Marketing is no Longer Hollywood

Small Conversations not the Big Idea

85% of brands are defined in everyday interactions: a friend talks to her friend about a brand; she sees a review of Youtube; she walks into the retail store.

Brand Happens.

What defines brands isn't the Hollywood style glitz of Mad Men and the ad world but simple, innocuous daily conversations and interactions that brands are struggling to get to grips with.

We no longer control brands like we once used to.

Winning Awards not Customers

A generation ago, the success of your brand came down to the ability of your marketing manager to choose a good agency. That one campaign could make our break your brand.

* The Pepsi Generation
* Diamonds are Forever (DeBeers)
* Tony the Tiger (Kelloggs)

A generation ago, brands were defined by agencies.

A good ad agency could create a story about your brand by creating an emotional experience that transcended any physical qualities of the product itself. We learned that Starbucks wasn’t about selling coffee but lifestyle and community. Nike no longer sold sneakers but an active lifestyle engendering all aspects of competition and success. Pepsi sold an identity and a voice for a generation of urban teenagers.

We experienced the brand through these powerful stories and the best stories won awards.

A generation ago, you could measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign not by its long term impact on the brand and market share but by peer recognition. The best marketing managers and ad agencies weren’t measured in terms of how they lifted company KPIs but in the number of Cannes Lions they scooped.

As Jerry Della Femina (the legendary "mad man" who gave us Meowmix "so good cats ask for it by name") wrote,

"It all goes back to us wanting to be in Hollywood. We all want to win Oscars."

Marketing is no Longer Hollywood

If you look at brands that successfully defined Customer Experience today - brands like Amazon, Zappos, South West Airlines, Lush, Lego, Monster Energy and GoPro you find brands that invest heavily in daily interactions with their customers.

Rather than crafting narratives that win big glitzy awards, these grass-roots brands invest in the less glamorous touchpoints - service, retail, customer feedback and other grassroots activities.

And although we may realize a shift in mindset is inevitable; that the era of Martini cocktails and Cannes Lions is coming to an end; we have a lot of money, relationships and interest sunk into the success of the old model.

If you look at how we consumed video content a generation ago, we consumed the content of the major TV networks and movies studios. Today, however, more than 50% of the content consumed by 18-30 year olds is on sites like Youtube, the vast majority of which has little to do with traditional players.

When Brand Happens

When brand "happens" you need to be prepared.

One of the themes in my writing I'll reiterate here is:

Dialogue is out there whether you like it or not.

Which means, customers define your brand through their everyday conversations. Accept you have little control over this environment and develop a strategy to roll with it.

As the old military adage goes, "no plan ever survives the enemy". Rather than operate from a base line of rigid brand templates and management structures we need an environment where the brand empowers voices at all levels - from the Fans right up to the marketing department.

Embracing the shift requires a few tough decisions to be made:

* Taking responsibility for brand strategy internally rather than outsourcing it to creative agencies

* Moving from a strategy of brand management to one of brand curation

* Understanding that the official brand narrative is just one voice in the crowd and that alternative customer versions are as valid, if not more valid than the ones crafted by the agency.

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