The Evolution of Brands & The Sixth Phase - Wiki Brands

Marketing and culture at large, has a pretty short memory. They know what is in front of their face and they know what happened yesterday, not so great at placing things in context. Blogging 2004, YouTube 2005, My Space/ 2006, Facebook 2007, Twitter 2008 (strange we haven't heard about the new on the scene 2009 thing yet). We are a flavour of the day, ADD-driven, low mental storage capacity industry, which makes us tough to see the forest from the trees.

Let's unveil the curtain of history for a moment. When you consider this wondrous art of marketing and communications that has flourished into this $350 billion economic juggernaut, we really have only been practising it for 150 years. People are sounding off about the end of this sometimes poisoned practice with the onset of new technology, the new social "shiny things" and new business models, when really it's still in its early adolescence (and like most adolescents is going through an awkward phase).

My postulation is we've seen 6 distinct phases of marketing and brand development. Each phase marked by a different driver of brand value, a different brand-customer relationship, a different focus of management and a different force at work within society and the marketplace that brings about change.

This would probably make for a really good Ken Burns 24 part documentary, but I'll give the abridged version here. A

In the beginning, there was a trademark - with the advancement of business law, brands became signatures for "hands off, my property". A good brand owner back in the 1860s wanted a distinct mark that made it their own and would display it prominently. Company marks ceded way to brand marks, in fact, the world's first legally registered brand trademark was Bass Ale's red triangle in 1875 and having once managed the brand in Canada, I can testify it is still in existence today.

As markets expanded, distribution networks became more efficient and the industrial revolution rolled into high gear, brands started to have a bigger geographic reach. Your customer base wasn't just the 8 general stores in your vicinity - but customers that spanned states, regions and countries. Brands became icons of trust and good value for customers. Companies started to produce brandmarks extensions to a portfolio of company products. In the late 1800s, P&G's brand Ivory became the soap everybody wanted because it was so pure 99.44%, mild on children  and that it would float. Mass produced products started to push away locally produced versions based on good product quality at a better price - good branding helped aid the spread of these products.

In the golden age of mass market brands starting in the 1920s, increasing wealth and aspirations, caused corporate innovation to flourish - automobiles, appliances, exotic travel, radios then TVs - all became attainable by the middle class. A brand became a badge - a set of associations that satisfied our real and perceived wants and fulfilled our dreams and communicated that to others as well,  from simple household items to big purchases. Think Marlboro. Think Ford. Think Tiffany's. Think Coca-Cola. Brands became embued with values, frequently promoted by celebrity spokespeople that embodied those values and efficiently communicated through 3 TV channels, your local 8 radio stations or 3 local newspapers- no further questions asked.

Fast forward to the 80s and 90s, and we started to have a surplus of stuff. Grocery stores saw an eight-fold rise in the number of products that carried. From expanding retail big box stores to global competition to corporate love of line extensions and the rise of generics, there was an explosion of choice for customers in every industry. In this post mass market brand era, brands had to stand for something and as Ries & Trout outlined in their book Positioning, the need to be first in something in the customer's mind was key. Brand managers focused on building brand equity and strengthening their credentials on some attribute or another. Well owned positions were able to charge a premium and withstand the increasing power of retail demonstrated by Walmart's rise to power. Volvo for safety. BMW for experience. Mercedes for luxury. Cadillac for prestige. You get the picture - owning something important and maniacallyt adhering to the script was the plan.

But what happens when there is just too much stuff and not enough attention to go around. Good positioning is no longer enough to overcome a customer's increasing lack of attention, time and trust. Even if you can claim superiority, do I believe you? do I care enough to listen? or do you get past my attention span inundated by media and product proliferation?

In a Lovemark world, popularized by Kevin Robert's book of the same name, brands in this recent era are applying cause marketing, story telling and design leadership to overcome customer hurdles and force them to love us. Apple. Virgin. Stella Artois. Starbucks. Dyson. Southwest Airlines. Moleskine. Target. RED products. RED Bull. All brands succeeding based on remarkable brand affinity that goes past simple brand features or equity and focuses on creating an extraordinary, well-loved experience. Lovemarks are able to get past the mass media glut, the pressure of getting on shelf, the commodification of categories and short product life cycles because people simply adore them.

My belief is we are just at the beginning at a very different phase of brand life that requires a complete 180 degree turn on what we have learned and what might have worked over the last 5 phases. I've outlined this as the Wiki Brand era and have written a critically acclaimed paper of the same title talking about what brands now need to do in a customer controlled marketplace.

We're talking new ways of positioning, new ways of targeting, new ways of innovating, new ways of communicating, new ways of measuring, new media usage, new levels of openness and transparency and an overhauled marketing organization, skill set and structure. The ascendancy of broadcast media, mass marketing and command-and-control brand development is seriously threatened, if not made already irrelevant.

Marketing has become a function of what you actually do as a company not what you say you do. Going to market has become less about who you are targeting and more about who is involved. Brand success is less measured by how satisfied your users are and more about how excited and engaged they get.  Gone are the days of brokering eyeballs, and a keen focus is being now directed to how companies build positive word of mouth.

Why? and why now? There are so many factors coming to play at once - I've tried to bucket the key 5 reasons -

Shifts in media - close to 70% of what's on the web now is not produced by companies or professionals but from people - users, customers, hobbyists are creating the stuff we hear of, know of and believe in- this is having profound effects on where and from whom customers are learning about their next purchased products, brands and services

Shifts in customer needs - as mentioned in my previous post "Mindnumbing Brand Sameness" - quality and leadership are tablestakes for product attributes, Wiki Brands deliver a lot, are unique in how they do it and involve their users along the way - they are delivering freedom, authenticity, experiences, innovation, personalization - this is what the new customer wants

Shifts in technology - the tools for life skills are in the hands of users - you can buy anything, produce anything, create your own media, evaluate anything via the web - there are few monopolies left as technology has created a level, much quicker-playing field

Shifts in business models - the most successful brands of the wiki brand era either have started online or migrated online, they are not saddled with legacy costs, the slowness of conventional thinking, the inefficiency of traditional business processes

Shifts in demographics - call them Generation Y, the Millenials, the Net Generation - but a demographically powerful group of people under 30 are flexing their teeth - they are tech savvy, they are collaborative, they are inquisitive, perhaps somewhat too entitled but crave particpation - they are also an increasing part of your customer base and employee roll call

Put together, these shifts are creating a sixth phase in marketing that demands collaboration, cooperation, co-development, crowdsourcing and in some cases, co-ownership of brands. Great brands are now the host of conversations. They are creating forums for their users to play, learn, experience, create, mashup, socialize and improve what they have. Think Zappos. Think Facebook. Think Mozilla. Think Threadless. Think Wikpedia. Think eBay. Think Lego. Think Wold of Warcraft. Think Wii. Think Nike Plus. Think Obama. Think Intuit. All engaging brands that are opening their worlds up for their users and creating and promoting the sparks for real two-way dialogue with their stakeholders.

This is the world Wiki Brands. So you just gotta ask yourself the question, "do you want to want to practice marketing in the 6th phase or something less than 5th? Well do you...traditional world punk.

History class dismissed.