How to change push to pull.
Quit asking consumers to equate product with desired outcome; start inviting consumers to equate desired outcome with product.
It's not "Coke." It's "Liquid Refreshment."
Some brand (and this shows that the branding failed) used as a tag line "the drink that refreshes." Under this new marketing paradigm, online or off, the tagline needs to be "be refreshed with..." or "stay refreshed with...."
This paradigm shift allows marketers to be more responsive to the ever-changing and ever-demanding marketplace, and the new adaptive markets are extremely agile and agonizingly demanding. Fail to meet consumers' needs and you'll be forgotten before the next page loads.
I was once told, "If you don't have competition, you don't have a market." I doubt that's true any longer. New markets are being created daily as new technologies evolve allowing person A to share information with person B. In many cases, the market didn't exist until some technological innovation created a space in which that market could exist.
The competition isn't in technologies any more; it's in the delivery of the technologies' messages, or promises, to consumers.
Social networks and the new branding
Recently, in an interview with TechNewsWorld, I explained that this is a "Holmes and Watson" scenario.
Boomers want to identify a Holmes in their social network, someone with experience and no agenda whom they can trust to provide good information. The marketers who are targeting that demographic need to identify the Holmeses; then (if possible), they have to bring the Holmeses into the brand's fold. Marketing to Boomers means finding influencers.
But the situation is different at the other end of the scale, inside the social network. There, everybody wants to be a Holmes so the value of each individual Holmes goes down depending on how many Holmeses there are.
In addition to the Holmeses, marketers need to identify the Watsons in this group, the evangelists who can carry a Holmesian message without being branded as another no-name with an opinion. As one person in our research commented, "they were just doing the usual thing you see on forums and blogs-- trying to sound important." Ouch!
The true power of social forums and networks -- what marketers often fail to understand -- is the exchange of ideas, not the promotion of product. Just ask any one who attended "Foo's Paradise" at Googleplex this past August. Folks from several disciplines were invited by Google, Nature Magazine and O'Reilly Publishing to get together and just talk. They did talk, and only talk, and everyone involved thought it was wonderful.
Communicating your brand
There was a time when, meeting someone for the first time and somewhere between asking if they'd ever been here before and their zodiac sign, you asked, "What do you do?"
The question in the new branding is different and driven by consumers who know their market space better than most marketers would like or will even admit to. The question, "What do you do?" -- whether the asker means to or not -- is a question that puts the respondent under a microscope. Depending on how and when the question is asked the respondent might answer inaccurately or not at all. It's also a question from an era when the market -- the person asking the question -- had more power than the consumer -- the person giving the answer.
That's changed. There are too many businesses out there, each vying for the consumer's mind. Businesses that used to ask "What do you do?" are learning they need to start asking, "What do you need done?"
The market has shifted from supply and demand to demand and supply, with consumer's making highly educated demands to learn whether or not suppliers measure up. They don't want just any soft drink any more. They want liquid refreshment. Woe to the bottler that simply wants to sell them a "Coke."
Many thanks to NextStage Global's Dr. Cindy LaChapelle for help in preparing this column.
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Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global. Read full bio.