Fast And Fearless – The Future Is Blogs

Martin LindstromJune 16, 20073 min

You can’t avoid them – the blogs. They’re so plentiful that the opinions they offer are influencing our daily news reports. Given the evident potency of blogs, therefore, the question is should blogs remain within their current sphere of influence, helping individuals to share their personal opinions on the world, or should they be adopted by brands as communication tools?

The fact is that the marriage between blogs and brands is no longer a vision. Personality brands, like Seth Godin or Tom Peters, have been blogging for some time. And brands like Weight watchers, LEGO, Apple or Harley Davidson already appear on a frequent basis, not on behalf of their brand-builders, but promoted by their fans.

This raises a potential danger: gradually the control over brand messages is being drawn away from brand builders and being redirected by consumers. So should brands begin investing in posting their own frequent blogs on the net, representing their points of view and personalities? Could you imagine Disney blogging its fans about its characters, Nokia about its latest products or Microsoft about its virus issues?

Yes, I’ll bet you can. The action would probably help brands get closer to their consumers by reaching right into those core communities of fans. But exploiting this avenue takes commitment.

In fact, the problem would not be for companies to write the blogs, but to write useful blogs. To achieve this, you have to be flexible and able to react promptly. Companies are simply not armed with the flexibility and quick response time required to run a relevant, interactive and engaging blog. The medium would pose a risk of producing small one-page press releases rather than interactive, current points of view.

However the prospect raises an interesting question. Brands of the future will need to handle this discipline effectively – the discipline of quick action. They’ll need to dare to exhibit opinions fearlessly and share them with the world, avoiding litigation and unhampered by the risk of it. But, as we know, companies tend to avoid political issues. Corporate entities feel obliged to clear their opinions with every quarter, eliminating all risk of offending any sensibilities, and thus, sanitizing their points of view into meaninglessness. This sterilization is death to achieving the momentum needed to sustain and inject value into a blog.

Tomorrow’s brands will need to be able to transgress current inhibitions. In many ways, this could be the ultimate test for brands, reflecting organizations’ confidence and coherence, demonstrating brand self-esteem and ownership that unhesitatingly speaks for itself, promotes opinions and shares them in hours rather than in weeks or months. Just as manufacturers and retailers learned the “just in time” thinking in the nineties, brands will need to adopt another “just in time” dimension to their self-management: the ability to share information, just in time, with their consumers.

In contrast, if brands don’t make this evolutionary leap soon, companies will be left behind a consumer population which expects timely email responses, prompt fulfilment of orders, and brand blogs in minutes. A phenomenon which, in my latest book, BRAND sense, I call HSP (Holistic Selling Proposition) brands will need to emerge with coherence in order to deal with consumers holistically, becoming part of the individual’s minute-by-minute experience of everyday life.

However, companies are far from this point. To establish an organization that enables true HSP branding, brands, which could handle the blog challenge, requires dramatic structural, systemic and communications changes.

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Martin Lindstrom

4 comments

  • Dan Schawbel

    June 16, 2007 at 6:08 pm

    Great points here. My view is that because of the overturn of the web into web 2.0, the focus is on consumer or user driven participation instead of directly from the corporation.

  • Douglas Karr

    June 16, 2007 at 11:15 pm

    Fantastic post. It’s a hard pill to swallow for the PR and Marketing crowd that they no longer ‘own’ the brand. The brand is owned by the consumer now… they craft it, they build it up and they can destroy it. As marketers we have to learn how to closely monitor ‘our brands’, how they are perceived and mirrored, and tactfully and honestly adjust accordingly.

    There is no ‘controlling the message’, anymore . The job now is to ‘start the message’, ‘maintain the momentum of the message’ and ‘respond instantly’. That’s what allows us to influence the consumer and protect the brand.

  • Daniel Sitter, Idea Seller

    June 17, 2007 at 11:45 am

    Since speed is now the currency of the web 2.0 generation, marketing, particularly branding, have established at a new and evolving pace. I couldn’t agree more that blogs are forging the brand and forcing the future of marketing.

    I like Douglas Karr’s comment about starting the marketing message. Once we release it, we had better pay close attention to what becomes of it. Although we attempt to drive it, the steering may be controlled by a viral, lightning-fast market who will make their own determinations.

  • Steve Woodruff

    June 19, 2007 at 6:14 am

    Very helpful thoughts in this post. Sounds like a whole new marketing category is evolving – “dynamic, conversational marketing” – and companies will either engage (two-way) or leave themselves open to whatever. But one-way messaging is over.

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