Category: Brand

  • Identity & Equity

    I read two quotes in a completely unrelated (to this blog) context – Ashwin Sanghi’s “Chanakya’s Chant”, a work of fiction – but was intrigued by the perspective when I saw the ‘brand-social’ domain through this ‘framework’.

    The quote to start with is the one by John Wooden “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

    In the days of (only) traditional media, (if given the money) both character and reputation were relatively easier to establish and maintain because the number of publishers with significant reach were limited. Which leads to the second quote – from Winston Churchill “There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion”

    And then came the blogs, social networks and the statusphere, which allowed everyone to become a publisher.

    The question I’d like to ask is whether this published opinion and the pressures of real time (not to mention limited characters) are making brands focus more on reputation than character. How would you define reputation and character in brand terms? Would it be brand equity and brand identity respectively? If the focus were to be more on creating a strong brand identity through the product itself, customer care, sales process and even marketing communication, among others, would reputation/brand equity be much easier to handle?

    until next time, identity scarred

  • Personal Brand

    ’10ways to unlock your personal brand’ would guarantee hits, but the problem is that I can’t bring myself to write it. That’s what the post is about.

    The title is because the post is related to me, and the raison d’être of the blog. To give you a quick update, I have been considering various employment options in the last couple of months – not just ‘the next job’, but even at a ‘consultancy vs job’ level. Given the options, I believe I’ll be able to put that to rest next week, at least for the medium term. Since the blog’s existence played its part in providing me these options, I thought it deserved a ‘take stock’ post.

    I had always intended this to be a resting space for my ideas and perspectives. But I have realised that the blog is at best, a strategy, and not an objective. The objective is to tell the world that I have perspectives on the areas I specialise in – brand and social. Notwithstanding my interest in these areas, it has been driven a lot by the same blogging discipline that has kept the personal blog alive for more than 8 years now.

    However, the autopilot discipline, in cahoots with my general nature, has kept me writing more for myself than an audience, which completely goes against the objective. It not only affects the content generated, but the brand/communication strategy as well. I have followed a ‘build and they will come if they are interested’ approach, something that I advise brands and publishers not to do in an era of abundance. Also, I rarely publicise posts beyond a single tweet/ LinkedIn status, and refrain from baiting. (brand or individual) In fact, I very reluctantly started sharing my own posts on GReader only a few weeks back. Bad strategy in the era of aggressive personal brands.

    This thought had been gnawing at me for a while, but hit me when the afaqs guest post happened, and the reactions started coming in. This is a good time to mention that left to myself, the article wouldn’t have happened. It took consistent ‘do it’ pushes from the ever kind and wise Vijay Sankaran for the article to see the light of day. It took just a little more time than the average post to be written, but the amount of people who sat up and took notice was many multiples more than anything this blog had seen. It has also led me to the question of identity and a single web location (unifying the blogs), but that’s for later.

    Considering that time is going to be my most valuable resource going forward, I will need to prioritise.  I experimented with tumblr and paper.li to see if i could produce more content in lesser time (to be used here) and leave ‘heavier’ writing for platforms with more reach. But I realised I would just be adding to the noise, and not being original at all. I like what I do here, and won’t stop. What I might have to do is skip a week once in a while so that I can also meet the objectives I had initially set for myself. Interestingly, the immediate trigger for this post was that while I was writing the original post for this week, i realised it could make a decent article elsewhere. 🙂

    In case you have reached here, I have a question. If you could change something about the posts here, what would it be? Shorter? Better scope for debate? More personal/topical examples? Let me know.

    until next time, happy I-Day 🙂

  • Brand Personalities

    The discussions on anonymity are back in full force on the web, mostly courtesy Google’s stance against pseudonymity on Google+. Google has its reasons and is supposedly working on it.Considering that I represent myself as ‘manuscrypts’ and an icon/logo on most social networks, identity on the web is an issue that I can definitely relate to.

    But when I consider this from a brands’ perspective, I sense an equally grey area. The brand is usually represented on social networks as a logo and a ‘voice’ that cannot be tied down to a person. Most studies indicate that consumers/users would rather talk to a person than a brand. But that also sets the stage for a BBC-Twitter like incident to happen, a scenario I had written about a couple of years back. I have seen only a few interesting alternatives. (eg. Chicago Tribune’s Twitter directory or adopting a persona like Hippo)  There is a different side to it too – how many brand managers would like to associate themselves with the product they manage? (for various reasons) When agencies manage social platforms on behalf of clients, what is the best way to present that? A person has many identities, some he/she wants to share, and some others he/she does not, a brand is rarely given this leeway.

    I feel that in all the time that has elapsed since my earlier post, the networks have not yet built systems that allow brands to fully explore the ‘people-conversations’ aspect that makes social work. Twitter and Facebook, the premium players, both lack a way to surface the identities of the people tied to the brand, in context. There is only so much a Twitter bio can hold, and no one looks at the Info tab on Facebook. (LinkedIn is best placed, but very few brand centric discussions happen there.) The focus, whether it’s Facebook’s Ads API or Twitter’s promoted tweets, seems to be on broadcast, albeit more targeted. Foursquare is still early in the game, but the self-serve brand pages are a decent step. I hope Google considers all this when they do allow brands to play on Google+.

    If a platform does manage to work it out, it would be helpful for all concerned. Brands could apportion responsibilities. Monitoring systems and reaction mechanisms could build in roles, ‘filters’ and ‘rights’ accordingly, and users would know exactly who to speak to for what issue? The other way, of course, is for brands to build that network themselves, feeding in data, personas and conversations from existing networks. That way, they can even assign responsibility to early adopters within the organisation to test out new platforms on their behalf, and communicate that. With the rise of SoLoMo (social, location, mobile), the need for a distributed social architecture is now of much importance.

    until next time, a brand’s personal identity

  • Brands and Plus points

    Considering that I tweeted this sometime back, and found this a great read, this post is not on the pros-cons/ how to use Google Plus or on the lines of 'why I am getting out of Facebook and hopping into bed with Google Plus'. These are just thoughts based on a query I asked on and about the platform a couple of days back.

    The context: I observed that, on my Plus stream ( I have 'circled' about 150 people), a few people were sharing the same content they did on Twitter and LinkedIn, presented the same way as well. I could understand why they would use these as distribution networks because it is difficult to accurately predict who catches what in busy streams. But what did surprise me was this content being shared as 'Public' on Google Plus, when it is very easy to create circles of people with common interest and share accordingly. (using earlier interactions on other networks or even what they share on Plus) And so I asked

    Predictably, the most insightful comment came from generic propecia online no prescription 1

    twitter.com/#!/misentropy” target=”_blank”>Iqbal, who nailed it with “we are used to the environment defining the limits of who we share with – rather than having the ability to choose and consciously picking one set of people over another, every time we have something to say.” In this context, I remembered an excellent post by JP Rangaswami on the subject of filters, publishers and subscribers. While I agree with his summation that “We can only fix filter failure by providing subscribers with better filters, by providing publishers with tools that allow subscribers to filter better“, I did feel that in the interim, till the environment (/infrastructure) is able to deliver this at least to a certain degree of satisfaction (it's a dynamic scenario, not likely to be completely perfect), publishers (us) should filter our output too.

    All of this led me to a comparison of this scenario to that of brands as publishers. Thanks to traditional media platforms, brands had an environment which to a large extent defined the what/who/where/how of marketing communication. Few brands have been able to cope with the explosion of platforms and the freedom, choices and protocols that come with it. As consumers become filters and learn selective broadcast, exploring and navigating the platforms might be a good idea for brands, but it might be a better idea to (also) invest in a content-communication infrastructure which can be customised to meet both the dynamics – the brand's messaging needs and the consumer's sharing habits. (in the brand's context)

    until next time, helpless to help+ 🙂

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  • Consumer Tracks

    I heard a very interesting quote recently, attributed to Rishad Tobaccowala –

    When consumers hear about a product today, their first reaction is ‘Let me search online for it.’ And so they go on a journey of discovery: about a product, a service, an issue, an opportunity. Today you are not behind your competition. You are not behind the technology. You are behind your consumer.

    That reminded of the title of a post last month from Mitch Joel – “The Ever-Evolving Consumer Evolves (Again)“, in which he talks about how consumers are now more advanced than marketers in terms of technology and how they communicate. Quite agree in general, though it varies with geography, kind of demographic and so on.

    Simplistically put, word of mouth with a technology assist. You'd say that every 'social media' presentation has a version of it, and I'd have to agree. But the interesting part is how brands react. For the purpose of this post, let me give you a contemporary tool based example.

    Within a few days of the launch of Google +, a few brands jumped on to the wagon. They weren't just content sites, but regular brands. Only to be told by Google to lay off until they were officially allowed to. Were the brands behind the con

    sumers in this case? Or technology tool? Not. But even if they were allowed to operate in Plus, would that guarantee a success story? Not necessarily. That's probably because many a time, when brands (and brand managers) get to know about technology, they choose the easy way out. Order the agency to create a page/handle/group and get x number of fans/friends/followers, post some content to 'tick' engagement and then wait for the next shiny object. The harder way is to understand why people are active on the social platforms and the networks that are created within. In this context, relationship and trust. Something that brands lost when they made full use of the fact that traditional media didn't allow consumers to talk back.

    Mitch Joel is right when he says that brands finally found an answer to the first coming of the web. They answered the 'why' reasonably well – information, and built websites. But with an explosion in platforms and interactivity, the answers this time around aren't that simple. Having a touch point at every new internet nation state is a great thing, but if brands look at the new shiny technology/service through the prism of why users are flocking to it, and go through the data – information – knowledge – wisdom path to figure out if/how they can use the technology/service to anticipate and meet consumer needs, they might be evolving a better and scalable strategy for the days ahead.

    until next time, to corrupt a cricket line, platform is temporary, class is permanent 😉

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