Brand ownership in this digital age

Even the old guard can agree that the meaning of brand has changed in this Facebooked era. But there’s a catch — typically that realization is stubbornly rooted in an old school perspective: Who owns brand, the old guard asks, consumer or provider? Who owns brand. It’s an equation heavy on two outdated notions:

1. 

   The days of a passive, receptive audience are long gone in the wired world of this digital age.

   Once upon a time, providers owned the only bullhorn in town. They owned a nearly exclusive, mass media voice in setting the public identity of their brands.

2. Consumer or provider — us vs. them, it’s just not a viable stance to take in an age when the consumer audience now has access to a deep, diverse array of networking platforms designed for sharing ideas and opinions with the world.

Back in the golden age of corporate greed, the zenith of Wall Street excess and hopefully the worst collective sense of mainstream style I’ll ever have the misfortune to witness, the stakes for a given provider were far more simple than today. Avoid the pitfalls of product recalls, oil spills or negligence that led to consumer ingestion of unintended toxic contaminants and your brand avoided bad press. Avoid alienating market segments who had alternative choices, and you’d avoid driving customers to your competitors.

If you fly Delta, the baggage fees win.

These days, it doesn’t take an oil spill and it doesn’t take a story in the national news media to derail months or even years of promotional work.

Consider the online backlash in spring of 2011 when Delta airlines charged baggage fees to a group of soldiers for a domestic flight during their return from a deployment in Iraq. The extra fees were reportedly charged for the soldiers’ combat equipment.

The soldiers had a complaint video uploaded to Youtube by the time their flight took off, and the video had gone viral on Facebook by the time they landed. Faster than a reporter could have set up an interview with the soldiers. Faster than a news story could have been written and published. Faster than Delta’s public affairs staff could have reacted to mounting public criticism. Word spread that fast — distributed by the audience, from Delta’s target consumers to Delta’s target consumers.

The classic Gap logo (left), and the brand refresh that was scrapped after a social media uproar. Some pointed out that if you look close enough, the new logo spells "crap" with the R reversed.

Delta’s not alone in struggling to manage its brand as the realities of doing so effectively have essentially left its public affairs team bewildered at the sudden inadequacy of its outdated playbook. Remember how consumer social media backlash shot down Gap’s logo refresh in fall 2010? Or BP’s absolute flogging in the court of public opinion during the Gulf oil spill?

Keep in mind — big brand, small brand — nobody in any line of business is immune to a relentless audience/consumer flogging in social media. The same things that happened to Delta, Gap and BP could happen again, to a public figure, a big brand or a mom & pop operation. And it could happen rightnowtoday.

Long story short, asking who owns your brand is a waste of time. Whoever happens to be talking about you, posting about you or blogging about you and your brand — possession being nine-tenths of the law, that’s who owns a stake in your brand. And here’s the kicker: No matter who you are; no matter what line of work you’re in — you’re outnumbered by a networked audience with an array of global platforms to choose from.

True, we’re only a few years into the social media era, but your audience already takes for granted its opportunities to participate in your brand identity. And there’s nothing you could do to stop them anyway — short of a China or Libya move for a nationwide internet blackout. But in western society, engineering such a blackout would mean you’d have to take down cell phone service too. Not all that viable as strategies go.

All of which is a long way of saying, exclusive ownership of brand identity is no longer a realistic expectation. Your brand identity is profoundly and directly linked to the public perceptions generated by the quality of service you provide and the level of sustainability in your business practices.

That old us vs. them mentality makes for missed opportunities when consumers favor your brand. It’s a readymade PR disaster when they don’t.

Blatantly and genuinely burn a consumer in this digital age, and you can bet the rest of the world will hear about it by morning.

* * *

–CD