Posts from — January 2008

Everyone has said or written something they later regretted. However, for most things, people forgive, they forget, they move on. For many things we regret saying, there isn’t a public record, only a private one between individuals. There is no personal court reporter making transcriptions of everything we say in person, or on the phone, or write on a post-it note.

That was true until Google, however, and the creation of your own personal Google Shadow. Your Google Shadow is the lifetime collection of all the information you have ever posted to the web. Everyone post written, blog comment made, rant delivered, or complaint aired is quietly and efficiently stored in search servers around the world. It will probably still be there for your great-great-grandchildren to see, long after you are gone.

Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine writes about how the relatively positive benefits of a life online outweigh the trouble your Google Shadow can cause you. While the embarrassing moments will be there for everyone to see forever, this is compensated by knowing that a virtual network of all the people you’ve ever known throughout your life is only a couple clicks away.

On the other hand, Max Fawcett at This Magazine talks about the negative tendency of Google Shadows to come back to haunt you. He also has a great quote from Douglas Coupland on living with your shadow:

“You’ve got this thing that follows you no matter where you go. It’s going to survive your real shadow long after you’re dead. It’s composed of truth, half-truth, lies, vengeance, wishful thinking, accuracy, inaccuracy. It grows and grows and gets bigger. It’s you but it’s not you.”

Personally, I don’t think the existence of my Google shadow is a positive or a negative thing. It just is.

You can know that thirty years from now you can search and probably see some form every web site you’ve created, potentially every Flickr photo you shared, and any random blog comment you posted, all preserved forever, courtesy of Google and the rest of the search engines.

It doesn’t make me want to pull the plug and live in a cave. However, it does kind of make me pause and think a bit before hitting publish.

As marketing makes a transition between traditional to digital media, understanding how this affects the practices of developing brands and brand strategy will be critical.

There have been a lot of articles and blog posts recently on branding and brand strategy, so I wanted to collect and share the work of some very smart people. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but they do represent some of the freshest thinking on the topic.

1. First, it may be helpful to start out by getting a definition of what a brand is, and I like the thoughts behind this definition at Stephen Sammartino’s Start Up Blog.
2. Of Max Kalehoff’s 10 principles on brands, I think transparency is the most critical in the new digital environment. Consumers will respond positively to your candor, and additionally, in a digital environment, keeping things hidden won’t last long.
3. I could do a top 10 lists of brand insights from the Brand Strategy Insider alone, however I’ll focus on this article by Brad VanAuken on how marketing research is essential across several steps of brand development.
4. John Caddell, as posted on the Marketing Strategy and Innovation blog, talks about how much we can actually change about a brand when a marketing team decides to do some “Re-branding”.
5. What separates mythic brands versus the ordinary is that brands with a mythology have a rich story that consumers can connect to and identify with. As Seth Godin points out in his post about Brand as Mythology, “People use a Dell, they are an Apple”.
6. Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing writes about how branding can be reinforced through the effects of sound. It’s why I think jingles had been so effective as an equity element.
7. By using the Method Home brand as an example, David Taylor at the BrandGymBlog, lists five principles why this brand has been such a success. The principle of defining your brand simply, but boldly can be found in their slogan “Detox your home”.
8. This post at WhisperBrand.com highlights the tension between living up to a Brand Promise and the need to deliver business profits: Johnson & Johnson 1, British Airways 0.
9. While this Wired article by James Surowiecki on The Decline of Brands is a couple years old, like most things by Surowiecki, it is packed full of evergreen insights.
10. Finally, Seth Godin shares some thoughts on a brand formula based upon people’s expectation of a brand and whether the brand delivers on that expectation. He cites FedEx:

“Fedex is a powerful brand because you always get what you expect, and the relief you get from their consistency is high.”

Are there any other great posts on branding or brand strategy that people could share?

It doesn’t take a market researcher to understand that the fashion and beauty industry over the years was selling an ideal on how a woman should look that was completely out of step with the vast majority of women. The industry’s focus on an beauty ideal that only applied to a very small number of women had been criticized and held up for ridicule.

But underneath the jokes, there was also a significant amount of resentment that women felt about all these unrealistic beauty standards being broadcast across all forms of media.

The marketers at Unilever recognized this resentment and turned it into an insight that they outlined in a new brand manifesto for their Campaign for Real Beauty:

For too long, beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling stereotypes. Women have told us it’s time to change all that. Dove agrees. We believe real beauty comes in many shapes, sizes and ages. That is why Dove is launching the Campaign for Real Beauty.

Dove’s global Campaign for Real Beauty aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty. A view of beauty that all women can own and enjoy everyday.

The amount of viral buzz this campaign created since its launch in 2005 has been incredible. Additionally, it also led to double digit growth for an already mature brand.

As consumer packaged good companies work to incorporate search more into their advertising and marketing mix, they are running into some stumbling blocks. In this interview from Brandweek, Kevin Kells, who is the national industry director for CPG at Google, talks about some of the issues facing CPG companies.

In order for CPG advertisers to be effective online, Kells thinks that:

“Instead of focusing on a small amount of creative, they should be making more. They should be making 1,000 digital assets a years as opposed to three television assets”

Unfortunately, CPG companies aren’t currently structured that way in their relationships with their agency partners. They generally work with their agencies to develop a creative strategy that is motivating and steeped in the insights around the brands and their consumers. Then they blow this core message out across all the traditional media touchpoints: TV, print, in-store, etc.

Kells thinks CPG “needs to be online with different stories” through multiples of creative, while traditional CPG advertising is more about a single story told through several different vehicles.

While I think a mindset change could come, the more difficult part will be the costs behind developing all those different creative executions. Online is currently very efficient from a buy standpoint compared to traditional media. However, all that efficiency could go out the door if the non-working production costs behind developing 1,000 creative executions skyrocket.

CPG and Google are still at the hello stage, but at least they still are in the same room.

Just read a very interesting and well written piece by Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian on the ability of aggregated search data to potentially predict future behavior and attitudes.

He cites my favorite concept from John Battelle’s book The Search, which is about how the clickstreams of queries behind search creates a “Database of Intentions”. I’ve posted before on how this could revolutionize the fields of cultural anthropology and consumer research.

If you haven’t read The Search, it should be at the top of your list for reading in 2008. A truly fascinating book.