Redefining Brands in an Era of “Cheap Interactions”
Feb 18th, 2008 by John Stodder
Think of the untold billions Coca-Cola, Nike, Kraft or AT&T have spent on image advertising and PR to develop memorable brand identities.
In just ten years, and without spending much of anything on buffing its image, Google has surpassed them, according to Millward Brown’s Brandz report.
Umair Haque explains how that happened on Harvard Business School’s Edge Economy blog:
What is a brand? It’s a promise: information from a firm promising you a set of costs and benefits from the consumption of a good or service. Brands shape your expected value.
Now, for the economics of an industrial era, branding made sense. Interaction was expensive – so information about the expected benefits of consumption had to be squeezed into slogans, characters, and logos, which were then compressed into thirty-second TV ads and radio spots. The complex promise of a Corvette, for example, was compressed into shots of cute girls, open roads, and lots of sunshine.
But cheap interaction turns the tables. The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the often empty promises of firms.
In fact, when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.
And they do – with a fervor that portends revolution.
Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, which advises clients on new approaches to communications strategy. On his site Bubblegeneration.com, Haque last year said, “If consumers loved brands, brands wouldn’t have to advertise.
Sphere: Related Content(M)edia’s central challenge in 2008 remains what was in 2007 - to rethink the essence of branding, and create new modes of communication consumers really do love.
