The end of brand and the last fan......

The cheapest pair of glasses in specsavers where the best design.....

As resources become more scarce and consumers poorer, the value option will be increasingly the option the majority of the market chooses.

If that's the case, then logic dictates that every brand needs to make its value product the best product, whilst making the rest of their range, less attractive.

Ergo....the concept of brand value is dead. Value has won again. The last 250 years were a blip.

I loved The End of History and the Last Man- it was so brilliantly, arrogant, short sighted and stupid. So 1992.....

There is perhaps a book to write, which riffs on the title of Fukuyama's inverted masterpiece (like Stiglitz did with Freuds' Civilization) and makes the same argument about brands instead.

Social experience design....

No brand marketing can exist in silos – however sophisticated and well designed those silos might be.

As a customer – a user – a consumer, the interactions I have with a brand, (most of which can be measured in seconds; barely fleeting thoughts passing through my mind) are triggered by activity in all “channels”, at all times of the day, in all locations.

For any brand to focus their marketing – their conversation with their customer – in any single channel and say “that is how someone will experience my brand” simply doesn’t speak to the reality of how we interact with the brands we live with…..

The fleeting conversation in the pub about the new mortgage, the tiny snippet of information gleaned from a friend, which leads to the ad-hoc search for the product on the bus, which happens to resonates with a 48 sheet about a competitors' product, which fits with the piece of content stumbled over whilst doing more formal research, which ties in with the debate at the supper party, which might eventually lead to a half completed application form, which leads to the argument with the partner, with leads to the form completed – and a product or service sold.......

Messy, disparate - and spread over every conceivable channel and platform – that is more often than not a “brand experience”. Being honest with ourselves about this, means we are more likely to be successful.

Social experience design – to place a clear understanding of different types of customers' actual behaviour at the heart of a planning process - to let ourselves off the leash - to be honest and brave - to let the stories we tell about how users will interact with our brand be real........

That is the genius of social  experience design. It is militantly honest – utterly engaging to develop – bloody hard to realise correctly.

3 chords and the truth....

TGI, 3rd party research, basket data, online sentiment and influencer analysis, site surveys, focus groups......all routes into the understanding of a brand's issues and challenges

Do you need all of them to develop strategy?

No, the more we have - the more complete the picture - but can we get 70% of the way with just one of them......course we can.

90% of what they're buying......

 has got nothing to do with what they're buying....

why does anyone think selling "the cloud" is a good idea?

no one outside of the technology community has a bastard clue what the cloud is?

marketing is about selling benefits

the cloud isn't a benefit, its an enabling technology

countries as personas

we have limited resources with which to process information

we default to short cuts, bequeathed to us by evolutionary advantage

this we know

one of these short cuts is our common tendency to distil entire countries into single personas

what does this do to our behaviours?

the brand story platform