does your brand rent or own?
Sunday, June 21, 2009 at 8:55PM Kevin Doohan I’ve been thinking a ton about digital marketing for global brands as I prepare for 2010 business planning. My perspective on the importance of “where” experiences happen has shifted in the past year. In addition to the experiences we create on rented, loaned, or borrowed space on others' websites, brand marketers need to create meaningful digital destinations of our own. I believe this is critical.
I used to think that location of interaction was relatively unimportant. “Fish where the fish are.” was the best strategy. Quality of outcome and the number of the “right”consumers reached were what mattered. I now believe location of the interaction can be equally important. Who are your partners? What is their role in your overall strategy? What do you expect from your brand owned properties? How will your partners help build your brand owned properties in the long term?
What if you didn't focus on building your own presence for consumers and staked your brand’s primary community claim on myspace? How would you be feeling when what would have been inconceivable three years ago happens? Would you be concerned when myspace announces a layoff of 30% of staff (around 420 employees)? Maybe you didn’t invest heavily in myspace. I’m sure facebook is a safe bet today. Really? Things change and they change fast for digital marketers. Jim Banister thinks facebook will fail. He makes some good observations about specific approaches winning over time vs. general approaches. Will facebook be able to deliver “specific” without ruining the “general” it so clearly excels at? Only time will tell.
How about video? Surely we can continue to rely on YouTube as the place to consolidate our video views. Or can we? Silicon Alley Insider (with data from Credit Suisse) proposed in April that YouTube may be doomed because it will lose close to $470 million in 2009. NY Times (with data from RampRate) says YouTube’s loss will be only $174 million in 2009. Either way, those are losses that someone must be paying attention to. Do you want your entire video strategy to rely on YouTube when radical business model changes could be right around the corner for the video portal?
Maybe YouTube and facebook will win. Maybe myspace will stage the comeback of all comebacks. Something I've learned through experience as a digital marketer is that the digital invincible sometimes fail and longshots occasionally win. The best way brand marketers can be prepared for the success or failure of whoever comes and goes is to build something you OWN that is awesome. Build something exclusively focused on your brand, that your consumers/fans can count on over the long-term, and that is open enough to connect to whichever external general purpose platforms win in the future. And I mean OPEN with all caps. Maybe true openness will be a future post.....
Reader Comments (4)
Kevin,
I remember you broaching this subject at SXSW, and it stuck with me. And the article you referenced has some excellent insight. Love how he posits a possibility, and the commenters mostly jump all over it saying it will absolutely never happen. Smells like trend.
I think your position that companies shouldn't rely entirely on social media is very solid. At the end of the day, the brand has to 'own' something. While I'd say social networking is here for the long run, the individual social nets are a different story. As you mention, MySpace is a good warning shot.
Near term, Facebook offers brands a good way to make a quick connection with their customers, er, fans. For those brands that haven't really gotten the social media ball rolling, or with very limited budgets, FB offers a good entry point.
I also wonder if social networking may not have the same room for 3 top brands at the top, as outlined by Al Ries years ago. With Facebook Connect, even Facebook seems to recognize that at the core, their value is more about maintaining a database of people and their friends than it is in being the sole way that all those friends network and communicate. Thus making room for the content providers, the real centers of community, to rally their citizens around.
Thanks for a thought-provoking post.
Very good line of thinking and I'd like to see you turn this into an Ad Age thought piece or something to get the entire industry debating this!
One big issue with today's platforms like MySpace, YouTube and Facebook is that they are simply not sustainable in the longer term because they have no real business model. At some point they will either fold/degrade or be forced to throw in more annoying ad units to try and pay the bills.
On the other hand, I like the iPhone platform. There is a clear business model here and incentive for Apple to make the product better while not getting in the brands' way.
Kevin,
Thx to Bob for tweeting this.
What does this mean from an action step perspective if you are a brand manager?
Do you think brands should go out and start social portals like MyBarack Obama.com or SuccessNation.com.
Or should they go out and write blogs like Dell, South West, Method, General Motors, and Zappos?
Or should they do both. Or do neither? Or does it just depend on the brand and the consumer?
ps Check out the private email I sent you.
thanks for the comment Elliott!
depends on the brand or consumer but, generally, I'd say brands need to own something that connects with consumers. portals whether old-school or social focused are valuable intermediaries with big groups of aggregated consumers but direct relationships between brands and consumers enable the best insights and, ultimately, the best opportunity for customization of brand messages based on declared or inferred consumer needs.
sorry I took so long to respond. just spotted this good comment while clearing out some spam comments.