0500 How do customers connect with trusted brands?

MARKETSPACE

In some respect, this new figure may strike you as a bit confusing. However, it does a good, if not masterful, job of representing several important aspects of a very complex and dynamic thing: the inter-relatedness of markets, media, intermediaries, competing brands, and the strategic positioning of brands by consumers.

I remember in one particular executive retreat, this one chart ignited and fueled a 3-hour discussion that produced a huge insight: the Web is no longer a sales channel; the Web now constitutes a business ecosystem; and a Web-channel strategy will just pissed of those people [potential brand ambassadors] who will ensure or deny us success.

So, let’s take a few moments and review what insights that viewing this figure can evoke .

First, on the left, we have the brand producer or vendor that must create and push messaging through what we call “mediaspace” and products through the logistics and distribution value chain of what we call “marketspace”.

This suffix of -space still holds up from the dotcom days. It conveys a key idea that digital interactive communication and services have redefined how all the actors of the media or market value chains add value and get paid for adding value. In practical terms, the -space suffix emphasizes the integration of many information systems in what IT folks call a loosely coupled fashion as well as calls attention to the significant and growing requirement for data agility, the ability to acquire, analyze, manipulate, and transform data into business information and strategic insights.

So, marketspace should convey the idea of new, unprecedented levels of process integration, transparency, and orchestration in how a firm creates, moves, distributes, sells, and services products. Mediaspace should convey a similar idea: how a firm creates, distributes, publishes, and analyzes the consumption media and the brand messaging conveyed by media.

On the far right, we have the customer. However, she does not see a marketspace and mediaspace as separate channels. She makes no distinction between the market, the medium, and the message For her, upon encountering each new or familiar brand, she asks, “Do we know you? Are you one of us? Do we trust you? Do you bad things?” Keep in mind, she asks this on behalf of her cohort of friends.

And how she answers those questions, she creates what I call “Brandspace”, concentric circles of trust, ambivalence, and distrust in which she positions each brand and inflects with emotion and attitude as she discusses the brand among friends.

Now we can discuss “lines of association” between brand producers, intermediaries, and consumers.

In some cases, the brand producer has a direct relationship with the consumer. In other cases, the brand producer has a relationship with a fulfillment intermediary such as a retailer or catalog house, but no direct relationship with the consumer.

Nothing new there. You have either have a direct relationship with customers, or you single- or two-tier distribution channel.

In still some situations, the consumer doesn’t have any meaningful relationship with the brand producer or the primary retail outlets.

Still nothing new there: you may want to acquire those consumers, using all manner of promotions to build awareness, consideration, and get her to opt-in to a relationship.

However today, Shannon has a lot of relationships, many of them casual and short-lived with bloggers, rating services, and forum discussion groups as well as several longer-term relationships within her global social network of Facebook and so on.

These information intermediaries play a significant and growing role in how Shannon constructs and maintains the constellation of brands in her Brandspace-any that most of these information intermediaries remain unknown to the brand producers trying to engage Shannon.

Fundamentally, these brand-information intermediaries constitute the long tail of marketing.

This sets up the challenge, “How do we start to engage the customer when all of our traditional corporate communications and marketing communications get filtered through these brand intermediaries?” That’s a big problem.

TITLE:
Long Tails Wag Big Dogs

SUBTITLE:
How the synthesis of professional and user-generated content will continue transforming media, entertainment, publishing, and marketing

KEY TOPIC:
How digital asset management speed convergence of professional and user-generated content

PRESENTATION DATE:
12 May 2008

VENUE:
Henry Stewart’s DAM and MOM Symposium, New York, NY USA