Branding in the internet bazaar - struggling for control in an uncontrollable world

In 1999 the Cluetrain Manifesto stated, 'Five thousand years ago, the marketplace was the hub of civilisation, a place to which traders returned from remote lands with exotic spices, silks, monkeys, parrots, jewels – and fabulous stories. In many ways, the internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose upon it.'

As the manifesto predicted, the marketplace of today has become a conversation. It's all about stories. And it's all about stories that are being told by people, not companies. In fact, many of them are stories being told by people about companies. And very often those stories aren't flattering. The internet is the weapon of choice, the world is their oyster.

BRAND OWNERS – STRUGGLING FOR CONTROL IN AN UNCONTROLLABLE WORLD

Companies have traditionally believed that they are able to control their brands: that they own them and have a right to protect them. But for Andy Nairn, Planning Director at Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, 'Branding is a controlling paradigm in an uncontrollable world. We now exist in a constantly evolving experiment.'

We're at a watershed. Brands have always existed in people's minds. That's a fundamental principle of perception. But the structured world of the past gave manufacturers the illusion that they controlled the brand's imagery and its meanings. Brand building (and thereby brand control) was simply a matter of channelling images and messages through conventional advertising created and owned by the manufacturer.

Yet, increasingly, brands will be built by word of mouth as consumers pick up snippets of information from a myriad of sources. The web provides instant global access to word of mouth. This is the world of 'mosaic marketing' where consumers are calling the shots.

THE RISE OF THE 'STEALTH SURFER'

Why go to shops peopled by poorly trained, uninterested staff? People who don't understand what the customer wants, and even when they do, discover they don't have it in stock anyway.

The 'stealth surfers' of today use fast broadband connections that allow them to multi-task and deal quickly and efficiently with any number of disintermediated suppliers. These suppliers in turn have extremely effective websites, the best prices, large, well-stocked warehouses, good availability and strong relationships with good delivery services.

These people are saying, 'I'm making the decisions, I'm making the price comparisons and someone Published by World Advertising Research Center else is doing the work'. Or, as Tesco says of its online service Tesco.com, 'You shop, we drop.'

UNCONTROLLABLE SOURCES OF INFLUENCE

The worrying thing about this for brand owners is that their customers are increasingly less influenced by media advertising and far more by other people's recommendations – particularly customer opinion or press reports on the web. Ads simply don't have enough information in them for the classic stealth customer. He or she is very well informed before swooping to make a purchase of what they want at the very best possible price.

AOL's Brand New World research on people's opinions of brands as a result of using the internet is sobering. Brand owners who think they provide the collateral for the reputation of their product or service are in for a shock.

In the Brand New World research 56% of respondents said that as a result of using the internet they looked more favourably on certain brands, 53% said they came across new brands that they hadn't been aware of previously, while nearly 80% said that they would think twice about buying a product or brand if they saw a negative review about it on the internet.

BRAND EDITORS: eBay, GOOGLE AND 'ME' BRANDS

But where exactly should we be looking on the internet? Enter the internet authorities: web editors that play an important role in influencing choice – a long way away from the brand owner's control.

I'm not thinking of the post-Microsoft digital era of eBay and Google, but more of the 'personal' brands that do not have the gloss of corporate brands (and I include Google within that definition of corporate brands).

I'll call them 'things', because I'm not sure we really know what they are yet. Nor can we predict which will stay and grow in influence, and which will vanish. But these are the kinds of influencers of opinion popping up on the web that add further static to the conventional conversation between brand owners and people.

Things like student Alex Tew's 'Million Dollar Homepage', which has been dismissed as nothing more than a 'link farm' by some, while being feted as a work of pure genius by others. The simple notion of selling the million pixels on a computer screen for a dollar each captured the imagination of advertisers and ensured that Alex could comfortably pay his way through college.

Things like Craig's List, the first free classified ad website, which spawned the thousands of imitators that are cropping up all over the web, causing News International CEO Rupert Murdoch, to declaim that this type of advertising is now lost to newspapers for ever.

Things like Blackspot, the world's first globally promoted 'anti-brand'. It may sell sneakers, but Blackspot is the antithesis of Nike. Not by chance is its best-known line called 'Unswoosher'.

Things like blogs. Many have pointed to the outpouring of creativity that blogging has unleashed. No longer is journalism the preserve of professionals, despite the fact that many blogs are indeed very professional creations.

'AGENT' BRANDS AND COMMUNITIES

Prompted by journalist Alan Mitchell's book Right Side Up, Nick Kendall, Global Strategy Director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, has described the emergence of 'agent brands'.

For example, in the US collectives have been created where people gather together to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies. They use the internet and handle the distribution themselves – true disintermediation!

MySpace.com, the value of which has been recognised by News International, is similarly an 'agent' community. Originally created to help promote new bands, it is a social networking site that provides the opportunity for young people to say what they like using their medium of choice: the internet.

As an aside, Rupert Murdoch paid $580m for this website, which despite being only two years old, has 70 million registered users.

eBay is a commercial agent brand that has started to use conventional advertising to create a stimulus for participants. As Nick Kendall has described, 'The job of the advertising is increasingly to facilitate use, not to tell them what they should think about the brand.'

eBay (Inc.) describes its purpose in the following way: 'We are pioneering new communities around the world built on commerce, sustained by trust, and inspired by opportunity.' And don't forget that eBay (Inc.) owns eBay, PayPal and Skype. Quite an armoury to wield in the digital market space. David Lubars, Creative Director at eBay's US agency BBDO explains, 'They are a very complicated client. They don't make or sell anything. Other people use them. They are like an enabler, a host. What they do is like air or gas.'

ADAPTING OLD MEDIA TO NEW NEEDS

There are those that have suggested that the very expression 'newspaper' is now a non sequitur since if you really want news you certainly don't go to a paper, since by definition it will be out of date.

Chris Ingram, Chief Executive of brand strategists The Ingram Partnership, points to the power of media brands when he says they have 'stronger relationships with their customers than other brands because they're built on the personality of the title'.

Chris has identified that the brand opportunity for newspaper owners in the digital age is to recognise that, since they are unique in delivering a completely new product to their customers every day that is full of good, well-presented information, they are very well positioned to become the providers of quality 'content' for the insatiable demands of the web.

He says there's an opportunity for a 'multi-platform publisher of “must have” content giving the best possible customer experience'.

The Guardian has seen the possibilities. Podcasts featuring comedian Ricky Gervais were available from the Guardian website for only a few months, but have built up such a following that more than 3 million downloads were made, making it the biggest pod-casting site in the world. The content of these podcasts was unique and couldn't be received through any medium other than the Guardian Unlimited site.

It is perhaps not surprising to discover that as newspapers try to carve out a niche for themselves in the digital age, a 'transfer market' has been created for columnists. After all, these are the people who give vent to the 'opinion' of the paper, the people who comment on the news stories and give the added value that mere factual reporting of an event can't match – dare I say, the 'brand values' of the publication.

DRAMATICALLY BETTER PRODUCTS ARE NEEDED

Disintermediation and price wars are leading us back in time to a point where the notion of branding is returning to a simple presentation of the competitive advantage your product or service has. But this works only with truly differentiated products.

The finest example at the moment must surely be the iPod. This is the product that created and thereby defined the category, with a fine pedigree, unutterably cool styling, near perfect ergonomics and an appeal that transcends age, sex, nationality, creed or colour (save for the difficult decision of whether to buy it in black or white).

This is the product that spawned line extension into Nano and product development into iPod Video, before some imitators had even got their first efforts to market. This is the product that even has its own infrastructure in iTunes.

Finally, this is the product that is sold at a significant premium to its competition. It also remains true to Apple's concept of empowerment for the people.

Not everyone has Steve Jobs' genius for product innovation, but my point is that good old-fashioned product differentiation remains a way to keep your head above water.

COMPANIES MUST BECOME MORE ACCOUNTABLE

We're now living in the age of 'citizen media'. Of course, some blogs are being written by professional journalists, since it frees them from the obligation to toe the political line of their normal media outlets. And some companies (notably Microsoft) are encouraging staff to develop their own blogs to open a window into the corporation to engage in those all-important conversations with their customers. What these blogs do is allow customers to test whether the company is listening or not.

Of all the 'things' that are happening, it's clear that blogs have had the biggest impact. The blog search site Technorati (just think about the implications of that phrase) estimates that there are more than 30 million blogs operating on the web and that their number is increasing at the rate of 75,000 a day.

One of the many challenges for the new creative minds employed by brand owners to promote their brands is how to get on the agenda of these intermediate influencers or how to keep the bad news off their agendas.

But, of course, the easiest way of keeping bad news quiet is not to create it in the first place. The ultimate morality of the internet may be that it becomes a far more powerful agent for holding companies accountable than the law or the actions of shareholders.

WHAT KINDS OF AGENCIES ARE NEEDED IN THE INTERNET BAZAAR?

As the web surfaced as a viable commercial sales and communication medium in the 1990s, we saw the very means by which brands spoke to their customers being shaken to the core.

Advertising agencies and their clients tried to ignore the new age of communication because they just didn't understand what was happening. Initially agencies saw the internet as just another medium upon which they could stick advertising. People drew up rate cards and suddenly we were confronted with the banner ad phenomenon, closely followed by pop-up pester power.

This was a fundamental misunderstanding. Marshall McLuhan would have recognised that the internet as medium was the message, not merely a moving billboard.

Advertising agencies also failed to act from a structural point of view. Many continued to be built around a frankly archaic notion of a creative 'team' playing around with bits of paper, preparing 'layouts' that were (after several weeks or even months) turned into advertisements.

Clients wanted immediacy and were increasingly finding they could turn to a new media agency to provide it, where the creative director was a computer programmer with a penchant for writing in the new Esperanto that he called – HTML.

Of course the power of the agency groups meant they could get some of that new expertise by buying up new media companies, but in truth it's a mindset issue. Buying their way into new media meant that agencies could offer their clients an 'integrated' service.

In principle this is fine; in practice it's flawed, because what the client is actually being offered is an agglomeration of companies, rather than an integration of services. The client that needs advertising, direct marketing, digital and data management ends up receiving invoices from four separate companies, each with full-service facilities.

Clients want core functions, such as strategy and planning, and account handling, at the centre of an organisation, and then to select media and creative resources to suit the specific need of the client.

We've heard the expression 'media neutral' for some time now. I think it's time we heard the expression 'service neutral'.

IN CONCLUSION

So, let me pull together the strands of the argument.

The brand owner must become a partner and confidante of the consumer because the company is no longer in control. The task of channelling the information and imagery to the prospective purchaser is getting more difficult with many more intervening sources of influence for good or bad.

The images created in their minds that form the mosaic of meaning called the brand will come from a far wider and more disparate set of sources. Very few of these alternative sources will have the manufacturer's best interests at heart.

This has profound implications for the way companies conduct their business; not just the products they make but how they behave morally and ethically in a world where they will be held much more accountable.

This has equally profound implications for creative brand management. The existing patchwork of companies and individuals falling over themselves in their struggle to provide one of a dozen different requirements is clearly not up to the task. New structures are needed.

Finally, with all this talk of change, we should consider what has stayed the same. Has people's behaviour changed? Unquestionably, yes. But have their instincts changed? No.

Bill Bernbach once remarked, 'It took millions of years for man's instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communication must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.'