It's branding in the Participation Age. It revolves around brand experience. And it rode in on the wave that is social media to vanquish the Positioning Era of branding.
In this new Age, what you say about your product or service means almost nothing but what your customer can do with it and how they interact with you regarding it, means everything.
That demands that you create a brand that customers can live.
The ability of advertisers and marketers to contrive and convey an emotion through advertising is quickly fading. Brand exposure is less valuable than brand experience. What do I mean? Well, what means more to you when making plans for casual dining -- a 2 star rating on Yelp or a 60 second ad during NBC’s The Office?
I thought so.
The good news is this; you no longer need to “capture” your audience to tell them about your brand. People are willfully engaging with it, starting discussions about it, and using it as a way to define who they are by “liking” it on Facebook. They just want to know why your company should be part of their own personal brand. And that’s something that can only be learned by living it.
You can teach the customer how to articulate what they are feeling about your product or service. But companies need to stop buying and selling ideas about themselves that don’t have any substance behind them and start enabling people to discover why they should incorporate the brand into their own.
So, how do you move toward this livable brand? Be livable.
When a company says to me, “We want to be positioned as ___.” I say to them, “Then go be that.” No amount of positioning is going to move the customer closer to believing your ideal. They’ll determine whether or not your brand is what it claims to be by experiencing it. And if the experience is profound, they’ll live it.
