digitaldust

I thought I would get down and formalise some of the thinking about brands that I did while I was in San Fran in Sept and was brought to the surface after a discussion with some colleagues recently. Not sure who else to include in my rant audience, feel free to pass it on.

If you read no further then my summary is that Brand in the future will not be about the usual communication channels.

Brand is a 20th century phenomena. It’s a mass market, mass communication, mass production phenomena. Without these 3 states existing there would be no “brand” as we know it. The reason that Brands have come about is so that products may operate in mass markets, manufactured and delivered by mass production and sold via mass communication.

I thought I would get down and formalise some of the thinking about brands that I did while I was in San Fran in Sept and was brought to the surface after a discussion with some colleagues recently. Not sure who else to include in my rant audience, feel free to pass it on.

If you read no further then my summary is that Brand in the future will not be about the usual communication channels.

Brand is a 20th century phenomena. It’s a mass market, mass communication, mass production phenomena. Without these 3 states existing there would be no “brand” as we know it. The reason that Brands have come about is so that products may operate in mass markets, manufactured and delivered by mass production and sold via mass communication.

Mass production produces lots of the same product and to a certain extent our idea of a product would not even exist if it wasn’t for mass production. A product to us is a thing that is produced in quantity such that no one thing differs from another. Every item of a product should be identical in form, function and quality.

Mass markets come around due to distribution and communication technologies.

Mass communication is used to sell products into peoples heads. Not the actual act of retail sales. Mass communication is the act of showing the same thing to a lot of people all at once.

A little history…

First a little about my idea of the 4 economic ages. First there was the gathering age, then there was the agricultural age, then there was the manufacturing age, and now we are transitioning into the information age. I see these as primarily being differentiations of economics, about the primary means of production, about where people can make profit.

In the hunting age people hunted and lived off the land, then there were technological advances that meant that lead to agriculture. Agriculture was a more successful way to create food and therefore value than hunting/gathering. Hunting/gathering soon (1000s of years) became obsolete, anyone involved in that kind of “economy” would be far behind the game. . Invaded, wiped out, destroyed. Anyone who’s played civilisation/god/sim game knows that the only real way to win a war is economically, more scale or more advanced means of production. Agriculture trivialised the skills, anyone could walk out their door and there were fields of produce and animals lined up for the slaughter.

The same happened in the transition from agricultural to manufacturing. What is often know as the industrial revolution (which didn’t happen over night, it can be traced all the way back the wheel as far as I’m concerned; these ages are more like bell curves than discrete jumps) meant a change to the way that value was created. No longer was agriculture the key. The feudal system, which was about control of the land and therefore the means of production, fell apart quickly. The land was no longer the “capital investment” the value of land would have dropped significantly. Industrialisation and scientific advances made agriculture trivialised, it lead to less and less people being involved in the production of food.

We are now heavily in the transition period from the manufacturing age to the information age. This age began transitioning even before the industrial revolution. The invention of writing and the printing press were step changes in it’s life-cycle, the invention of the computer was a major step change. There will be significant advances in manufacturing technology due the increase/advance in information related technologies (as at the end of the agricultural period in, there were huge advances in agricultural technology that revolutionised the production of food). For example (though it may be a lame duck) nano-technology could revolutionise manufacturing in such a way as to make trivialise it and make it completely dependent on information technology, not on anything involving the means of production being centred in manufacturing. The “expensive” bit in manufacturing will be the design/plans not the cost of production. Now nano-technology may not come about, but this revolution will happen, even if it’s some kind of brute force change (robotics maybe, general materials tech increase) and takes more time… it will happen!

Mass phenomena; production, marketing, communication, media are phenomena of the end of the manufacturing age. They will die out as the manufacturing ages passes. Production will become specialised, no more model T fords, one type of car for everyone, it will be an individual “product” for each and every person. It will be one-to-one marketing, we will read/watch/listen to what we want and when we want it. We will be pulling media not being pushed at. We will talk to other entities when we want to.

So what does this mean for brands. Brands were a means to sell products (and also unified “productised” services). Products are by their very nature manufactured. Products and brands will therefore be trivialised in the change to the information age. They will change/evolve or die. Probably the names will stay the same but the concepts will change. Already this is happening.

My idea of the replacement for brand is something to do with experience and interaction. These have been bywords for brand for some time now anyway, but that don’t work for most brands. When you buy a pair of Nikes you don’t buy em cause you engage with the brand, you buy them because you’ve been sold the brand. Brainwashed by the communication.

I don’t know exactly this new “brand” thing will be. It will probably still be called brand. Current brands are aspiring to the aspects of what this future brand will be. They are hungry for it even if they don’t know what to eat.

I wrote down yesterday that a brand is a two way conversation… then realised that I had heard that somewhere before. The Cluetrain Manifesto… other clever people had got there before me. Damn. And they say the same things I’m getting at. But anyway… they’re right.

I was told the other day about a top PR company carrying out a global rebranding. They had spent a lot of money with a sister company in their big marketing conglom-group (though they were proud of beating them down on cost, anyone who has worked in an agency knows the kind of work clients who smash them on price get, but that’s another rant). Their global CEO was all proud and strutting around wagging his tail, their new logo and letterhead had replaced their old typographic ampersand with a brush stroke version. This he proclaimed would change the way the company thought, and would change the way people perceived them. Someone stood up and asked why this change to their logo would make them as employees think differently? Apparently this was greeted by snorts of derision.

This is what it’s like in one of the dreadnoughts of global marketing, the best PR agency in the world, a big slow battleship that will be beaten by someone in a dingy with a cruise missile.

We don’t want to be doing the same thing. If we want a brand we have to work out where it is going. What brand will be in the next 20 years and aim for that. It wont be something that sits along outside the rest of the organisation, it will be intertwined in everything that the organisation does. No more separate marketing dept.

There will be a whole new way of interacting with customers in the future, a whole new way of conducting business. It’s time to get out the intellectual chequebook and go paradigm shopping.