"Social media" (the myriad of online, interconnected communities and communication portals) has had a profound impact on the way that brands view the consumer. It's the gospel here at Holland-Mark: this is a new age, consumers are taking control of conversation and demanding that brands, products, and companies listen, take note, and make changes in the way they speak and treat them (us). As a consumer, the shift in engagement tactics and tone is evident. More common than ever are stories like that of Domino's and Comcast, stories that give huge brands something that's evaded them for decades, humanity.

On the surface, it seems simple enough: face the truth, admit your faults, and start building real relationships with your market. The complicated underbelly is that these brands didn't have a choice. The voice of the consumer--the power of the consumer-- became too much. Eventually business as usual would be a death sentence. For Domino's it was a realization that people hated their pizza. Interestingly enough, people had been hating their pizza for years and years, but it wasn't until social media gave those Domino's-hating pizza consumers a megaphone that their shitty pizza gave way to the worst case scenario: the public opinion became the truth. And then people decided they'd just buy Papa John's.

For Comcast there came a point when size and market share were no match for disgruntled customers who were ready and willing to walk. They were angry, tired of being mistreated and all too aware of their choice. The alternatives (Dish Network, Verizon) were going to start eating at Comcast's pie because they were willing to give the customer more than a service, they were willing to add intangible value.

But for every empowering brand experience there is an equal number of disenchanting and disempowering brand experiences. These experiences are made worse by the assumption on the part of the consumer that he/she is empowered, that his/her voice should always matter, that someone is always listening. As a consumer it is exponentially more frustrating to feel powerless in this economy. It seems inevitable that brands, companies, and products who refuse to prove their value cannot and will not subsist. At Holland-Mark we equate this to being imperative to your customer. Getting to and being imperative is about more than providing a good and/or service, but delivering value. And while the extinction of these consumer-opinion-ignorant brands seems inevitable, many of them will choose to die a slow death by refusing to acknowledge the power of the consumer.

In many senses, we're returning to a simpler time. Before capitalism became about goods for the sake of goods an services for the sake of services, goods and services were valued based on the... value. Monopolies, mega-chains, and monster discount stores distorted the value equation.  Brands became entitled and eventually the cost of a good was the cost of the good and did not promise a positive experience. Building brand loyalty didn't really matter because the game wasn't about relationships, it was about size and price. That's changing. It has to. The people have too much power.

Choosing to die a slow death is more than just stupid, it's short sighted. Many brands--our clients included-- have found that delivering value is more interesting and more gratifying than simply offering a service or product. Being imperative is about building relationships, fostering brand loyalty, and delighting in the satisfaction of your customers. Loyalty translates to brand ambassadors and genuine, word-of-mouth marketing. In place of expensive market research there is good old fashion listening, real-time customer interaction becomes a breeding ground for new product ideas and organic service improvements. The danger of ignoring the customer is because they're vocal, it's because they're empowered and more often than not they are empowered in ways that can drive business forward. When asked, they are willing to share. When treated with respect they are willing to share with others. And when convinced of the imperative value of your product, they become a delighted annuity, a rich source of information, insight, and the occasional constructive criticism.

All major decisions in life are made emotionally.  It's a statement once made by Bob Minihan, Holland-Mark's ECD during the late 90s.
And its true.  Who you marry, who you hire, the job you take, the house you buy - emotion is the central driver of the decision. 
For all of our fixation on the rational, the functional, the tangible, at the end of the day it's feeling that brings people towards our
brands, gets them to stay and prompts them to come back.  Now there's a role for the rational stuff, for the facts, they're just secondary to
the need for visceral engagement.   And if you want proof regarding the power of emotion and the supporting role of proof, two different
but affirming bits of research. 

The first is a University of Michigan study referenced in a recent article by Joe Keohane at the Globe.  The research asserts that when
people are presented with facts that refute their belief about something, the absolute proof actually makes them believe what they believe
more absolutely.  Oh my.  It turns out that we hate to be wrong more than we value the truth.  The emotion of losing is simply anathema and
we will override all logic to avoid the feeling.  Double oh my. The study and Joe suggest that this Maslow-motivated psychology (neurosis?)
also makes us willing to accept bad information, facts we fundamentally know are not true, if they support our beliefs.   Makes you realize
why people don't seem to care about the quality of user generated content as source material and the lack of fact checking behind it
(including this post I suppose...). 

The second study referenced a while back in Scientific American reveals that when people meet other people (or brands) for the first time
they subconsciously assess two things, in this order: warmth and competence.  Feelings first, then facts.   In our brand strategy work we
extend that construct one step: emotion, facts, emotion.  You are attracted by what you feel, you seek facts to confirm those feelings, and
 then you move forward with those feelings as the overriding context for your relationship/association with the brand. 

All of this points to the need/opportunity to position your brand and engage emotionally. Regardless of what you're marketing and who
you're marketing to, the doorway you want to offer into your brand should be emotionally crafted.   Emotion motivates, facts validate. 
Think about it.  Or don't. 

Since the inception of the first primitive forms of email, the appearance of the worldwide web, and now the rise of social media, there
has been an inference that the ability to reach more people, more often, any time at no cost is nothing but a wonderful thing.  We've moved to a world where being linked in and linking, friending and being friended, tweeting and re-tweeting,  is viewed as somewhere between a cost of doing business and an essential aspect of a fulfilling life.  But like many new forms of societal exchange it comes at a price.  This new standard is causing people to forget the unwritten rules of friendship and personal association and in doing so create what I call  "network imposition". 

I first experienced network imposition last fall on a crisp November day, my birthday.  From the moment I arose to the time I retired I received a multitude of wall based birthday wishes and direct emails from my 300 facebook friends.   The only problem is that most of these people really aren't my friends.  I have never supped with them.  In some cases I have never met them.  Or if I did meet them it was thirty years ago and I have no idea who they are today.  And they don't know me.  But more importantly if there truly were my friends, wouldn't they call me on my birthday?  Or send me a card? Hell, how about a gift?  Is the sending of a generic "happy birthday" to someone you don't really know because it's easy to do so a genuine and heartfelt act?  To me it seems like an imposition.   Now in this case it's pretty much my fault.  After all, I'm the one that said yes to facebook friendship with these people.  So the clear way to clear up the problem is to remind myself of my definition of a friend and to consistently apply it when people try to friend me or I friend others.    In this post from Google they discuss how even the moniker of "friends" is not a helpful one and the need for all of us to be more mindful of sharing content at a micro-social network level. 

In more recent months I've begun to experience another and perhaps more conflicted network imposition:  the email solicitation from someone I know through business to support a personal charity fund raising effort.  This is a little awkward.  As much as I believe in giving, and giving back, the dynamic at play here puts a bit of undue pressure on the recipient of the ask.  f we don't contribute are we de-valuing the business relationship? If we do contribute how much is enough?  Should our company be making the contribution because it really is, in a indirect way, all about business?  I'm not asking people to stop soliciting me but to remember the unwritten rules of personal engagement and which network I am really in. In fact if I had my druthers we would all step back and realize that there are various types of networks within our networks with different "rules of engagement".  Friends should be treated as friends.  Business relationships are just that.  People you don't really know should not be treated as people you do.  And if there's any doubt about what is right or just, don't hit enter.  Because if you do it will most likely be an imposition.  

NEBHE team preparing for launch of Content Hub. Stay tuned. Good stuff ahead.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Twenty years ago the shelf life of relevancy was at least a good ten years.  If you had a product or service offering that carried even a mildly distinct and relevant value proposition it was virtually guaranteed to produce healthy profits, loyal customers and decent top-line growth for a decade or more.  Polaroid's shelf life was seventy years.  Pan Am's even more.  Hell, Woolworth's lasted 118 years.  Now much has been written about how and why brands die so let's not tread that well-trodden ground.  My point is that the times literally have changed; that the shelf life of relevancy is down to years and maybe even months.  Any marketer that thinks that some combination of intellectual property, brand value, happy customers, price advantage, etc. serves as long-term competitive insulation is most probably naive and on the verge of getting their clock cleaned.

So the first order of business is to accept that ugly reality.  The second is to look the cold, hard truth in the eyes. To candidly examine where the chinks are in your brand armor and/or where the world seems to be heading in terms of buying or not buying what you're selling.  In Clay Christiansen's oldie but goodie book from 1996, "The Innovator's Dilemma" he repeatedly suggests that one cause of leading brands ultimately losing to new "disruptive" technologies is that they aren't willing to embrace the truth and believe that their leadership position is vulnerable to anything.  Some call that hubris.

The third order of business is to un-bridle corporate imagination while giving direct consideration to the equity zone.   What does that mean?   Visioning, envisioning, and re-visioning are the tasks of hope, of possibility, of what if.  But they are tasks that must be mindful of the real equities of the brand vis a vis the trend line of social equity.  Most brand forget that point, which is why most line extensions or segment expansion efforts fail.  Take Oldsmobile.  They tried to go younger when their equities were clearly older.  And they were going up against a declining social equity trend line, e.g. their demo was dying off and the new generation wanted nothing to do with them.  I hear VW wants to go mainstream, pull away from the kids.  Uh oh.  Which brings me to the fourth order:

Growth may not always be the right goal. In fact fixation on growth may be the recipe for a rapid demise.  For Polaroid to have transitioned from silver halide film to digital imaging probably would have required it getting smaller in order to get bigger.  Now the shareholders wouldn't have liked that message much, but look what they ended up with...  The other side of it is that perhaps all brands have a fixed shelf life (religions and nation states aside)?  Can Corporate America accept the concept of  "Inevitable Obsolescence"?

The fifth "to do" is to invest in intellectual and analytical rigor.  Because even if you've accepted the reality, are in eye contact with the truth, and have concocted a lovely vision of your brand's next incarnation, the devil (or salvation) can be in the details.  And again most brands, big and small, are simply not very good at examining the data and the details to validate or invalidate what they're planning.  And once they execute they tend not to be very good at measuring the results of their efforts.  Make data your best friend. 

These five orders of business represent somewhere between the requisite cultural mindset and a strategic planning sensibility to extend the shelf life of relevancy.  Increasing shelf life, or the "time value of your brand" demands embracing and responding to the truth of it all, in real time and real ways.  It's not hard, but it can be a wee uncomfortable.   But so can the alternative. 

When I began working at Holland-Mark, my dear friend-turned-colleague Chris Colbert gifted me with a subscription to The New Yorker. An odd sort of gift, but if you know myself and Christopher, you can understand how the gift is appropriate. The combination of opinions, articles, art reviews, and fiction provides ample fodder for conversation, as well as insight into the world at large. Over the last two years I've experienced the much discussed "ANYA: Acute New Yorker Anxiety", a product of lots of New Yorkers arriving more quickly than I could possibly read them, resulting in panic and taking stacks of the magazine on any flight over two hours.

A true sign of the times, however, was my recent decision to transition my New Yorker subscription to my Kindle. Every week my issue sneaks silently onto the homepage and waits for me to notice. If I don't get around to it, it politely archives itself so as not to bother me, or make me feel incompetent. Eventually I get around to reading back issues on the stair climber.

The transition has not been without its problems, though. If Chris wanders by my office to chat about an article, I can't recall the issue by the cover picture. I have no visual cue as to which issues I have and have not read. If I love an article I can't tear it out and share it with my mom, or bring it in and pass it around the office. The covers are no longer useful for collaging. The Kindle has taught me to be a true reader. With little to no distractions from the content I must truly love the content. Moreover, I must believe that the content, and nothing else, is worth the price tag. I pay $2.99 a month to have my New Yorker delivered to me. There are no ads. There is no printing. There is not shipping, hauling, sorting, organizing. Nothing. I pay for a file--the same file as everyone else--to be wirelessly delivered to my Kindle while I sleep.

At the recommendation of Chris, I went into my archive to read an article in last week's New Yorker entitled Publish or Perish: Can the iPad topple the Kindle and save the book business? Written (well) by Ken Auletta, the article explored the burgeoning relationships between Apple and the various publishing giants, desperate to be saved from their current state of existence. Amazon is vilified for its efforts to offer content to consumers for the low price of $9.99. Maniacally, or perhaps egomaniacally, Jobs stands at the front of the proverbial masses, assuring them that Apple will not allow this to continue. Amazon will be beaten into submission or be abandoned by publishers. The iPad is here. Content can now cost more.

As I'm reading the article, on my Kindle, I'm getting angry. If a hardcover book costs $25, a 50% markup, and a paperback $10-15, how does it stand to reason that an invisible book would cost equal to either? Production has been all but eliminated. There is a litany of explanations about the math and the reasoning, but it's a thin veil, under which lies a very simple truth: in the absence of a  need for a physical vehicle for content, publishers are even more irrelevant. These inflated price tags are nothing more than conspiratorial handshakes among friends desperate to band together to save their waning equity.

The content, and only the content, is now the only value. I cannot share my books. I cannot write in them. I cannot pass them on to a friend or put them on my shelf. No longer will my books act as functional decor. When I'm done reading my book it is archived. Out into space it goes, where I will likely never see it again. I won't be selling it on Amazon or Half.com. The book was worth its content and the impact it had on my life. And that is all.

So what is the value of the content? And what value does the publisher hold for me now? The value of a marketer?

For my birthday this year a dear friend bought me a Kindle. Upon receiving it, I was reminded of my attitude towards that little Amazon device only a year earlier: it was stupid. Why would I need a digital book? I have lots of books--real books-- and I can read those just fine. Oh how silly and naive I was. Within days I was hooked. Couldn't put it down. My Acute New Yorker Anxiety was relieved by having my subscription moved to the Kindle, where it silently arrives each Sunday night. (The back issues are automatically archived so I don't feel like a failure.) I went from being a reader to being an avid reader. I was flying through books, three or four a week.

And then my screen died. Dead. Like a computer screen that's been struck by lightening. And I was right in the middle of one of my most anticipated reads of this year. Panicked I went to Amazon.com to try to figure out what to do. The customer service page told me that if I gave them my phone number a customer service rep would call me back immediately. I did, India called, and upon uttering the words "broken" and "Kindle" my called was whisked away to a Kindle Specialist named Bernie. "It's broken," I told him. "Really broken? You tried to restart it," he replied. "Dead," I said.

Bernie told me that my new Kindle was being shipped out to me immediately, free of charge. And, because I was so concerned about not being able to find out what the hell is going on with Mattia in The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Bernie authorized Saturday delivery. I couldn't believe it. Bernie didn't even ask me if I dropped it, poured water on it, accidentally set a cup of tea on it. He didn't seem to care. He didn't care that I "got it from a friend" and had no proof of purchase. I was a Kindle owner. My Kindle was broken. Bernie was going to make everything okay again.

After I hung up the phone I got to thinking. This level of customer service was too good. Even for Amazon. I've been through the return song and dance before. A pair of boots rubs a blister after three wears, but I can't return them because I wore them. I've even gone toe to toe was Amazon before. Why on earth were they being so good to me? I deduced that it was one of three things:

1. Upon checking my buying history they realized that I'd been ODing on Nora Roberts novels, self help books, and the New Yorker which meant I was some crazy, liberal, cat lady on mood stabilizers that no one, least of all Bernie the Kindle Specialist, wanted to deal with.

2. Upon checking my buying history they realized I have no self control and have purchased no less than $200 worth of reading material in the month I've owned the Kindle.

3. Amazon is scared shitless that the iPad is launching next week.

I certainly don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I can't help but feel Amazon's benevolent Kindle customer service actions have less to do with policy than panic. Kudos to them, though. The iPad release will hardly be noticed by this girl. I'll be eyeball deep in my Kindle.

"The ultimate goal of any service interaction is delight. To that end we must call upon the most feared of all marketing tactics: honesty. Because nothing is more delightful and refreshing than open, honest communication. Nothing." - A smarty pants 

Take this test and find out for yourself.
(If the link is broken: http://www.thebrandquiz.com/)

How else can you capture gems like that?