters, change their way of thinking about brand development. We no longer “create” a brand image. We co-create it with our customers. Loyal customers give positive input. Dissatisfied customers have many platforms for going negative.The end result is that customers are crafting brands that have personal meaning for them and their lives. They are sharing the brands they favor with like-minded people. They are our brand evangelists and marketers must cultivate their efforts and provide tools to enhance them.

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