Interest Graph for Brands

For those wondering what I’ve been up to lately, here’s a talk I did at the Media Evolution Conference in Malmo, Sweden about the interest graph for brands.

September 4, 2012 // This post is about: brands, interest graph, marketing, percolate

The Safety of Brands

An aside in the book I’m reading sparked a thought I figured might be worth sharing. First, the snippet:

From our e-mail providers to our mobile-phone carriers, most companies’ business models are too lucrative to risk by mishandling our personal information and angering the consumer. So it is safe to say that despite the many potential risks represented by the volumes of data available, our past is relatively well safeguarded.

Which reminded me a lot of economic definition of brand. Here’s The Economist’s dictionary of terms on the meaning of brand:

Many economists regard brands as a good thing, however. A brand provides a guarantee of reliability and quality. Consumer trust is the basis of all brand values. So companies that own the brands have an immense incentive to work to retain that trust. Brands have value only where consumers have choice. The arrival of foreign brands, and the emergence of domestic brands, in former communist and other poorer countries points to an increase in competition from which consumers gain. Because a strong brand often requires expensive advertising and good marketing, it can raise both price and barriers to entry. But not to insurperable levels: brands fade as tastes change; if quality is not maintained, neither is the brand.

A brand is a promise: The more valuable it is, the less a company can afford it to be broken.

I wonder, though, whether that’s as true now as it was in earlier times. The example I’ve heard most for thinking of brands in this is not killing your customers. You pay more for a Pepsi than some random house brand because you know it won’t be poisoned (you also know it will always taste the same). But something seems to be changing, especially with digital brands. Maybe it’s that there’s more of them or maybe we have far lower expectations, but I feel like large brands frequently have data breaches or other terrible things and we forgive them in a way that doesn’t really jibe with the two paragraphs above.

If we don’t hold our brands responsible, the very meaning of brand changes. Part of it is that it’s easier to show outrage than it ever was, so when people get up in arms about Facebook’s latest privacy change I suspect it’s not real. Part of it may be the insanity of the news cycle: TJ Maxx loses millions of credit cards and its only a big deal for a day. But none of it explains how a bunch of banks that nearly sunk the economy are able to bounce back (except, maybe, regular brand laws don’t apply to oligopolies).

No matter what, something is different and its important that we understand what it means.

May 31, 2012 // This post is about: brands, economics

Talking About Brands and Content

I’m doing this “virtual panel” about content over at the new FastCo Create site. The first round is up (I’ll update this post as it goes up) and here’s a quick excerpt from my answer about what brands need to know about content:

I’m not actually sure that creating editorial content is all that different than creating promotional content, at least on a high level. Advertising is a process of combining brand outputs (look, feel, voice) with cultural inputs (insights, trends, etc.) and creating a piece of communication. The shift I see taking place is that the traditional processes around creating content for a world of campaigns break-down in a real-time content creation environment: Brands and agencies aren’t currently set up to consume culture as it happens, which is what media organizations do. I think this is a big shift we’ll start to see inside brands over the coming years. It’s not that they’ll try to model themselves on media organizations, but rather, they’re going to rearrange themselves around real-time consumption of content, data, analytics and anything else they can get their hands on to help make decision and communicate better.

March 6, 2012 // This post is about: brands, content, marketing

The New Content Curators – Only Dead Fish

Good thoughts from Neil Perkin on curation and Percolate: “As brands increasingly become content producers, and move into content hungry practices and channels, creating interesting stuff on a sustained basis is becoming a real challenge. As does mastering not just the stock, but the flow (flow being "pieces of content, produced rapidly and at a low cost"). Brands simply do not have the resource capability to accomodate this emerging requirement without utilising different forms of curation including algorithmic, social, as well as professional. As usual, it is by overlaying the best that technology can offer, with the capability of smart, talented people that works.” Pretty awesome to see smart people picking up on some of our themes.

December 16, 2011 // This post is about: brands, curation, marketing

Thinking About New Twitter

Really smart thoughts from Dan Frommer on the Twitter redesign. I especially agree with his thoughts around direct messages: “Twitter is trying to de-emphasize private messaging by moving it a layer deeper in the user interface. I’m guessing there are a bunch of reasons for this, not limited to: Simplicity, perhaps relatively low usage by most users, potentially confusing rules around DMing, and that more public content is probably better for Twitter’s product and advertising goals. Some long-time and hardcore Twitter users are probably going to be upset about this, but one of Twitter’s strengths has always been its willingness to design for its mainstream users at the expense of its geek users. (Tip: To get fast access to your DMs on Twitter for iPhone, you can swipe up the “Me” icon at the bottom.)” Also curious to see where things go with brands.

December 9, 2011 // This post is about: brands, marketing, twitter