Because people treat brands like personalities, some companies think that brands have a singular identity, defined just by their source. They are talking about brands as an entity, which should express its personality with a single voice, across all media.
Of course they’re right about the expression part. But like personalities, brands have a certain type of character. If your brand isn’t extrovert, your communication shouldn’t be extrovert either. If your brand stands for innovation, more than your advertising should speak about it.
Brand personality
Your entire brand strategy should be laid out to express the personality of your brand, which you identified during a process of collecting your brand assets, to build a brand equity. And your brand equity should reflect your corporate culture, your company’s perception as well as its policy and behavior. This is exactly where the personality of a brand is measured: in genuine behavior.
Brands are summaries of a lot of things. A lot of people confuse brands with branding, with advertising, marketing or corporate design. All these things should follow brand principles and express the values of your brand, but they are not the brand itself. They are representers.
Brand advocates
Psychologically, a brand may be perceived like a person: identity, character, personality and values are all there. But that doesn’t mean brands have singular personalities. They consist of a hive of personalities: your company’s employees, your marketing and communications division, your products and what people expect from them.
This is what brands are all about: the people. Without their perception, without their image of your products, your entire output, your brand wouldn’t even exist. So how come advertising companies, marketing specialists and brand consultants still assume it is one brand?
If it was one brand, the power of communication over this brand would be entirely in their hands. But it isn’t. In fact, more and more parts of brands are shaped, influenced and even defined by the people using them. The Internet has empowered the people to have a share in brand identification. They’re no longer just recipients, like they were with traditional advertising. With or without your marketing and your brand messages, people will always say what they’re thinking. They will express themselves too, and if you are not careful, their voice might be more powerful than yours.
Sure, brands can benefit from brand advocates—people who are feeling they are part of your brand will passionately defend it and convert more people to believe in your brand’s qualities. However, those voices are not the broad mass. And they are not driven by introvert people—to the contrary.
People shift your brand
A Brand Stream is a continued flow of information about your brand, from sources like your company, your marketing team or—you may have guessed it—the people.
Look at the technology sector, mainly handheld devices, a market that exploded in the last five years. Blogs are reviewing those gadgets, and their reviews rank on top of the lists of technology product reviews, even higher than those of traditional media, such as the New York times.
People who buy these products and test them (admittedly they are mostly geeks), post comments on those blogs. The majority of people visiting those blogs though are not necessarily geeks, they are the people who love gadgets, and they admire geeks for testing those products at first hand. They can’t afford visiting every technology trade show there is, but they are eager to learn about those products.
What you are perceiving on blogs like Engadget is a Brand Stream. A brand’s identity is not only shaped by the manufacturer and vendor of a product, but largely also by the people. This may sound terrifying to most traditional marketing expert, but it cannot be denied that this is happening right now.
The next generation of branding: Brand Streams
This is not only a short phased phenomenon; it’s not just a trend. It is the way branding will happen from now on. It is out of question that, as the originating source of your brand, you are its owner. So you should make the best of that and promote its true, honest qualities. However, it would be a mistake to assume that you will be the only one maintaining power over your brand’s stream.
The brand’s life is largely dependent on your output, your products, your company’s public and internal behavior. The larger your company is, the tougher it is to maintain that single voice-feeling in the perception field of your audience. But nevertheless, you will always be the owner of your brand. It will be in your responsibility to show the world what your brand represents, but it isn’t up to you to decide what people will do with it.
The difference in branding
The difference is to old-school branding is, you will have to adjust your behavior accordingly to the brand stream’s flow. Ignoring trends, tendencies, swirls if you will, may disturb your brand stream and give it a different direction than you may have intended. It’s quite dangerous to keep a Brand Stream unattended.
Don’t make the mistake to look at your own output only. And don’t try to cut off or censor the people’s voice. This would backfire on your brand even more. The best you can do is to look at what people are saying about your brand and learn from it. There is an enormous amount of data out there, and you just have to read it and make logical conclusions.
The future of your brand is in the hands of the people you made it for, and it is up to you to fulfill their expectations. And if that means you need to change your product- or marketing strategy, then it means just that, but you can’t avoid following up on it.
Related Links
- What Are Brand Streams?
- FriendFeed Group on Brand Streams
- You have no control
Here at Applied Storytelling we see brands as stories told in the marketplace. As more and more channels are influencing this story and how you capture and organize the conversation is key to continual brand value.
Some of the tendencies which tend to limit the brand expression are industrialization, national distribution systems, ease of travel and communications, cost of traditional materials, influence of press, and our desire to conform.
In our increasingly resource-tapped age, it behooves us to revisit the sound principles that move customers through the Customer Relationship LifeCycle [Pre-purchase: awareness, knowledge, consideration], [Purchase], [Post-purchase: satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy]
Core’s explanation model “Brand Streams” will allow brands to capture and understand all influences/touchpoints that impact the full brand expression. By understanding the model, brand managers will be able to apply “Brand Streams” and enhance their existing methodologies to move customers closer to loyalty and advocacy.
Matthew Kruchko, September 2, 2009 6:07 PM
I agree with your post, but I’m not sure what you disagree with, exactly, from my white paper.
Brandstreams, like lifestreams, either can be used to aggregate relevant content, or can be used to publish content. Either way, the posts must be curated so they’re useful and tell a story.
One point of yours I disagree with: Not all brands will brandstream to exhibit personality. Some will use them to cover an event. Others will use them to aggregate content on, say, an IPO.
Brandstreams will create shared experiences between brands, consumers and non-consumers. And that’s a solid foundation for any subsequent social media activities.
Daniel, October 21, 2009 8:46 PM
@Daniel: I think your understanding of brand streams and mine are fundamentally different. Creating a brand profile on Facebook, discussing experiences with users on Twitter, a FriendFeed channel&emdash;all these things can be part of a brand stream, but they are not the brand stream. The brand stream is something bigger, it is a principle, a model, that works offline and online and combines everything that involves brand experiences. Through interaction points we connect with these brands, but we also become part of the source of the brand, and that is something new, something classic marketing is reluctant to recognize.
A brand stream is the current that emerges out of many sources. What scares companies these days is the fact that people decide to become part of a brand experience, supporting, defending or declining its value. This is not a choice brands are actively making. They can ignore the brand stream, but depending on a brand’s impact, a brand stream will eventually emerge on its own, whether the original brand source decides to participate or not.
If you will, by going public (becoming visible and creating a public interest for the brand), the brand agrees somehow with an open-source driven community, acknowledging that the experiences that come with this brand will be shared and interacted with freely.
I don’t regard a brand stream as something that is directed or orchestrated only by the original source which created the brand. The brand experience is created by many, and what is more relevant to consumers today is the fact they can create their own version of a brand.
Sure, regarding the brand equity, there are no obligations from consumers, but there are obligations from the brand creators. I think your White Paper touches the point of brands listening to consumers, but it does not include the concept of a brand stream as an umbrella principle of how brands and consumers are interacting.
Henning von Vogelsang, October 25, 2009 3:32 PM
Might be interesting if you could give some examples of how this interaction might work, when you say that a company should learn from its brand stream. Clearly a company can keep an eye on various social media and see if people are dissatisfied with its service, then they can take steps to improve or adjust that service. That just comes down to listening to your customers, which some brands have been doing for decades (and of course many are bad at). In this way listening to your brand stream might easily prompt you to change some things about your service to keep them inline with your original brand ideas (e.g. we should be friendly and approachable, professional, etc).
But are you saying that paying attention to your brand stream should prompt you to adjust your own original brand vision, so that as a result of listening, the company decides that they should shift their entire ‘brand personality’ to take account of what people are saying? Like a brand moving from becoming ‘young and hip’ to ‘somber and reserved’, for instance?
Ben Hayes, November 18, 2009 6:15 PM
Ben, an adjustment of the brand will happen either way, whether you listen to people or you choose to ignore them. The whole point is that a brand stream emerges as soon there is a critical mass of people discussing this brand.
Independently of the degree of attention a company pays to its brand stream, it is something that has a certain dynamics of its own. There is no such thing as full control over your brand, and that is a fundamental change in the thought model of what brands are. Of course a company has control over its own output, but since companies are not the only sources of brand output any longer, they are not the only ones influencing their own brand.
When you make a purchase decision, say for buying a new laptop, which is the most influencial part to form your decision in your mindset? Is it the shiny ads of the laptop maker, or is it a combination of every information you could find about the laptop, like magazine reviews, personal statements and comments, experience reports, how-to articles, galleries and video clips on YouTube?
There is a shift of paradigm happening that is underestimated by most companies. It is often after something catastrophic happened (like the damage the UBS brand experienced lately), when brands wake up and realize they weren’t working with their brand stream.
When you compete with other brands, it is not only your product quality and your brand output you can trust in. You simply cannot afford to look away, developing no real sense of how people are really using your products and how they are thinking about them. You need to sense the entire brand stream, not just what people call social media today, to grasp the big picture.
On the long run the term social media will diminish, but the patterns will remain. They are becoming a regular part of everything, because it is in human nature to exchange ourselves and share experiences. In the past we used to do this with a close circle of friends or family, but these days a bad brand experience can have a lot more impact, if it’s posted on a blog or in a comment of a magazine.
Working with your brand stream means more than listening. It means adjusting to the course of flow. Using Twitter to monitor your customer satisfaction is one thing, but you need to keep an eye on the big picture, on every channel there is, and you need to see your whole brand existence as a whole, like a being among other beings, valued for your honesty and sense for reality.
Henning von Vogelsang, November 18, 2009 7:52 PM