Dear Marketeers: All Your Brands Are Belong To Us!

Some years ago marketing a product was pretty easy (at least in theory): you decided what you wanted to tell the costumers, you hired an ad agency, spent a large amount of cash in order to place your ads on prime-time TV or in the top selling magazines, and that’s about it. The costumers just had to listen/see your message and assume you were telling the truth and go and by your product or hire your services. And then along came the Internet, with social media attached, and everything changed. Suddenly, the costumers decided to tell others what they thought of your products/services and, worst of all, they decided to tell you what they think of them.

In Groundswell Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff talked with Ricardo Guimarães, founder of Thymus Branding, and he shared one of the most important insights in the book about brand managing in a social media age:

The value of a brand belongs to the market, and not to the company. The company in this sense is a tool to create value for the brand… Brand in this sense – it lives outside the company, not in the company. When I say that the management is not prepared for dealing with the brand, it is because in their mind-set they are managing a closed structure that is the company. The brand is an open structure – they don’t know how to manage an open structure.

I believe that this passage of the book made a lot of people feel uncomfortable upon reading it. Basically, Guimarães is telling them that the best way to run a brand is to let go of control because it really never belonged to you. And is right: brands are what costumers make of them! Companies just add value.

The thing is, it wasn’t social media that handed the brands to the costumers! They belonged to them all along, marketeers just didn’t know that because they weren’t listening. It was not entirely their fault. It wasn’t easy to get feedback from your costumers. You could do surveys, some focus groups, and that was it. Market research is still important and vary valuable to companies, just don’t expect it to yield results that it’s not tailored to get.

A brand is what costumers think it is, not what companies want it to be. The perception the public has of a brand is what defines it. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do about it. The marketing department just has to do their job: try to influence the perception the costumers have of a product! In reality this shift of paradigm comes in aid of companies: now they can get the info directly from the costumers and work with what they gladly give them. There’s nothing to complain about. Actually, I think this is the best time to do marketing. It’s not the easiest time, but probably the best.

P.S. If you think the title of the post is a result of poor grammar, I’m afraid you’re wrong. It’s supposed to be that way. But kudos to you anyway because it means you’re a normal person who knows how to speak English! If you understood the reference, kudos for you, but that means you’re a geek. That’s ok we’re in good company!

P.S.2 You can read a Portuguese version of this post at Dissonância Cognitiva.