My getting involved with social media was sparked by an idea of developing the perfect marketing solution. To me that is an intimate relationship with your customer. INTIMACY is feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness towards someone else.

If the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, then I reasoned that to do that you would need a relationship with that customer and the best relationship would be an intimate one. Intimacy is the ultimate relationship between two people.

So drawing onto my introspection about relationships since my divorce I thought of how do you get to intimacy in relationships and I concluded that it was simple in theory. All intimate relationships have three components TRUST, TRANSPARENCY and TALKING.

Between two people that is difficult enough so what do organisations need to do to achieve that state between an organisation and a mass of customers. The answer is simple treat them like people, people do business with people not organisations. Customers are people not demographics.

We need therefore to have ENGAGED customers and EMPOWERED employees and how do we do that?

with TALKING which is TRANSPARENT and so develops TRUST.

The tools we use are Social Media, because it connects people both within and outside organisations on a personal level.

There is a lot more to it but essentially that’s the driving philosophy behind PiKE’s Thinking and the PiKE Branding and consulting approach.

Photo credit tahoesunsets on Flickr

You don’t brand anything, you earn your brand.

Has there ever been a topic less well understood than Brands and Branding? I read about Brands all the time and am always amazed just how badly. The only term less understood is marketing – which is not the same as advertising by the way.

A brand is a simple concept. It is nothing more or less than a product, service, company, or person’s reputation, invariably it is linked to a device (logo) which becomes a mnemonic for the values the consumer associates with it.

The process of brand management is making sure that the associations people have with the brand are consistent with that reputation. So like you would manage your reputation by not getting into a position of getting arrested in a brothel, you manage your brand by making sure it is consistent. Its the same process.

You need to understand that;

• Brands exist ONLY in the minds of people (customers).
• Brands are built mostly by the experience people have of the product or service.
• Brands have an emotional and a performance component.

Brands are not the possessions of companies, they are the possessions of consumers.

In the article Branding Desperately Needs to Rebrand Itself the authors refer to the fact that branding is fast becoming a dirty word in the boardrooms of Europe. Branding has not delivered. In itself its not really surprising as marketers have attempted to do the impossible, and they said that they could, Some still believe that they can.

Branding lost its way when the marketing profession decided that they could manage perceptions. Its a delusion that you can do so to any great extent for any extended period. As Abraham Lincoln said “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” In the end the brand is formed, like any reputation, by the performance of the product or service.

AND

Now in the connected age customers have all the bull dust filters they need and can easily access the opinions of experts and others through online networks and blogs. Now you can fool even less of the people much less of the time.

Future marketers and brand experts need to understand that as they lost control of the flow of information and that control moved into the hands of connected customers so too they lost any hope of building brands except by consistently delivering value.

It’s a huge threat to the old ways and a massive boost to customers and good marketers.

Do you agree?

I don’t know Jason Bagley personally but I do follow @JBagley on Twitter so I know him, virtually. He got married yesterday and I was there.

It was in Cape Town somewhere, I think, no clue where. I was there because Jason tweeted his wedding from some sort of portable device. Jason brought me and his 432 Twitter follows into his life with his posts, he shared something important with us all and I think that it was cool.

Its also a really interesting commentary on the connected world. Ok not everyone is this extreme and Jason lives in the social media space every day and is early on the adoption curve but he is still a good example. In this world people feel the need to connect and share. The instinct is to grab a mobile and share events, news and views with others whether that is on Twitter or posting a news story on CNN.

I wrote about it today to congratulate the happy couple, and to illustrate to marketers just how much we need to understand how people in the connected world think and so what you need to understand when building your brand, people like Jason share their brand experiences in the same way.

To complete the picture use this link to  Twitter Search and you will be able to read how his friends not at the wedding shared it with him.  Consider that this search is the same way consumers research brands.

Congratulations Mr and Mrs Bagley, I hope you don’t mind me using you to illustrate a point. The really important thing is that I and all your “friends” wish you a stunning life together.

Glad you switched off Twitter at the point you did, although when there is a new Bagley I know how we will find out about it.

Driving into the office this morning I thought about some of the conversations I had had last night at the graduation ceremony of the aaa school of advertising. The conversation often turned to digital marketing and advertising and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.

Firstly we cannot understand what can be done until we free ourselves from the interruption marketing/advertising paradigm.

We have been conditioned to think that our job as branders, marketers and advertisers is to change people’s perceptions by presenting them with a message. We know that the more impactful the message is the easier it will cut through the tremendous clutter of information that surrounds every human being. We feel that the way to do that is to find someone doing something and deliver the message to them, interrupting what they are doing and  if we grab their attention the message will get across.

So we find people driving down the road and set up a billboard, people watching sport and the insert a TV spot or people browsing the Internet and we insert an CPC ad. We know that the more relevant that ad is to the person whom we are interrupting’s frame of mind at the time we interrupt them the more successful we will be at getting our message home.

But, we get stuck there and we think of the digital space as we have been conditioned to as a different activity that we can interrupt, and so we miss the point.

The opportunity offered by digital media, especially by the Web 2.0 technology should really force us to think totally differently about our whole approach to advertising.

• We need to recognise that in a connected world, we as advertisers we don’t control the message any longer.
• We need to understand that we have the opportunity to engage in a two way conversation.
• We need to understand the ability to build communities around our brand.
• We need to use our ability to test and get feedback from the community.

In an earlier post, the one on Alice’s Restaurant I spoke about building a brand by creating a movement around an idea and a concept. I believe that’s what Barack Obama did with the “Yes we can” mantra.

Is the trick to find the idea, the customer value proposition, then to follow this formula?

• Find the talkers
• Give them something to talk about.
• Give them a way to help them talk about it.

I believe that that’s how we could use digital media in our marketing efforts, find the value, the idea, get it out there using the incredible characteristics of the Internet and online mobile connections to let it spread supported by building communities and then accelerate the growth of the idea using traditional media.

We are still making the rules so I would love to hear your comments.

Photo credit: alicepopkorn on Flickr

The song called “Alice’s restaurant” took 18 minutes 34 secs and was based on an absurd but true story that had resulted in Guthrie not being accepted into the American military (to burn woman, kids, houses and villages – as he says in the song) because he had a criminal record for littering.

He had gone to throw the garbage out at the city dump and had found that it was closed, as it was Thanksgiving day in 1965. He chose instead to dump it illegally where he had seen a pile of garbage and was arrested for his trouble. See YouTube video of Arlo Guthrie performing the song here.

In the closing part of the song Guthrie advises those called up for the draft, and being processed through the medical to sing out the words “Shrink, you can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.”

By being so you would create a movement.

“You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.

And that’s what it is , the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement …”

This song is a clue as to how marketers need to think about branding and introducing new products in the new connected world. Barack Obama used this technique with his rallying cry “yes we can” which got him elected as president. He in fact, probably unknowingly, very closely followed the advice given by Arlo Guthrie many many years ago. He planted a thought, gave the thought relevance and currency and created away for people to share it and then let it lose into the connected world of the internet.

One of the overriding characteristics of the new digitally connected market is that the power in the transaction has moved with the control of information, to the customer. Understanding how to build brands while putting the customer in charge is one of the challenges facing marketers today.

The answer can be found in starting a movement.

“You can get anything you want in Alice’s Restaurant”