From The Head Of Zeus Jones

Love it, slides 25-30 are the 'meat' of what this business, and I'd argue life is all about. Until you in your heart of hearts believe what you're trying to talk to other people about - your message/purpose/whatever is going to ring hollow.

On a separate note, I was struggling with a presentation I'm working on to give to some local politicians about the comms of change, I thought hitting them with the 'live it and people will listen' lyrics might be too harsh, you've reminded me it's the only way to go. Thanks Adrian :)

Thanks Sam, good point on belief, I think I could probably make that stronger. People are looking for more from the companies they do business with, I think a strong belief and a larger purpose is a big differentiator in so many ways

Adrian,

Lots of great insight in that presentation. I really like your use of the tag clouds to make your point between traditional and controlled marketing vs the more modern approach.
IMHO when thinking of modern brands, a few themes start floating in my head:

- occupation vs role vs aspiration: I may be splitting hairs, but i really think that the brands that are successful today are the ones who've ask themselves what can i do to help, to be useful to simplify my evangelist life. And by evangelist i don't mean the magic 20%, i mean everyone.

- demonstration vs communication: Users today, potential or existing of products, want brands to walk the walk. They want to touch and feel the product and see it banged up, not because they cannot make the connection between product promise and use, but because they've been lied or exaggerated to in the past. Before they will recommend the product to their friend and thus put their rep on the line they need to believe in it.

- herder vs controller : the biggest brands today absent of Apple, act more as caretakers of their brand image than herders, scientifically and clinically controlling the messaging going out the door. Successful brands today invite users to integrate their products in their life on their terms as well as communicate the benefits or pitfalls openly and in their own way as well.

- Platform or holistic vs singleton: By that i mean that as Dove proved to us, resounding success and engagement with one brand in your portfolio may translate into the same expectation for all brands / products in a company's portfolio, that they further the companies or brands role or occupation. If we don't take a holistic view of our products and the roles they have, customers might get confused and worse feel like we're not being completely honest about who we are/want to be

- MAKE GREAT PRODUCTS - there is no substitute for creating great products. All of the mechanism we've talked about previously are built to demonstrate and let great product shine through. Give people something remarkable/honest to talk about and provide them with the tools to do it to their own community in their own way.

Hope this helps...

Thanks Sean, yes your first point reminds me that a basic tenet of all modern brands is that they are service companies first and foremost whether they are b-to-c, or b-to-b. Also love the thought that communications are created by how people use products or services in their lives, not by planners and copywriters in agencies. That's a huge shift!

don't pretend to have the answer to why this shift is happening. But would love to see your thoughts on why the nature of brands are changing.

My thesis is that we're moving away from personal narrative creating our identity and towards shared narrative defining our identity.

I think that our growing sense of communal identity is one factor, but the easier reason for why "brand" is changing is that we simply have more information available about the companies we do business with. As a result, we can see that their ads don't always reflect reality. In the past it was harder to see so clearly inside of corporations - still is to some extent but there are a lot more whistle-blowers out there keeping companies on the straight and narrow.

Agreed. But i hope that from a brand and strategy, that an important motivational pillar is to want to add value to the "community" by building better products and being relevant as opposed to the fear of being exposed.

Some people motivated by carrot, some by stick - all good for customers :-)

Hey Sean,
Branching off your holistic vs singleton point above, I'm curious to hear what you think about the juxtaposition of Frito Lay's sustainability initiatives and the prankster ethos it's crafting for Cheetos. Do people see a conflict between social responsibility and social mischief, or is that reading too much into it? All I know is, the challenges faced by the big, house-of-brand corporations are pretty intense when viewed through the lens you and Adrian are helping to create for our industry.

Hi Michael,

Yeah i believe you're talking about Frito Lay's Net Zero initiative. If you subscribe to the model that brands should be more human like, it's totally ok to demonstrate a few personality traits or occupations. The caveat is, that one traits shouldn't conflict or be in opposition to each other. In this case you can certainly be a prankster and be environmentally conscious (just look at Ashton Kutcher).

Where the danger lies, as past cases have shown (Unilever with Dove vs. Axe), is that if another brand within your companies portfolio strays from that occupation or conflicts with, consumers will call you out on it. Credibility a commodity not often associated with marketing is a key construct of brands today. Without it regardless of what platforms brands are utilizing, their messaging will be seen as advertising and thus ignored.

Working on an eerily similar presentation (which I guess proves your other post about how we're all slaves to the common denominators). Its funny--what brands DO (not just what they say) has become so important to building a brand with any kind of fidelity that the things they end us saying is increasingly just a reference to the things they do (green is a good example). The expertise is shifting from the communicators to the builders. Jeez, I need to go out and make something.

Hey Erik, totally agree, it raises the big question of what our (agencies) role is now that this expertise shift is taking place. Would love to see/steal your presentation too.

Nice big hairy vision stuff - how about more practical examples of the thinking in action that are more than just an image (trouble with Slideshare is I can only see what you're showing, not what you're saying).

Death of the campaign and the big idea, it's not giving up control but sharing it, coherency replacing consistency, character replacing values.

Actually maybe I'm just repeating what you say with different words!

Agree examples would probably help, let me give that some thought, I think I can come up with a few.

Adrian
Nice presentation. Thought provoking. I like!
A brand is a bond. A bond is something that holds together. What holds together are beliefs, trust, experience, relationships... which is built and maintained through communications which is the act of sharing (opinions, ideas, thoughts). I still think modern brands are built with communications. What has changed is that it used to be through controlled, polished, sanitized, one sided message & image through medias..to...the communication of shared experiences.
Laurent

Thanks Laurent, much appreciated. I feel it's getting better with all this help. I agree that communications are still involved in building brands but I think we (as marketers) are/should no longer be involved in creating those communications. Customers are doing the talking and people tend to say what they think not what we want them to say.

Adrian
You do a very good job creating great content and opening the discussion+following up on comments.
L

Thanks, I really appreciate the help and time people give, I know how you all are.

"Branding solves communication problems" Pre-industrial age, consumers actually knew the baker down the street. As the bakery grew to serve hundreds, that baker could not possibly have a personal connection with every customer, so he "branded" his products, thus extending a level of implied communication aka, trust. Today, it is important to for consumers to trust the brand but it is equally, if not more important to "belong" to the brand...participate in its evolution. All this is part of real communication.

When I say branding solves communications problems, the voiceover for that part is referring to how branding theory evolved based on clutter. The idea of a very simple, single-minded proposition and the idea that brands ought to build to one simple promise is really a defense against clutter. Also the idea that imagery is the thing that marketers can manipulate is also a product of mass communications. We can make the term communications broad enough to encompass everything, but here I use it in a focused sense, the creation of messages that are distributed through media.

HI Adrian - two things stood out for me: classic brands creating a transactional relationship vs. modern brands creating a community, and classic brands being controlling vs. modern brands being empowering. I'm seeing a distinct shift in the nature of brand communication from one-way to conversational - it's why so many brands are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon or creating Facebook pages. They're not always necessary, but that's a separate issue to debate. I think more brands realise the 'talking to people' vs. 'talking at people' shift, and that's what I'd reiterate. It's the difference between a slowly dying brand and one that is set to conquer new territories.

Great point, I'll make that more prominent, thanks

Adrian,

As stated above the presentation makes for a great read. but I thought the best slide you have , you have yet to make.

"...reminds me that a basic tenet of all modern brands is that they are service companies first and foremost whether they are b-to-c, or b-to-b" comment of you.

together with slides 34 and 35, this is the starting point of ur preso. we are in service of people and we are in service of output. action counts. methods are secondary.

And it leads me nicely into a minor flaw with the presentation (of course this is just my view).

it is the VS stuff. you actually make a pretty binary preso. this vs that. old vs new.

I would personally extend the preso to include a concept called : unnatural naturalness.

"Here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony.
If you have one to the extreme, you'll be very unscientific. If you have another to the extreme, you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man - no longer a human being. So it is a successful combination of both, so therefore, it's not pure naturalness, or unnaturalness. The ideal is unnatural naturalness, or natural unnaturalness." Bruce Lee

This way you can brigde "old and new" , because image is still a viable method. even though you say correctly in one of the slides that modern brands are build for a modern world, the modern world is occupied by people whose evolutionary instincts have not changed all that much.

the ambiguity of slides 34-35 and the comment you made about " being in service of.." are the truth about the business as it was and will be. unnatural naturalness as a goal is what we should aim for.

plus it fits the brief nicely on blending :)

sorry if it is a bit rambling..

Thanks Niko, I agree that chart has definitely made it in to the revised version of the presentation.

In terms of binary - I know what you mean. Typically I don't like doing the black v. white thing but in this case I do believe that the way you build modern brands is so completely opposite from the way you build traditional or classic brands that it's justified. I'm not sure that advising people to blend these does them a service - I think there's a lot of traditional branding thinking that absolutely needs to be jettisoned because it's worse than unhelpful, it's actually damaging.

adrian,

as usual i thought this was a very clear and concise point of view. as you've said before companies can't hide behind advertising anymore because so much information is available and people can share and discuss freely - and now than can, they do.

i do think that brands still need to develop relationships and i think the concept of relationships is even more valuable than ever. what's changed is that the way for brands to develop and sustain a relationship has changed. i must admit though that i still love a good ad, it's just that i rarely see one. :-)

It's a good point, the purpose of a brand hasn't changed, it's just that everything about how you go about doing it has

Adrian:
Your classic modern slide is the best one in the deck. All by itself it offers some basic guidelines as to how a brand should behave and think. Brands may never again control the conversation but they can still determine their behavior and their culture. It's astonishing how few even have a culture. The great ones, SJC, Four Seasons, Nike, Apple are obvious. Their products, employee behavior and most of their customer comments and reaction reflect the brand ideals. In many cases the products and services aren't that different from what they've been in the past.

What's changed is that consumers now have a new and different way of letting those brands into their lives. They have new, free, open relationship to content, media and to each other and that lets them not only participate but define, or at least influence, the brand experience. The best get it. Harley Davidson has united its consumers and let them be a big part of the dialog. Yet the product hasn't really changed. Ernst and Young is still in the business of grooming future leaders. They've just made it far more interactive. Even WalMart with its Moms is responding. All of these brands believe in what I call "return on generosity." They not only give of their products and service and technology, they give consumers a chance to be part of it.

My favorite quote that I use to open all my presentations comes from a young college student I met on Twitter. It's this: "If you don't create a community for us we will create one ourselves." This goes for Moms, runners, gadget enthusiasts. It's a simple way of saying "your brand belongs to us, too." If a company understands that basic sentiment they'll figure out what to do.

Edward Boches

Very interesting! I agree, there are lots of companies who have changed very little about how they operate but who have made great strides in becoming more open and collaborative from a branding standpoint. I think some of the ones you mention, Harley, Ernst & Young, haven't really been faced with a disruptive competitor in their category that has fully embraced the idea of being a modern brand in the Zappos/Method kind of way. Therefore, they appear to be the most modern of the pack and can achieve success without making really fundamental changes. I think that they are vulnerable to a new entrant who decides to do things differently. Think about Virgin entering these two categories, I think they'd find it fairly easy to make both the above brands feel old, closed and stale. This isn't to take anything away from either of these companies as they are clearly successful.

Adrian. The presentation was perfect. It was a pleasure meeting you at newmodes, and if you're in Memphis again, I'll let you drive my old Porsche 911 and see what that brand experience is all about first-hand.

-michael guthrie

cool