"Branding just ain't what it used to be." After a drink I felt compelled to write some stuff. (I may wake up tomorrow/today to regret it)
I guess the grand duc of branding was Enzo Ferrari with his claim that he inherited the prancing horse emblem from the family of a World War I fighter pilot. Complete bullsh*t of course, but in those days you could get away with that sort of thing. Alas, Branding will eat itself.
Enzo must be laughing in his grave as Torino Lamborghini (son of Ferruccio) whores the family name around like a member of the hilton family, and yet both men, Enzo and Ferruccio were masters of maintaining pseudo historic patronage in the face of a second wave of modernity (later to become post-modernity).
It seems as though it is a slippery path between maintaining a brands heritage and succumbing to the pressures of share holders. Like the share holders of a football team, half of them passionate supporters of the team itself and half of them trying to maximize the returns on investment. Companies trying to sell experiences today face the schizophrenic dilemma of creating a product experience that on the one hand, delivers a story compatible with the consumer and on the other going for broke on next quarters sales. Combined with the credit crunch and talk of corporate transparency, brand managers must be thinking of driving their Lambrettas off a cliff.
"Gone are the days when a country bumpkin could become a billionaire by wearing a tin foil hat and claiming to be a pixel." Charlie Brooker.
Small businesses should adopt ultra transparency. Execute your business in such a way that you win based purely on performance without a dichotomy of branding. What you present to the consumer MUST be the actual way it is! A brand is integral to the business itself. Branding is not new, 10,000 years ago (or what ever), when the first person tried to sell a wheel, the bullsh*ting began.
Both Selling and Science are based on probability, the economics of a lemon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_LemonsThe whole idea of insurance (which is the game that big business is really in) is that you charge a group slightly! more than the total predicted cost of payment for claims. The insurance companies then try to gain information concerning claim probability based upon individual past claims and other variables. If the insurance companies had perfect models based upon their information, they would be charging us slightly more than we would pay out in reality. Imagine a situation in the future with negligible accidents where exact age of death could be predicted. Insurance companies could only exist with the most extreme form of marketing, Marketing by Obfuscation!
and yet, this is what we have now, Marketing by Obfuscation. Marketing by Direct Line insurance that tries to denigrate the place of price comparison sites, not with evidential claims, but with platitudes and cliches. Either companies who use such tactics have factored in the fall out from such marketing ploys or have missed the under lying tectonic shift towards transparency. the 2010s, the decade of the cynic. We have a generation of young adults who are feeling disenfranchised by the Argos chocolate brown sofas and the various other TV ideals of 'Lifestyle'. The very word 'Lifestyle' is antagonistic to post-post-modern generation. 'Lifestyle' was marketed as individualism, but as come to mean a discretely labeled segmentation. Edward Bernays or Jospeh Goebbels may have faired well in the current media cloud. When you are trying to sell aspirational lifestyle, you are attacking your own market by offering customisable product. The days are over when Nike could get by on offering personalised name stitching on trainers (Refusal to stitch the words "Sweat Shop" anyone). Behind every large media message allowed on the hallowed turf of the mass media (better labeled broadcast media) landscape, you will find commercial agendas, even Al Gore with all his green credentials has now come clean with his ownership of a private carbon tax enterprise. Do skateboarders wear nike? I think not.
Business Ethics; just the same old doing what does not seem 'Evil' in the eyes of your customer scheme.
Green Business; just the same old doing what does not seem 'Evil' in the eyes of your customer scheme.
Name one thing Microsoft has done to advance information technology. Microsoft has done everything it can to slow down the advancement of information technology. That is slightly unfair, their first product, as version of BASIC for the altair in the mid seventies was actually progressive. But ever since, what they have tried to do is corner the market with proprietary standards. It is obvious to most in the field of IT that software will be eventually be hosted by facility managed organisations like google, of course there are questions of security, but how many businesses are as weary of the security of their banking suppliers who hold their financial transaction data. Due process auditing can effectively manage risk of commercial operations as well as it can of financial transactions. The only winning card in Microsoft's hands is Excel, and that will disappear in light of the offerings of compatible web based software. We are likely to see a divergence from using a word processor from a certain software house, to usage of specific and varied plugins from various suppliers hosted on one of many available collaboration platforms, of which Google, Microsoft, SUN will be just some of the offerings. Much as we see circles increase in size and dissipate to reveal smaller circles, in a rippling pond, we are likely to see the large IT organisations of today give way to smaller offerings.
I want my Dom Perignon alarm clock. Surely as Tony Blair and Francis Fukuyama decreed an end to history, the great sale of the millennium was in the plundering of heritage at the expense of people who where truly passionate about 'je nes se quoi'. As soon as you can codify an experience in discrete form, the experience looses value. Even the word experience can do this, in as much as we are now selling an 'Experience'. My two areas of study were the philosophy of computation and post-modern ontology's. These two seemingly disparate subjects are in fact the same thing. We deconstruct information into discrete taxonomies across various dimensions and create a dialect around the information. This is what is now called 'Data Mining' and relies on probability analysis, which could be called more popularly "Searching for the X-Factor". X-Factors are clusters and avoid discretion by being quite nebulous. I should imagine the reason we adopted a continental phase such as 'je ne se quoi' was so it maintained a kind of meta 'je ne se quoi'. Definition is the key to knowledge. We Know Nothing but Observe Everything from our point of view 'POV', this is the basis of relativism and as marketeers, our sole mission is to communicate our crafted 'POV' to an end user as a belief/knowledge. I AM WORTH IT. Thanks L'Oréal. The biggest problem for brands in the future is the divergence between crafted 'POV' and evidential reality. As information flow increases and there is less credible recourse to censure, brands will find themselves once again integrating the PR and Marketing into the fold as their more noble pursuit of 'Communication Liaison Facilitators'. Their job will be to inform suppliers and consumers of what the organistation does and how to communicate with the organisation. What will disappear to the road side are tactics such as web based companies credit reference agencies not including contact details on their web sites. What will become more apparent are such things as companies linking claims to actual fact based research, less claims such as German Car Manufacturer claimed more patents than NASA, when an organisation such as NASA was set up on the basis that public US funding would generate R&D data available in the public domain (A more honest comparison would be German Car Manufacturer Patents to NASA patentable discoveries). And there we have it, Commercial transparency may be more honestly described as 'Honesty Marketing'. Would the CEOs and CMOs be able to stomach such a thing?
"The Holy Grail of Business"
Bayesian methods applied to all R&D.
A commerce platform based upon Critical Path Gantt (Accessible by Super/Sub/Cross Organisation) and Requests for Tender.
Gantt tasks describable by formal business logic.
All business logic and transactions to be subject to the R&D analytical process.
Business is about increasing the flow of information through an organisation, especially that information called 'money'. The less highlighted goal of business, the hindrance of information flow though competitors.
To succeed in business, you must be hyper cynical and presume your customer will become the same. Only through being hyper cynical can you determine what you really value. Did you want a Ferrari before or after they started to brand £13 plastic alarm clocks. Sex, Travel, Entertaining Experience, are the closest thing we have to absolutes and so marketeers will try to link any product to these.
If I had a penny for every time someone said "Could you lend me 10p" I would start a bank.
Banks rely on trust and making anyone else who considers starting a bank seem un-trustworthy. No matter how many times a CEO states that they consider "Competition to be healthy", I can't help but imagine them coughing up the question "How do we remove the competition."
Creativity comes and goes.
one word CARTELS, that is all you need to know about markets to define an offering to cut through the mire.
REALITY IS WHAT YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH.
