The context of consumer engagement for brands these days is that of a social economy, a marketplace in which nothing is worthwhile or valuable unless it is shared with others. This is not an easy environment for brands. It requires more than simply adapting a brand’s promise or performance to new needs or new priorities. Instead, it demands that brands be utterly un-brand-like.

Perhaps the best way to say what a social economy means for brands is simply to observe that people don’t want relationships with brands; they want relationships with other people. Maybe this has always been true, but it has gotten special emphasis in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, brand marketing has been about nothing but building strong relationships with consumers. This brand focus is rooted in the one-to-one marketing concept of customized design and individualized service that became popular with the development of deep, robust databases and new technologies like the Internet. These innovative marketing capabilities gave rise to an over-the-top enthusiasm among marketers that brands could finally make genuine personal connections with consumers that would be highly relevant, truly meaningful, and worth the price. The idea of brand relationships ruled the day, defining the essence of what it meant to be a powerful brand. The best brands were those with the best relationships with consumers.

The purpose of business has always been to deliver the best possible solution to customers. As the late Harvard marketing guru Ted Levitt famously said once about consumers, “They don’t buy things, they buy solutions to problems.” One-to-one marketing and the parallel idea of brand relationships were organizing principles to help brand marketers accomplish that. But these ideas, while more useful in a marketplace in which consumers have fewer ways of exerting control and making connections, do not serve marketers well in the social economy.

What the newest technologies now enable is less the ability of marketers to engage with consumers and more the opportunity for people to engage with other people. Brands matter only when they have something to offer that people can share with one another. Brands have value only when they give people a chance to connect with other people, not when they themselves try to make a closer connection with consumers. People are trying to be social not commercial, to relate to one another not to transact with brands, to share with friends not open up to marketers. Technology has shifted from putting brands at the center of power to diffusing power across a network of social connections among individuals.