You may know the brand. But, the stages and levels through which the brand is being assembled, tailored and disseminated defy knowing. We live in a collaborative time. Manufacture – including even co-creation – and certainly distribution are undetectable in modern brand outcome.
We have entered the era of The Great Convergence. There are no channels any more. It’s only you and the customer.
I know a women who has 40,000 followers on Twitter. Several times a day, she Tweets about her shopping experiences. Like it or not, she’s now part of your marketing team.
As brand curators and custodians, inhale the signposts dotting digital space:
• “For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” (Seth Godin)
• “Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.” (Kevin Kelly)
• “Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent – all depending on who wields it and how.” (Steven D. Levitt)
• “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.” (James Surowiecki)
• “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.” (Malcolm Gladwell)
• “For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” (Steve Jobs)
• “Good is the enemy of great.” (Jim Collins)