Building Customer-Centric Brands

Over the past few days, Chris Anderson and John Hagel have had a fascinating exchange on the evolution of brand influence. According to this perspective, brands change as a function of scarcity. In the early 20th Century, a lack of consistent, high-quality goods provided the foundation for the emergence of "product brands." As consumer choice became more plentiful, shelf space became a scarce resource resulting in the rise of powerful "retailer brands."

In today's economy, on the other hand, Internet technologies have provided near-infinite shelf space and niche-based consumer choice. The new scarcity is attention, which is fueling customer-centric models of brand influence. Hagel argues that brand loyalty will increasingly spring from products and services that help navigate proliferating consumer options and inform decision-making. Brand value, in other words, is born of an exchange between the allocation of attention as a scarce resource and the promise of highly relevant products, services and community.

Hagel argues that if companies are really going to gain the trust and attention of customers in this context, they must be prepared relinquish a certain degree of control and offer products and services of other companies, even of competitors. This can take on many different forms, but in essence this looks like highly personalized portals or multiple front doors that resonate with target audiences and lead people to from granular brand experiences to more general information about products and services. According to Hagel, thriving brands will successfully transition from the product innovation and commercialization business to the customer relationship business as a fundamental value proposition. 

What does this mean from a marketing perspective? John Hagel advocates for a new paradigm he calls "collaboration marketing":

"Collaboration marketing challenges the current mantra of 'one to one marketing' and instead views the opportunity as 'many to one', connecting each customer with as many entities (including other customers) as may be required to maximize value for the customer. Collaboration marketing represents a 'pull' approach where the marketer becomes so helpful to customers that they seek the marketer out, rather than a conventional 'push' approach blasting marketing messages out in an effort to find customers that might be receptive to the marketer’s offering."  (Read full post from John Hagel).

Chris Anderson adds an interesting twist by suggesting that tomorrow's most powerful brands will not be owned by companies, but by people -- either in the form of aggregators like Google and Amazon, or tastemakers, such as celebrities, critics, editors, and bloggers.

"So, in a Long Tail market, the brands that matter most are the tastemakers. These are the filters you trust, who point you to the niche (or mainstream) stuff you wouldn't have found on your own. And because you trust them, you're willing to follow their recommendations, voyaging down the tail with confidence. In the Long Tail, great filters become brands." (Read full post from Chris Anderson).

In my view, Hagel and Anderson are touching on marketing insights that reach well beyond advanced CRM programs or the targeting of influentials for word of mouth marketing. There are several strategic recommendations I would advocate based on their ideas:

1. Search is Still King: Search results based on consumer generated media (CGM) -- e.g., search engines, user groups and forums, blogs and review sites, and recommendations engines -- represent the primary vehicle prospective customers find product and service information. Why? Because search engines favor frequently updated and link rich content, which are defining characteristics of CGM. SEO may take on many different forms, but brand managers need to be aggresive and methodical in their pusuit of CGM to acheive SEO objectives.
   
2. Empower Evangelists: While you cannot, and should not, attempt to control brand messaging through CGM, you can provide platforms, tools and training to elevate the volume of positive brand information bubbling up from the most loyal and passionate customer evangelists.
3. Get Serious About Social Search: New social networks are bursting on the scene that are built on personalized information management systems (Read about Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 Beta). As people, not search engine algorithims, crawl through online content, tags and bookmarklets enable the categorization, ranking and bread crumbs that become part of a constellations of traits that are publicly shared, becoming dynamic recommendation engines. Make sure all your marketing channels, including online video distribution, embodies infrastructure that interfaces with social search.
   

Taken together, this strategy requires a number of advanced marketing tactics, some tried-and-true such as SEO and CRM, others still teetering on the bleeding edge. But, the imperative rests on experiences that connect existing and prospective customers to a new, community-based value dimension.