By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Every time I hear or read the word “brand” associated with “social”, I wince. Not because of the ballooned hype surrounding this kind of association, but because most of this hype reveals an outdated – and often damageable – vision of what “marketing” and “brand” mean in our highly networked context. I won’t hold forth about marketing, as Greg Statell (@Digitaltonto) recently thoughtfully and thoroughly nailed this coffin, but ‘brands’ have a story to tell, nevertheless quite different from what ‘social media marketers’ (sigh) are trying to teach us.
The evolution of branding
Even if brands existed long before, ‘modern’ branding is a typical emergence from industrial era and mass consumption. Mass consumption went de pair with mass production, and at that time, brands were a necessary differentiating feature for otherwise quite similar products competing with each other in crowded categories. While already meant to leverage customers’ loyalty, brands were tools directly linked to the products they were apposed to and to their (sometimes supposed) tangible qualities. In other terms, brands were the intermediary layer through which companies pushed products, and communication, toward customers: know me better, and you will buy me more.
Brands’ meaning, and our comprehension of their signification, changed over time, from company-created (consciously conveying facts and values attached to products) to customer-owned (constructed in customers’ mind along their experience with products, according to their perception of the values conveyed through interaction with the company). A great reading about this evolution is the analysis made by Steve Vargo, Yi He and Michael Merz in “The evolving brand logic: a service-dominant logic perspective“.
People, not brands
Employees and communities of customers are also considered as integral actors in brands’ value creation. Brands acquired new dimensions through human resources and societal responsibility. Nevertheless, the same paradigm still prevails: brands as a filter through which companies, customers and their respective ecosystems and networks communicate and create value. As interactions and conversations now matter more than individual behaviors, and as we begin to understand how and how much they influence them, this conception is no more relevant.
Interactions are a human-to-human matter, they involve people, not brands. Whether it be a customer service rep, a sales person, a community manager, another customer, a relative, conversations and engagement are always about exchanging knowledge between different human beings. Period. Nobody, unless irremediably harebrained, has ever conversed with a brand. In that context, talking about brand engagement or online presence is pure nonsense.
From filters to attractors
Brands have no more reason to stay in the way between people. I previously envisioned brands as strange attractors in the complex system formed by companies, customers and their relative ecosystems, and this is something I want to further explore here.
Brand value creation happens through knowledge sharing and use: knowledge about how a product or service fits into customers’ job-to-be-done (value created through experience in use), knowledge about collected customers’ insights, knowledge created and collected through all available kinds of human interactions (at company-customers touchpoints, between different stakeholders,…). The factual, informative part of shared knowledge is directly related to these interactions, but as brands are no more a screen between people, is it still relevant to consider it as part of their value? Beyond information and context, emotional intent is a capital factor of knowledge, since no sharing would ever take place without this intent. This emotional dimension is, in fact, what constitutes today the value of brands.
The emotional dimension of knowledge sharing
Differentiating emotion from information and context is, of course, not an easy task. But viewing brands from such a prism provides us with thoughtful insights in understanding how value is co-created and how brands could help in maximizing this value, both for customers and companies. Valeria Maltoni (@ConversationAge) wrote sometime ago a thought provoking post entitled “Why Customer Service in Social is not Fair“. She made some great points in it, but let us consider the case under our new prism:
- Company-customer interaction
Complaining online provides the company with knowledge about an existing issue. This is directly actionable knowledge, which can be used to fix some broken process, for the benefit of all customers. Whether the company chooses to use it or not is another story, but not using it might prove to be expensive, as Valeria wrote.
On exchange of this knowledge, the company rewards the customer with direct resolution of his issue. Is that unfair? I don’t think so.
- Brand value
On an emotional point of view, this interaction modifies the customer’s perception of the brand. It raises his level of satisfaction, and potentially turns him into a brand’s advocate. It is a win-win situation.
Emotional intent is intrinsic to knowledge sharing. Brands, as emotional attractors, facilitate and foster further communication between companies and customers, and their value is created on the go, through customers’ expectations and level of satisfaction, through companies’ commitment to provide better customer experience, through day-to-day experience of every internal or external conversation. Communities are glued by shared emotional values, and brands are the signals which allow further, actionable, conversations to take place in them.
Awareness, influence, advocacy, trust and loyalty are powerful dynamics of emotion which shape brands value. Analytics, crowdsourcing, interaction, are some of the levers which companies should use to enhance business through the social web, and which build more brand value along the way. Talking about “brand presence on social media”, thinking “brand” instead of “company” is a serious error, as well as Social CRM is neither a fans counter nor a social media listening tool, but an extension to CRM. Clay Shirky qualified as “Cognitive Surplus” the spare part of human creativity which can be used to help in building a better life. Similarly, I see brands as “Emotional Surplus”: the emotional dimension of knowledge sharing which can be used to help in providing better user experience.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Fostering collaboration means blurring boundaries. Internally, it involves letting knowledge flow across organizational silos, capitalizing on informal knowledge to reshape work according to more efficient and human-centric patterns. Externally, it assumes nurturing new relationships with customers to better help them in their day-to-day lives, providing a better service and learning from their interactions.
I am of course over-simplifying here the scope and complexity of Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM fields, in order to make this simple and obvious statement: blurring internal (among stakeholders) and external (with customers) boundaries won’t be a sustainable evolution unless it is considered as a step toward a more radical change. The traditional (industrial) dyadic model of company-customers must also evolve to adapt to our new hyper-connected environment. But where do we go from here?
Avoiding decomposition
Sadly enough, most discussions around Enterprise 2.0 only scratch the surface of the consequences of evolving toward connected ecosystems on business. Socializing business processes merely keeps the fundamental nature and operational aspects of organizations unchanged. Internal collaborative problem solving, as well as social learning applied to in-work training, is often no more than a chase for efficiency, while staying stuck in present paradigm.
In large corporations, the main (if not only) reason of existence for many roles, and even departments, is to ‘keep things together’: insuring coherent vertical integration, bridging across silos, reducing internal friction… Diffusion of collaborative behaviors will at some point dismiss the necessity to maintain them. Nevertheless, effectiveness cannot be left to autopoiesis. On the other side, the more the companies have to reach out customers on multiple contact points, the more internal departments are involved in the walk, without necessarily speaking the same language. Retailers won’t take the same approach than wholesalers, who might be contradicted by customer service…
Enterprise 2.0 thinkers have put a strong emphasis on leadership, on the necessary role of leaders in employees’ empowerment. Leaders have indeed the necessary skills to fuel the collaborative engine. But how many leaders can a single, unified, organization afford? It takes some kind of personal vision to lead, and chances are good that coexistence of several leaders, or even some kind of distributed leadership, might induce more chaos than convergence. In our complex multi-relational world, maintaining a single, corporate, voice is no more an option. To blur internal boundaries while avoiding decomposition, companies need to experiment with new organizational models.
Brands as strange attractors
At the other side of the spectrum, do customers discuss together, gather into communities, they are wishful to improve their own personal life, they are ready to suggest improvements in products or services. But they don’t bother about an organization’s hierarchy, corporate culture, or… yikes, processes. They buy propositions made on behalf of brands. Whoever being at some point in contact with customers must meet the expectations raised by those brands, sharing a defined set of values, delivering a defined level, and nature, of service.
Brands are mainly considered as intermediaries between companies and customers. They convey factual, as well as emotional, information upon products, reinforcing both consumers’ confidence in their buying choices (through information accumulated in brand’s offering history) and their self-esteem (through symbolic exchanges channeled by brands values and personality). This linear approach (information against emotion) leads to companies hiding their internal structure and mechanism behind brands. This is perfectly on line with the traditional value-in-transaction model, but is clearly unsuitable with connected ecosystems, where companies and customers share an ever growing number of contact points.
Rather than transactional amplifiers, brands have another important role to play for connected organizations; they have to be considered as the strange attractors of the complex systems formed by companies, their stakeholders and customers.
A step toward a more sustainable model
A more and more important part of the value associated with a brand comes from interaction between the company and customers This either directly, both shaping the brand’s personality by transferring emotional values and sentiment generated (as in the case of brands communities), or indirectly, accumulated along cradle-to-grave customer’s journey with the brand.
All these interactions are the expression of forces at work between individuals during the whole brand’s lifecycle: companies’ internal mechanisms, customers’ relations circles and communities, customer service, empowerment and influence (which Michael Wu recently insightfully described ), open innovation, crowdsourcing… where the brand itself is no more an intermediary, but a representative symbol.
Customers and marketers have been accustomed to such transfer of value, value in expectation, for instance, being directly linked to the brand associated value. But organizations themselves should care much more about brands, as they offer a new model to maintain, and reinforce in a meaningful way, the collaborative enterprise. Let us envision networked specialized entities or departments, gathered around shared brands’ values and directly linked to customers. This model, as it works for Zappos and a few others, might prove itself an alternative, more sustainable, model for today’s rigid and bloated organizations.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
It is quite striking to see how much the mass production era still shapes a lot of our behaviors, whether in our relationships to brands or in Enterprise world. From a customer point of view, while conversing more and more with brands around what I consider as a symbolic transaction, we are still mostly considering companies as products and services manufacturers and distributors.
In parallel, “work as value” is still a dominant paradigm in a lot of companies, which, at same time, are trying to implement 2.0, socio-collaborative, tools and platforms to foster knowledge emergence and capitalization. This is strikingly strong in countries like France, where our President said “travailler plus pour gagner plus” (working more to earn more) less than two years ago. Let’s face this, every effort to facilitate Enterprise 2.0 adoption has to take into account, not only structural resistance, but cultural artifacts from a past era.
Most employees have quite effortlessly switched paradigm, from “work as value” to “work as creation of value”, as it relates both to their day-to-day experience as customers and to their expectations in Enterprise world, but managers are facing a bigger challenge, as they are less and less connected with a traditional (pre knowledge economy era) role of managing teams, and expected to consider management as transformation of value. As obvious as this might be, seem from our Enterprise 2.0 heralds’ seats, we have to keep in mind that organizational and behavioral gap: from gatekeepers of business processes, managers must now dynamically harness existing knowledge to transform it into competitive advantages for their company; a tough challenge for most.
Furthermore, while bringing more agility, adoption of collaborative tools and platforms, whether used in the existing framework of business processes or not, allows for a new type of leadership, combining knowledge fostering with social connections facilitation. Managers will now have to catalyze groups and communities activity, involve them in decision-making as well as in maintaining their inner state of equilibrium, acting as the strange attractors of a complex internal ecosystem.
From their real adoption of what is clearly a totally new role, a role which requires more qualities than ever, will depend success or failure of many companies in this new socio-collaborative economy.
By Thierry de Baillon
Version française ici.
Considering that brands are in fact shaped by their customers is anything but new. In 1954, Peter Drucker already wrote:
[Marketing] is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer’s point of view.
The recent frenzy of social media marketing doesn’t say anything but the same, enjoining companies to listen and engage with customers, providing us with a too often over-simplified view of business, where brands and customers seem to be the only players in town. While Enterprise 2.0 is a careful field of many approaches and thoughtful adoption and roll out frameworks, in a number of cases Marketing 2.0 doesn’t appear much more than Advertising 2.0, or Sales 2.0 at its best. Co-creation itself is often reduced at the mass customization level, mitigating customers’ creativity with small scaled processes.
But today’s brands trump any simplistic vision of marketing. They are part of an ecosystem which encompasses both enterprise and customers; they have to deal with complex multi-channel creation and distribution systems where each actor has a capital influence on their perception. François Gossieaux recently wrote an interesting article about the difficulties inherent to brand positioning in our Connected Age.
The disappearing product
One of the most striking aspects of today’s brands is a complete change of an element which was, until recently, at the center of all attentions: the product. Not to tell that the finality of marketing is no more about selling products, and that offering your customers the best ever products is not of uttermost importance; but what we are experiencing today is a shift from products as personification of brands to products as symbol of value exchanged between brands and customers. As customers’ experience take more and more importance in today’s marketing, brands dematerialize themselves.
Typically, two facets of the classical Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism are now merging, Physical (product based) aspect getting interweaved with the brand’s Personality, as the brand perception is focused, not on static aspects, but on dynamic exchanges between a brand and its customers.
Brands attractors
As brand perception evolves from positional (physical and “moral” aspects of the product) to transactional, the simplistic view of branding as a brand-to-customer relationship seems understandable, but hides in fact an increasing complexity. The “customer-centric” brand is in reality mostly the more or less conscious result of several traction points. Suppliers, partners, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, delivery, internal and external services, from design to customer support, are all part of the end user experience. Understanding where your brand’s main attractors are, fully preconditions your understanding of the brand perception. Neither it is a matter of controlling the whole chain, nor is it about simple interaction. Branding in a complex world requires a full awareness of positive and negative traction points, as a simple change in any of them might destroy a fragile equilibrium. Changing a supplier might have a tremendous impact on the final product, therefore on your customers experience; staff turnover in a retail point might turn them away… Your brand relies on several traction points. Get to know them. You might not have any possible action on them, but you will at least be able to prevent any negative impact from a change of conditions.
