Every time I turn on the TV I'm reminded that traditional branding doesn't stand a chance in a world connected by social media. The core problem, as I see it, is traditional brand planning is inherently skewed toward creating "our brand position", "our brand promise", and delivering "our brand message" in a slick package designed to tell you What We Want You to Believe.
Well let me tell you, What We Want You to Believe isn't as easy a sell as it used to be.
If social networks teach marketers anything, they teach us that what we want people to believe isn't nearly as believable, or powerful, as what their friends tell them. That's why I've retired promise, position, message, and the skew of traditional branding from my practice and replaced them with a single concept, Brand Experience.
Look, marketers and messages don't make brands, people do, and what people believe most comes from their life experience and the experiences of their family and friends. It's always been so, but social networks lay it bare: as I write this, more than half a billion people are actively sharing their life experiences on Facebook and Twitter, effectively turning word-of-mouth into instantaneous media with global reach.
Unfortunately, most CMO's don't yet understand social media. In fact they fear it, and for good reason; it's scary when your job demands results from an entirely new marketplace and you're working with partners who are locked to a revenue model that depends on selling traditional media, methods, and ideas.
To succeed today, marketers need to ditch traditional brand planning and their traditional brand partners and shift from creating "messages" to a focus on delivering a better experience that improves people's lives. Deliver a better experience and people will share that experience with the world. That's the focus of Brand Experience. It's that simple.
To sum this up and get started, ask yourself:
1. Where can I deliver a better experience? Is it in the product, on a phone call, in a retail store, at an event, or somewhere else? Consider every context and be the best part of that experience.
2. In each context, what are people trying to do? Delivering function is the foundation on which Brand Experience is built.
3. But how can I go further than function? How can I break the familiar routine and create a heightened experience that satisfies people emotionally?
Yes, satisfies people emotionally. The one fact Brand Experience has in common with traditional branding is this: until you have an emotional connection, you don't really have a brand.
