Remember that crashing sound? It was the fall of the old economy, and I believe, the fall of the old brand ecosystem, combined with the rise of the social web. It may be happenstance but democratization of brands seems to have surfaced along with the new economy. And this is great stuff really.
Back in the day, standard brands from GE to Ford were not defined by their communities. Brands were more equated to campaigns then community. We may have loved our Levis but they told us what they meant to us through advertising. The few defined the many. This was certainly pre Yelp.
Some marketers argue that nothing has really changed and that we simply have more powerful social tools to harvest our customers and manage our brands. They are just wrong. The basic dynamics of power has shifted to the crowd and the community, as individual voices can now be heard and counted and reverberate as part of an influential larger community on the social web.
I would posit that old school brands that don’t find a community of value will fail over time along with their economics, and that new brands can’t really be built without a community catalyst.
Put aside the exceptional, like Apple, or the definers of new platforms like FaceBook and Twitter and FourSquare. Look at the companies that sell hard goods or services or just stuff and I’ll wager that without a community of interest and a desire to participate, there is not really a brand in the brewing.
Does it mean that you can’t have a successful company without a true brand identity? Probably not. But it does mean that in order to earn the trust and harness the power of more social and democratic consumer populations, aka ‘the crowd’, you need to truly have value to offer. Brute force interruptive advertising or push campaigns are old school and just won’t work.
I don’t think this means that individuals have all gotten smarter or stronger or more individualistic (although maybe). I believe that the social power of crowds and communities are smarter and stronger than the sole individual and that is the driver of change and arbiter of value.
And this is redefining what brands and markets and marketing is all about.
Welcome to a new and more uncertain and more interesting world!
