It is acknowledged that brands have to deal with what John Moore, the author of "Brand Autopsy," dubs "the Growth Paradox": "The smaller you are, the bigger you must look. The bigger you are, the smaller you must get." And yet, the bewildering disruptions in the realm of social media, in conjunction with significant changes in consumer behavior, raise many new questions for marketers that go beyond sporadic, anecdotal smallness. What are the strategic implications for brands and branding? And what are the vehicles in the micro-marketer's arsenal?
One could argue that it is the very fragmentation of audiences and attention that justifies the big brand spending in order to cut through the clutter and consolidate scattered impressions into one overarching "big idea" – a beacon in an ocean of choices. But on the other hand, it may turn out to be a Don Quixote-esque fight against an inevitable erosion of the brand in the new Internet landscape. If the market is polyphonous, don't brands need to be polyphonous, too? If the audience is fragmented, and attention is, too, don't marketers need to fragment their brands as well? But how do you do that, fragment a brand? How do you create brand loyalty with an audience that is fickle and attention-scarce? How can brands access "the worlds within worlds," the micro-verses of consumers, and be relevant in the context of individualized user preferences? How can you build a "charismatic brand," defined by Marty Neumaier as "any product, service, or organization for which people believe there is no difference," if the perception of that charisma is vastly distributed? How can a brand still be the sum of all impressions, a pre-conscious image of a trusted persona, if impressions and attributes are disassembled over myriad online venues and applications? How can you build a brand identity if the brand in fact means different things to different people? Isn't the brand, by definition, the "macro of micros?" How do you build trust if behaviors can no longer be consistent because the arenas of behavior aren't? How can you foster a brand community if communities rise and dissolve ad-hoc?
One possible solution: Shrink your brand! The competitive advantage lies in being smaller than the rest. If everyone's vying for the premium attention space above-the-line, then there is enough room at the bottom, in the small world of small, below the line. Jordan Weisman, a producer of Alternate Reality Games (ARG), says "if you have something to share, hide it!" If you shrink your brand, the hiding will be easier.
Shrinking brands undermine the economics of attention. If you can't beat them, distract them. If you do not have the power to buy attention, steal it. Enter guerilla marketing, which basically means hijacking the attention that has been generated and directed to a third party's event. Like microbes, brands can get the attention they want by breaking into another brand's or event's attention eco-system. Brands can be wedding crashers. By leaning into the frame, they can hijack someone else's conversation. Best suited are market conversations with a built-in emotional response (sports, high-involvement consumer products, weddings, baby products, etc.).
Be eye-to-eye with your customers instead of bigger than life. Make your brand the water and not the rock. Be around your customers, at all stages of the customer life cycle, and surround them with meaningful conversations. Every interaction with the customer is a referendum on the brand. Re-create your brand every day and make it the fabric that embeds your customers' micro-verses. Do everything as if you did it the first time.
In other words: Act like an amateur!
Comments