Brand Fatale

Even scarier for brands: Young people don’t want brands' friendship, and they think brands should go away. “Many brands are looking to social media as a strong digital channel to communicate with these consumers, since it’s where 12- to 17-year-olds are spending so much time,” wrote Jacqueline Anderson, Forrester’s Consumer Insights Analyst, who authored the report. “But research shows that it is important to consider more than just consumers’ propensity to use a specific channel: Almost half of 12- to 17-year-olds don’t think brands should have a presence using social tools at all.”

According to Forrester’s report, they might be better off being more reactive than proactive, and they should listen. Just 16 percent of young consumers expect brands to use social media to interact with them, and 28 percent expect those brands to listen to what they say on social sites and get back to them.

Regardless of their willingness to interact with brands, nearly three quarters of 12-17 year olds—74 percent—use social networks to talk about products with friends and make recommendations.

Much more important than advertisements, he considers relevant news events to be of interest to people and more likely to make them pay attention to the country. “The promotion of individual sectors is different from building the complete image of a country and the two should not be confused. Effective tourism promotion can help improve the country’s reputation indirectly, because it encourages more people to visit; if they have a good experience, they can then become positive advocates for the country,” said Anholt. He advised the government not to spend taxpayers’ money simply on providing yet more information about Bulgaria, because “we live in an information age” and this can be found easily on the Internet. “The challenge is to get people interested in accessing the information”,

The challenge for luxury brands is in evoking an aura of desirability across broad audiences, while curating individualized experiences for their core customer base.  Luxury brands have to develop strategies that promote both accessibility and exclusivity. Digital and social media can help increase awareness of and perpetuate the myth surrounding the brand, but they must be carefully curated in order to maintain an impression of exclusivity. Furthermore, these channels should be viewed in the context of the store experience. 

While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence.

Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behavior.

Traditional forms of entertainment (movies, television... remember books?) are in a rapid decline. The demand for entertainment hasn't decreased, it's just shifted to a more interactive, pervasive form of entertainment. It's shifting to games.

We've seen simple game dynamics increase traffic to locations 4X over a matter of days. We've seen others extend the average amount of engaged time consumers spend at a business by upwards of 40%. This propagation of game dynamics into the real world via the social graph and mobile devices will have powerful business consequences for those who understand how to leverage them.

The appointment dynamic is a famous game mechanic in which to succeed a "player" must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. It's simple and immensely powerful. The appointment dynamic is powerful enough to alter the behavior of an entire generation — "happy hours" are appointment dynamics, as is the pervasive game "Farmville" by Zynga. But we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Imagine companies like Vitality leveraging this dynamic to improve the adherence rate to often less-than-pleasant medicinal regimens, or the government creating a large scale game (with financial incentives as rewards) to alter traffic patterns to decrease highway congestion in the mornings.

In the progression dynamic, a "player's" level of success is displayed in real-time and gradually improved through the completion of granular tasks. Somewhere deep-rooted in the human psyche we have this desire to complete any progression dynamic put in front of us as long as the steps to do so are itemized and clear. With this as a known dynamic, it's not hard to envision the ways that this can be leveraged even further in the real-world.

Communal discovery is a mechanic which involves an entire community working together to solve a problem. The reason I've saved the communal discovery dynamic for last is that it, perhaps more than all others, presents incredible opportunities to positively influence the world as we enter this decade of games.

DARPA launched a challenge late last year. They hid 10 red balloons at different locations all across the continental United States and offered $40,000 to the first team to correctly identify their locations. The winning team (a group from MIT) constructed a strategy that in many ways mirrored a pyramid scheme. It was a cleverly constructed waterfall of incentives that encouraged massive cooperation. Essentially everyone to give them data about any balloon's location won some portion of the prize money based on how many other people also submitted the location of that balloon. This created positive communal incentives across what rapidly became a large and self-propagating network. Their strategy managed to accurately identify all locations in less than 9 hours.

The fastest way to translate a new idea into mainstream success is to tell a story that is bigger than your products.  A story that’s not just about the offering, but a story that’s about an ethos, a lifestyle, a way to be in the world.

Brands are like people. They are a character for us to have a relationship with. Audiences project all sorts of expectations onto your brand, based on the various dimensions of that implied relationship

share content, ideas, and resources that others will greatly appreciate. Or just make people smile and laugh on a regular basis like Mailchimp with its hilarious mascot. The key is to establish a connection. The more your story can become their story, the less you need to sell anything. What do people respond to? Find out.

what you're saying with jargon is: A) You belong, and B) If you don't get it, you don't belong."

Language takes on added importance in management consultancy, says Lambert, because the report is the only tangible evidence that a client sees of what actually might amount to significant labor.

There's a bias to wanting to use big words and appear intelligent—obfuscation—to not be plain and direct."

Even brand consultants, a group that should be advising their own clients against hot air, are guilty of using jargon and stock phrases. There's a surprising amount of brand propositions and tone of voice guidelines with "simple," "dynamic," and "fresh" principles; most are not distinctive at all.

The hazards of Newspeak are illustrated in the unimaginative language of brands. If your vocabulary is limited, so is your range of thought.

Language can be brought to life through the use of stories. A brand's story can be about how a business first started, who the people are that run it, or the idea behind a product. Stories and words feed off each other. When the language comes alive, the brand is better defined and more robust.

If you try to regiment a brand's language you're stultifying its development.

training staff to be able to recognize when a piece of writing is in line with the brand's values. This will encourage sensitivity in staff's own writing

staff engagement and practice. Any time that an employee spends thinking about how to correctly implement the tone of voice is time well spent toward understanding and living the overall brand

A good place to start might be the internal newsletter. This is usually a one-way process originating with marketing. If other staff members write it, they are actively participating in the brand, while gaining practice on their own colleagues.

Simmons likens his brand language teachings to a "subversive activity." Being better with words certainly makes staff more confident and empowers them to shun the self-imposed Newspeak of management jargon. But this approach is also encouraging staff to put their personality into their writing and the organizations they write for. This not only gives writing a renewed status in brands, it unleashes a voice for staff too.     

In today's world, it's advocates--not advertising's "Mad Men"--who have the power.

The biggest reason brand advocates are so powerful is a single, five-letter word: Trust. Nine of 10 online consumers say recommendations from friends and family members are the most trusted form of advertising worldwide. Only about 2 of 10 trust online ads.

Advocates' recommendations are the number-one influencer of purchase decisions and brand perceptions in nearly every product category from smartphones to software, hotels to housewares, cars to computers, financial services to fitness memberships.

In the old days (pre–social media), advocates' reach was limited to their immediate circle of family and friends. Recommendations were made over the water cooler at work or over dinner with friends. Now, empowered by social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, Foursquare, online reviews, and more), advocates collectively reach millions of buyers with trusted recommendations.

When you create and engage an advocate, you've identified a renewable marketing asset you

when we see a logo, our defenses go up and stay up. We fear we're being played, or manipulated

The term "smashable" dates back to 1915, when the Coca-Cola company asked a designer in Terre Haute, Indiana, to design a bottle that consumers could still recognize as a Coke bottle, even if someone flung it against a brick wall and it shattered into a hundred pieces. Coke is a smashable brand.

still hiding the brand logo, eyeball your copy, your graphics, whether your pages are spare or dense-looking. Do all these things convey what your brand represents? Does your brand have a personality anymore, or is it standing shyly and stiffly against the wall, hoping no one notices it now looks (I hate to tell you) like every other brand out there?