A person’s feeling towards a brand is made up of the
aggregation of their experiences with that brand layered one on top of
another over time.
In the not so distant past, the vast majority of those
experiences were controlled by us, the brand owner. We created the experience through the product, in store and
event or we served it up in a one-dimensional, passive mediated way to people
through TV, radio, print etc.
The change that has come is not in the way that brands
are created over time but in our loss of control over the mediation.
The most powerful force for vicarious experiences now is
the connection between ordinary people.
The power of mediation is passing from our hands and from the hands of
the media owner into the hands of the collective. And this mediation is now
active – the mediators add their own spin whereas they never used to.
This leaves us with two routes for communication –
create more stand-alone experiences ourselves and work with the fluid, active,
multi-dimensional mediation of the collective.
And working with the collective - really working with them - will take us to a new place in our thinking about the way big brands need to behave.
A brilliant man I worked with once said "Brands exist in the minds of consumers" (Paul Feldwick, BMP) but right now, those minds are made public, become connected and are archived and searchable.
We are all getting used to the idea of co-creation of content, but are we ready for the notion of co-curation of brands?
