ADOI Blog

BRANDS, MARKETS AND THE BORDERLESS CONVERSATION

mackattack on 05 30, 2008

by Mack Attack

I can’t really remember where I had this conversation, but I do remember being thoroughly drunk most of the time. Most of it was a haze, except for a little snippet that stayed long after the alcohol fuelled moment had long passed.

I told someone that the word ‘brand’ caused me no small amount of discomfort. I mean look at its origins. People poked cattle with a red hot piece of iron bearing their initials or a mark that distinguishes their ownership of said property. I’m sure the cow felt uncomfortable too, probably a lot more than mine.

I prefer markets. Hugh McLeod – my fave ad guy (www.gapingvoid.com) and a friend I should try to catch up with – puts it best when he wrote:

“I dont like branding. I don’t like brand theory.

I like markets. I find them much more interesting.

Why? Because branding is all about what people think they do, markets are about what people actually do.”

Hugh’s right. Now think of the internet as a huge market with noisy conversations going about everything and anything. Anything can be associated with the brand, from one person’s bad experience to another one’s exuberance at finally being able to own a product by a specific brand. That’s marketing’s new frontier, and like the Wild Wild West, it ain’t pretty.

Everyone seems to have their own idea on what’s right and wrong and nobody agrees much with one another, except on the fact that something has to be done to manage, control and contain these markets within the brand definition.

Jeff Zweig wrote in a comment recently – and while I often provoke, I think Jeff is right on many things – that:

“Achieving success with digital marketing and branding strategy means understanding the mindset of our target audience when they engage with social (and other types of interactive) media. This means thinking far beyond running banner ads on a bunch of other people’s blogs and websites. It means thinking how best to leverage the power of online content sharing sites, video sites like YouTube, running our own blog, syndicating our content and getting our online fans to spread it for us, exploiting the power of podcasts and vodcasts, leveraging the power of online communities and social networks, etc.”

That’s a tall order but within those lines, Jeff did get one thing right. He invokes people to undertake the task of understanding the market-place and the people who make markets exist in the first place. Except for the word ‘branding strategy’, I like what he said in the paragraph. It does however entail a lot of work and an almost intuitive understanding of what makes people excited, and what would put them off. Go forth Jeff, and multiply. We need a few more like you.

An example of how a friend of mine does this is by a simple blog post about getting wine in the States. Hugh (yeah that guy who draws bizarre cartoons on the back of business cards) wrote a blog entry that was a fabulous act of ‘open-source’ marketing (http://www.gapingvoid.com/). Read it. He understands the powers of creating meaningful conversations and being honest – brutally sometimes – about his thoughts to the people he interacts with. They in turn have learned to trust the brands he associates himself with. That’s finding a person who converses well with the market, and is not necessarily a branding strategy.

Closer to home, Yasmin Ahmad is another consummate marketer. From her work in advertising, to her movies and in her conversations with her audience over at her blog (http://yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/), she strives to communicate her feelings to her audience. We see a bit of us in her now almost cultish ads and remember the brand mostly because of the story she weaves. We relate and she converses – even in an ‘intrusive, one way” medium such as a TVC. Sometimes people like to listen, when something is told right. She too, is usually brutally honest about the way she feels, like in one of her more recent posts (http://yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/) where she writes, very near the end:

“Not bad for a film that was described by last year’s chairman of the jury at Festival Filem Malaysia as “filem yang tak ada pembaharuan”.”

Yup, not bad at all.

Despite all the noise, some do stand out. The sad thing is that brands that are now trying to win people like Hugh and Yasmin may not necessarily understand what makes these people tick. Some have been successful – like Microsoft and Hugh – others merely try to brute-force their way in by trying to buy these people.

I hope they don’t succeed all too much. Because the marketplace needs people like these – to sift through the muck and engage big corporations to be better at what they do. To show us that happiness does not lie in sponsorships and freebies, but being happy with what you bought.

Ah, that would be nice.

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