Wiki Brands - Reinventing Your Brand in a Customer-Controlled Marketplace

As much as some people would like you to believe, brands are becoming less important in the new economy, the  evidence is actually to the contrary.  Prestige brands have flourished. Boutique brands have sprung up. Digital brands have become cultural powerhouses.   Even Anti-Brands like No Logo and Slow Food have become branded anthems. If you look at the financial makeup of companies, the intangible "brand" has steadily become a greater percentage of a company's financial pie.

What has changed is what  brands, or I should say strong, winning brands represent. In a recent paper "Wiki Brands"  I completed  for New Paradigm, we recognized 6 distinct eras that the art and science of branding  has marched through. Each have been a reaction to some type of media shift, marketplace scarcity, generational pushes or consumer attitude. ...and the eras are becoming shorter and shorter, anointing new winners who tap into the paradigm shift and leaving losers in their wake who don't react quickly enough.

A history lesson on the 6 phases:
Trademark (until 1860)    - A mark of brand ownership - "Something you buy"  i.e. Cattle
Brand Mark (1860-1920)   - A mark of brand quality - "Something you trust" i.e. Ivory
Mass Market Brand (1920-1970s) - A mark of positive associations "Something you want" i.e. Marlboro
Post-Mass Market Brand (1980s-late 1990s) - A mark of superior brand attributes "Something you prefer" i.e. Tylenol
Love Mark (early 2000s) - A mark of inspirational brand vales/stories/design "Something you love" i.e. Apple
Wiki Brand (the future) - A mark of brand interaction "Something your participate in" i.e. MySpace, Wikipedia

Yes, imagine that - brands are becoming something you participate in. A new generation of net-enabled  have left the angst-ridden anti-corporate baggage at the door. They line up outside Apple stores for days to get an iPhone. They donate their free time to Mozilla communities. They spend three times as much on coffee to experience Starbuck's third place. They develop new ads for Doritos. They send in photos to get on Jones Soda bottles. They help find solutions for Intuit. They join with their kids on Webkinz virtual communities.

Given a perfect storm of marketplace, media and consumer conditions, we are accelerating toward a world where customers are actively participating with brands. Brands have become surrogates for other forms of traditional social participation - religious, political and community. Some mass marketed brands are screeching the brakes trying to stop this train. The winning brands are credibly tapping the talents of users, consumers and customers into authors, designers, storytellers, scouts and researchers and thus turning them into word of mouth advocates, brand ambassadors and customer evangelists.

Wiki Branding is smart marketing for our times.  It recognizes a human instinct that has always been there but has all been ignored for the greater part of the last 1/2 century of marketing - customers just don't want to consume your brands and communications - they also want to 1) engage and play with them, 2) create and customize new stuff for themselves and 3) share their wisdom and creations with others. Given digital and mobile technology, at no other time  have customers been able to tap into these 3 other brand motivations - we are a hyper-connected, super-informed and very involved volunteer brand army ready to be mobilized.

In our Wiki Brand paper, we interviewed 15 successful wiki brand companies and realized the way they are approaching their customers and structuring their organizations are entirely different than their peers. We noticed quite distinct and differentiated points of view on at least ten different areas, altering traditional and accepted notions on how to build brands:
- Brand engagement - the pursuit of genuine customer interaction
- Brand orientation - the passion for building a better customer experience
- Brand tone - the reduction of brand hyping and presence and increase in transparency and ideas 
- Brand targeting - the pronounced shift to targeting microsegments and influencers
- Brand media - the shift from mass broadcast to intimate, narrowcast
- Brand innovation - the recognition that innovation is always in beta nver a final destination
- Brand openness - strong brands malleable enough to build new ideas/enter new market segments
- The marketer's role - shift from strategic/communications genius to dialogue facilitator & integrator
- The role of brand positioning - use in controlling what company's do, not just what they say they do

Welcome to a Wiki Brand world. Are you ready to join and participate?