Internet revolution in brand marketing

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Question - what was the strategic paradigm for brand marketing and what is it now?

Answer - in the late 19th century and the 20th century the dominant brand marketing paradigm was one of buying news space - in the media, in signing, in hard copy collateral. Since the onslaught of the Internet, the dominant paradigm has become that of inventive energy delivered through social networks (communities)

Key points

Back in 2000, when Mud Valley was set up (it makes it easy to count how old we are), there was almost universal agreement about how brand marketing should be done – about the what, the why and the how at least. The which, the where, the when and the how much was up to you, except that the answer to “How much?” was usually “A lot”.

In fact, the only true controversy in the theory of brand marketing in the year 2000 was whether branding was a value-added discipline at all and whether that value should be recorded in companies’ Reports & Accounts. Andrew Ehrenberg argued that branding techniques did not get you to being market leader – rather that being a market leader got you to having a valuable brand. Brand value was simply a reflection of market share.

However, back in 2000, it was also clear that something big was happening – the Internet – although there was no consensus over its likely impact. IT-literate people got excited because they could foresee that they could soon have access to all the fun and prestige that the sales & marketing people were having, and entrepreneurs got excited because they could foresee that they could become global CEOs for a song, a wing and a prayer overnight, yet the loudest mantra among brand marketing gurus was that all things ‘e-’ constituted just another media channel and should be treated accordingly as part of the larger mix.

In 2000, Google was beginning to have a major impact in the search world because it was so simple and effective, although few people had a clue (outside Google) how it was ever going to make money. Amazon was still being described as the ‘biggest not-for-profit organisation in history’ even as it and fellow pioneers, such as eBay and Lastminute.com, showed that you could base a whole business strategy on brand marketing techniques and principles (sorry, Mr. Ehrenberg). YouTube didn’t exist, nor did the other social media sites. Websites were popping up like weeds, even when they were ultra-expensive shrubs. Most large corporations did not know what they wanted a website for strategically, but they were sure they had to have a big flashy one within months. Integrated marketing was still a pipedream, as was the reliable measurement of marketing effectiveness.

However, in less than 10 years, while most of the theory of brand marketing strategy (the stuff that we do) remains in tact, the ‘how’ has been revolutionised by the Internet. There are probably still a mass of older companies out there, especially business-to-business corporations, who have yet to get their heads around even e-mail campaigns, but most new companies do not think that they even exist unless their web strategy is firmly in place.

Reviewing some of our articles written on the subject ten years ago, the measurement of brand marketing initiatives has probably come the furthest. Marketing communications expenditure has switched largely into online activities where basic performance feedback reports are readily, instantly and often automatically in place. Indeed, click-throughs are at the heart of the commercial online advertising model. There are still a lot of gaps in terms of qualitative feedback and the crossover between online and real-world effects, but marketing ROI is now a guiding issue whereas ten years ago it was considered to be an unreachable holy grail for the vast majority of campaigns a brand marketer would run.

The advertising model has certainly changed (and explained how Google could make a stack of money after all). Pay-as-you-go is a dominant model for many companies, alongside the split-testing of advertising and communications campaigns.

One of the biggest and most controversial topics in brand marketing advertising and communications at the moment is behavioural marketing which works on the basis of often clandestinely capturing data about people’s online behaviour through their cookies so that brand marketers can select audiences according, in effect, to their behavioural self-segmentation. This activity is aggressively banned by the European Union, but it will no doubt re-emerge via an opt-in model spawning a vigorous black market of data pirating on the side.

PR has been revolutionised too. Ten years ago it was about hiring a flamboyant or fragrant PR representative to stand around talking about you very loudly at events or to phone a few friends in the media. Nowadays, ensuring that your news and promotions are picked up by Google, Yahoo! and other news syndicators is at the heart of brand marketing activity. Electronic PR gets stories out there where you want them, when you want them, and prominently listed by search engines and book-marking sites (e.g. Digg and StumbleUpon), with powerful metrics systems, tracking devices, archiving and contact profiles built into the back-end. Given that the news industry has been largely stripped of editors, if you can turn up in a few key places (including Reuters and Associated Press), your story can be spun and spun and spun around the world as everyone copies everybody’s else news.

But the real PR change is in the sudden arrival of UGC – user-generated content. You plant your seeds, you water them a little, and suddenly all the birds of cyberspace descend and spread your seeds around the land, creating a forest for you (you hope).

At one level, it is about being ‘viral’, using buzz-marketing to get key plague-carriers talking about you so that word-of-mouth promotes your brand through unpaid evangelism. Malclom Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point’ has been significant in popularising this line of thinking.

At another level it is about harnessing the blogosphere. There are millions of bloggers out there commenting on anything and everything, and some of them are followed by millions of people. Disney recently unveiled its plans for a Harry Potter entertainment park to 350 million people in about three days by exclusively briefing the world’s seven most popular bloggers, at the cost of the square root of a phone conference and no doubt some media packs.

Then there are the social networks – the big ones like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – the even bigger quasi-social media site – YouTube – and a host of niche ones for almost any community of interest you can think of. These technologies are designed to help people spread the word and Twitter in particular is aiming head-on at the intersection between community chat, PR and advertising, providing must-follow brands with a mechanism for continual news streaming.

So, has any of this affected the key strategic principles of brand marketing?

We would say that it has.

What it has done is to change the whole underlying paradigm of how brands are promoted. The dominant model of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century was one of published hard copy news, via the news media, via brochures, via mailers, via billboard advertising etc.. You paid for your media space, you got what you paid for, it was a largely controllable business transaction in terms of the mechanics (if not the effects), and it was mostly a one-way shouting match – less about getting people’s attention, more about retaining it. Yes, there were TV studios, call-centres and sales forces, but even they were only partially or nominally two-way (some days of the week you could have a more intelligent conversation with a telephone call queuing device than with a sales person or call centre representative).

Today, the underlying paradigm is of global community – people talking to people, the hubbub and the babble, the tsunami of gossip. You can gain worldwide exposure for $100, so it is not about how much you pay (although money can certainly help), it is more about how inventive you are and how much energy you have. Big brands are the ones you see everywhere, that are talked about everywhere – the ones with the most inventive energy.

Imagine yourself at a global event. Over there are the established big hitters, gracing us with their presence. Over there are the alternative glitterati, attracting audiences with their brilliance. There are some set pieces that pop up from time-to-time interrupting the conversation. Now, assuming that you are not necessarily a big hitter or a glitteratus, and that you haven’t paid for a set piece, how are you going to have a major impact on the event?

Most people will be modest performers, turning up, enjoying the show, chatting to some people and especially to friends. However, the determined few will steal the show. They may use shock tactics like dropping their trousers, behaving hysterically, or setting off an explosion, or they may set up a stall and invite people to participate in their market trading, or they may provide an impromptu artistic performance, but whatever they do, one way or another they will grab the attention of the room – they will ‘roach’ the event, improvise their platform on top of somebody else’s platform. That is what brand marketing is about strategically nowadays. As Tsufit points out in her book ‘Step Into The Spotlight’, every event is an opportunity, and the Internet is a continuous 24/7/365 event.

Energy is replacing money as king, although money can be easily and effectively exchanged for energy. The up-and-coming brand is the one that is recognised for its emerging energy quotient which is appropriate as the currently emerging scientific paradigm is that the world is basically an energy device, as described by quantum mechanics.

The laws of brand marketing, once considered immutable, have changed, are changing and will change. Discuss.

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