Delivering post-modern brands.
People who know me will know this is one of my favorite topics. Right now they’re probably letting out a silent groan and thinking, “there he goes again.” This post isn’t for you.
I come back to this a lot because it comes up a lot in conversation with clients. The typical context is something like, “I have multiple audiences, I do business with consumers plus I have an OEM business, I’m both a product and a service; virtual and brick & mortar, etc. I need a brand that provides consistency across all of these different activities.”
The shift in thinking that needs to take place is that brands are no longer received, they are requested. And because people are very adept at the post-modern technique of disassembling, mixing and matching, and re-combining; it is unlikely that the exact “message” you hope to “transmit” is the one that actually exists. The key to solving the paradox laid out above is to see this behavior as an asset rather than a liability. As a brand owner, I can simply make brand elements available to be requested by various audiences. They will take what’s useful and relevant to them and leave the rest.
Of course, for me, this is another reason why marketing as a service holds an advantage over marketing as a message. As a customer, I can do little with conflicting messages, other than assume you are lazy, stupid, incoherent or deceitful. That’s because I have little control in how they’re disseminated.
On the other hand, if a company delivers conflicting services, I simply choose the ones best suited for me. And, if the company has been smart in how it creates its services, combining different services together can actually create brand new functionality for me rather than resulting in dissonance.
Image from the babelcast mosaic gallery