Accessible Brands & Brand Governance

There are countless examples of Brands having suffered reputational damage in the digital space. 'United Breaks Guitars',  BP increasing their ad presence after the oil spill accident, Sony's Playstation sites being hacked, the list goes on. There are positive examples too, such as the Financial Times successfully launching a web app. By using html 5 they bypass the 30% kickback Apple gets when selling in-app content.
But most examples show how Brands struggle with Social Media, viral videos and technical complexity imposed on them by the interactivity of today's Digital Ecosystem. It is urgent then to define a Digital Brand Strategy.




Why is Digital Different?
To me Digital is just a technology that connects humans with humans but also humans with machines and machines with machines. Digital connections facilitate communication, information exchange, storage and media consumption. In addition there are a few interesting characteristics that have consequences for everyone and that includes Brands, dealing with it.


1. Digital communication is fast as light and viral in nature. Information can reach millions of people in a matter of hours since information can be copied and forwarded immediately with the press of a button. 


2. Digital is cheap and available to a very large part of the global population. A PC in an internet cafe or a smart phone is enough to create and send your own messages. Twitter is the example "par excellence" of a medium that can be used from almost all communication devices, including older smart phones at no cost. But in the right context it reaches further and is faster than any press medium is able to attain. The most recent examples being the protests in Libia and Egypt and the Tsunami in Japan.


3. Digital has a memory that cannot be erased. Paris Hilton can certainly confirm that one of the video's in which she features in her birthday costume will circulate for a while to come. It will an almost eternal reminder of a faux-pas she committed and which she by now might regret.


4. Digital is global. Again the examples of political protesters and the intense use of text messaging in Africa mean that more people have access to internet or more in general digital communication than ever before and the number of digitally enabled people is still rising. 


5. Digital is personal. Facebook has more details about you than you might know. This can be used for a wide variety of purposes. The recent announcement by the Dutch air carrier KLM that they will allow customers to search for a seat next to someone by using Facebook profiles of potential travelers on the same flight illustrates how this can be put to use. The web being so personal means that we start to expect that brands personalize their brand experience around my needs and preferences.


The Brand image disasters from the pas decade clearly illustrate what the consequences of these 5 digital characteristics are. Brands have become accessible because digital is interactive where the interaction can be totally owned and driven by web communities. Brands are as a result more exposed to their customers' opinion and are scrutinized over their actions, communications and responses.




Digital is about Listening, Feedback and Feeding Back
Compared to 'classic' Branding & Brand Management, Digital means that Brands have to deal with potential feedback coming from an increasing set of channels. The following illustrates the difference between classic Brand channels such print and television and the Digital ecosystem. 

The interactive connection between Brands and the Digital Ecosystem means:


- Brands are accessible and will receive Feedback from Digital Communities.
- But Brands also have the opportunity of feeding the Brand Values back into these communities. 
- Digital also creates the opportunity of listening or monitoring how your Brand Values are perceived and live in the Digital eco-system.


I call this the concept of Accessible Brands. Accessibility means that Brands today are more fluid, nonlinear in their development and subject to scrutiny by their clients. The question now is how do you deal with this feedback coming from Digital interactions. How is this connected to the 'classical' Corporate Design & Corporate Identity guidelines.




From Accessible Brands to Brand Governance
The Accessible Brands concept means that Brands have to define a strategy specifically targeted at Digital interactions. How can Brand Managers ensure that Digital interactions are in line with Corporate Design and Corporate Identity guidelines?


It is here where the Brand Governance concept can add real value. What I define by Brand Governance is the following:
- Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power or verify performance.
- It consists of either a separate process or is part of management and leadership process.
These processes and systems are typically administered by a government in the public sector and by the Brand Management department in the private sector.


Brand Governance can be seen as an extension of Corporate Design & Corporate Identity guidelines. The guidelines are there to manage expectations in Digital and grant power to e.g. the marketing department to act within the boundaries set. Brand Governance can only be successful if it is monitored in terms of its performance and effectiveness.


Brand Governance can also be regarded as a more specific form of Corporate Governance. It equally implies that stakeholders in the company take responsibility for Brand Communication and Interactions, against a broader Brand Value and Brand Purpose Framework.




What drives Brand Governance?
Brand Governance should be driven by Brand Values. In order for the Governance itself to be credible and effective the Brand Values themselves need to be authentic and positive. 


So before even considering going deep into Digital Space it is important to conduct a Brand Value and Positioning analysis.


Suppose you feel comfortable with your Brand Value Proposition then it is the moment define how your Brand is governed in the Digital Ecosystem.


Governance should then include the following:


- Listen & Monitoring framework
- Planned Actions based on the Brand Values & the Insights generated from Listening & Monitoring
- Show Leadership by taking actions that generate discussions, feedback in line with your  Brand Values and ideally reenforcing them.
- Guide your resources. The marketing people, editors and communication managers should have clear guidelines that help them interact, without boxing them in. At the same time these guidelines should help dealing with emergency situations. But better still they should help preventing catastrophes.




How to do Brand Governance: Easier Done than Said
Since Digital is the "raison d'être" behind The Accessible Brands and Brand Governance concepts, defining them for real world use is a 'brand' new task as well. Although one can define a lot of the guidelines by building on classic Brand CI & CD, adding to it the vast knowledge of expertise coming from the past decade of internet experiences, defining Brand Governance is a fluid process in itself.
Early adopters in Digital that have embraced Social Media at a very early stage have taken risks at first but now benefit from the learnings and best practices they've gathered. If you don't have defined your Brand Governance yet, then I would recommend the following:

1. - Have a good look at your CI & CD and core Brand Values. Are they consistent and based on a credible story. In short is your Brand authentic? 
2. - Listen to existing conversation around your Brand and monitor the discussions.
3. - Define a first framework for Brand Governance guidelines.
4. - Plan interactions
5. - Analyze and learn from these actions and feed them back into your Governance policy.
6. - Repeat step 4 and 5 while never stopping step 2 and occasionally revisiting step 1.

In short go Do and Learn. Or in the famous words of Nike's brand mantra: Just do it!

The Value of Brand Governance

Although no insights and research exists today in the actual value that Digital Brand Governance creates long term for business, it is clear that a quiet a few businesses have suffered already negative impact from Digital Feedback. The costs for the definition of Digital Brand Governance could therefore be allocated under marketing as well as financial risk management. My gut feeling is though that proper Brand Governance will create shareholder value because well managed Accessible Brands are more credible, better visible and closer to the primary revenue sources; their customers. This then can only contribute to the bottom line.

For further reading:

Value of Coporate Governance Lawrence McDonald

Branding Governance: A Participatory Approach to the Brand Building Process
Nicholas Ind, Rune Bjerke, Wiley





























































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What if Homer had a Twitter account?

Today's marketing channel fragmentation can be overwhelming. The difference in brand communication via television commercials and Facebook posts is a stretch for anyone in marketing and brand management. And not only brands are struggling with it, also agencies are trying to answer the all important question: how do I respond to the broadening demand from the client side? What is the glue that holds everything together? So the question is; what if Homer would have had a Twitter account?


The most successful brands tell the most interesting stories. Story-telling is in fact older than written communication. Anyone familiar with Homer and the Odysee probably knows that this famous Greek myth was first passed on by story tellers before it finally got written down.


While it took centuries to go from oral to written. It would take a few more centuries to go from handwritten manuscripts to printing. Basically the 3 first marketing tactics took thousands of years to develop. 


Then we got newspapers, telephone, radio and television. The impact of these channels on both advertising and branding were tremendous but somehow manageable.


Then the internet emerged and branding, marketing and sales have changed almost overnight. 


So here are some thoughts on the recent changes imposed on us by everything digital:

• What would Homer tweet if twitter would have existed in his time?
• Imagine Hannibal and his forces having access to email.
• Would Napoleon have conquered Russia if he would have had a mobile phone?
• Would Shakespeare's Romea & Juliette have ended differently if SMS would have existed at the time? 

Of course these questions are rhetorical. But as a thought start they might get you to realize how profound digital is changing our lives in just two decades... 


What doesn't change is that with regards to the rhetorical questions above leadership made the difference. We know about Homer, Socrates, Napoleon and others because they were somehow bigger than life. They became the equivalent of what we could call a brand today and through that they entered written history.


Today anyone can keep track of himself in writing, video or audio recording but the leadership part has not changed. 


If you look at brands as leaders then anything digital might mean facilitation of brand story leadership but it doesn't necessary mean that all brands succeed over time in the same way as the Napoleon's of yore. Telling a leading story is still that makes the differences between a great and a 'yet another' brand.


Brand story-telling needs to be leading. With this in mind the digital channels need to be evaluated regarding their potential tactical and strategic story-telling contribution. The questions to ask are:

• What defines my brand leadership, regardless of channel?
• Where can digital sustain, support or amplify this story?
• Looking at the digital story scenario today, what will be our story tomorrow both a digital only and a digital combined with 'classic' branding scenario?

Although these questions are pretty obvious the actual answers might reveal much more, specifically if you think about what Homer, Napoleon or even Shakespeare would have done if they would have had Twitter.

Amazon's Psychic Fire Power

What do Amazon and Psychic Pizza Delivery have in common. Well, more than you think at least when you look at it from a marketing perspective. 

Let me start by saying that I don't own a Kindle Fire yet but that I am planning to order one as soon as its available in Europe.

But there's a lot you can say about the device without having touched it. Of course I read quite a few reviews and a some were downright negative. Slow processor this, clunky UX that and too small screen, bla bla bla. Yes, all true, probably. But it is still the most significant piece of hardware that came out in all of 2011. Here's why.

Jeff Bezos started out with a BIG idea. He didn't want to sell thousands of books. Instead he dreamed of  selling millions of books, preferably ALL books available via the web. So far he has succeeded in bringing that dream to reality pretty well.


So most readers will still think of Amazone as an oversized digital bookstore. The great thing about Amazon today is that they didn't stop at books. As we all know they started delivering household appliances, hifi equipment, computers and... digital content.

So now they started selling there own hardware. All of a sudden Amazon is playing in the same area as Apple, Dell, Sony, HP and some others. Why bother would you think? Plus apparently the UX of the Kindle Fire is poor and it doesn't offer a lot of applications. Ok its only 199$ but still. Amazon is failing here, right?

The thing is I think they're not. Much like Apple they are creating their own ecosystem that allows them to deliver content faster and better optimized than they could do if they would continue targeting the gazillion different computers and tablet on this planet. Plus, delivering digital content over your own hardware comes with numerous advantages that so far only Apple has masterd to the full extent:

• You can kindly request or in the case of Apple bluntly insist on pushing alerts and update messages, also regarding new available content, to your audience.
• Payment becomes an afterthought, specifically if prices are low and there is content available for free. In fact consumption - or if you like joy of use - comes first and pricing should ideally be connected to the actual desirability of the content.
• You can actually measure the use of the content and build recommendations on it.

Now that last point sounds familiar doesn't it. Regular users of Amazon know the feeling. They've looked at something a while ago and all of a sudden you find suggestions for similar or even the same products in your email or on the homescreen, often weeks or months later. Amazon has become really good at that. 

Now imagine what they can do if they continue polishing and perfecting these algorithms over time. There's a really great blog article on Mashable written by Matt Silverman where he quotes Eli Pariser on how algorithms are in need of improvement. 

The 7 points where matching algorithms fail today are exactly the weaknesses that Amazon's current matching suggestions don't solve, although I am still every now and then amazed by the anticipation of some of the suggestions they bring up.

Now back to the Kindle Fire and actually all things Kindle at Amazon. What Jeff Bezos has seen correctly is that issuing hardware brings numerous advantages in terms of tying your brand closer to the consumer and his preferences. In my mind Jeff has created an ecosystem that would allow him to start addressing the 7 things that personalization algorithms do poorly today. But suppose he's not even thinking of going there yet, then he still has something that Apple doesn't have...

Amazon can easily tie 'real-world' products to digital content. Although this would also require some clever algorithm tuning my gut feeling tells me that this should be easier than creating algorithms that somehow will come up with mind blowing anticipated suggestions as stated by Eli Pariser.

Let's continue even thinking about the 7 points that algorithms should do better. In fact think about age old marketing challenge that most brands would like to solve. What if marketing could actually predict what customers want and as a brand you're there to offer it by the time they start asking for it? The famous be where the puck is going to be not where it actually is paradigm.


So, slow processor, clunky UX? Maybe but I'm sure they'll fix it and while they're at it Jeff and his team will create other benefits for his customers some of which we might not even expect today.

I leave you with the wonderful Psychic Pizza Delivery cartoon while I'll give you this: Amazon is creating an eco-system with the Kindle that could potentially create more value than they've currently locked up in their warehouses and on their servers together.

Matt

Update;

Another proof of why Jeff has been right about a few more things all along (thanks to LinkedIn and Businessinsider):

14 Years Ago Jeff Bezos Told You How To Take Over The World

Written by Henri Blodget