Newsletter #138 The End of Branding (As You Know It)

Created on Oct 22 2009 12:00AM

Feature Article

According to Time.com, "Brüno could be the first movie defeated by the Twitter effect." The outrageous Sacha Baron Cohen film dropped 40% in sales, from its US Friday night opening to Saturday, as an apparent Twitter and text message blitz stung the movie.

Twitter is not the only online source that is affecting brand perception:

• Canadian folk singer Dave Carroll's "United Breaks Guitars" currently has over 5.5 million views on YouTube and has undoubtedly damaged the United Airlines brand.
• User-generated recommendation sites like Tripadvisor.com for travellers and Epinions for consumer products.
• Search engines such as Google who rank Websites based mainly on optimisation and the number of links pointing to them .
• Social news sites such as Digg.com, Fark and Slashdot as well as bookmarking sites like Delicious.
• Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

David Ogilvy's definition of a brand is a reasonable one:
"The intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised."

But is it a definition mired in the past? Augustine Fou writing in Clickz.com says, "Digital broke everything" as consumers can now talk freely to each other - these conversations are even archived for future readers. Traditional 'brand shouting' is no longer the only source of information as consumers rate products and services and give each other feedback and recommendations.

As Terry Heaton says in talking about television that: "We're so awash in hyperbole that the only people really to trust are those we choose to be members of our own postmodern tribes: friends, sometimes family, acquaintances, references from friends…"

Consumers have also become more demanding and more likely to complain vociferously when things don't work out. Even though the reliability and quality of products have improved continually over past decades, satisfaction measures haven't budged. According to a Research International-TNS poll of local Internet users, 97% research online before making a significant purchase. So buyers are arriving armed with information and high expectations.


So is branding truly dead? No of course not. Buyology author Martin Lindstrom describes an experiment where 600 women were shown a box in Tiffany blue and their measured heart rate leapt 20%. And have you ever been in a car with young kids, driving past MacDonald's?

Marketers will still brand products but the effectiveness of marketing claims, advertising, brand logos and colours will be less as we continue to become more digitally connected, seeking continual feedback from others and searching for more information online.

To be a successful brand your product or service had better be good and your customer service fantastic! There is far less room for any disconnect between your product claims and what the product delivers.

James Surowiecki of Wired:
"The aristocracy of the brand is dead. Long live the meritocracy of product."

Hot Tips

Newbies

I'll let you in on a secret: keyboard shortcuts are real timesavers. The six I use many times a day involve the Ctrl key ("Apple" on Macs) and the bottom left keys: (+ means hold down the keys at the same time) "Ctrl+Z" Undo Last Action, "Ctrl+X" Cut, "Ctrl+C" Copy, "Ctrl+V" Paste, "Ctrl+O" File Open, "Ctrl+W" Close Current Window. If you can remember these you'll save heaps of time

Power Users

If you have a mouse with a scrolling wheel a cool function you can use is this: Just hold down the Ctrl key while scrolling the wheel. Depending on which way you scroll, the font size will increase or decrease. On a Windows machine the font size will increase or decrease, on a Mac the whole window size will increase or decrease.

Interesting Sites

Identifont is a great site if you're a designer or just looking for a particular typeface or font to suit something you are developing. The site has two main functions:

1. You can search for a font by name
2. You can identify the font by going through a wizard process that will help determine the font you are looking at.

http://www.identifont.com

InsiteFul Quotes

“a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.” Richard Wurman, author.

You can see our other Quick Quotes on the front page of www.netinsites.com; just refresh the page to see another one randomly selected from our database. Great for presentations or times when you want to appear to be a techno-dude(ss)!

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Best wishes

Alex Garden

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