The Era of Relationship in Branding by Bob Garfield, Doug Levy AdAge
Excerpt:
Welcome to the Relationship Era. Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling position. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element.
Begin with a simple experiment. Type “I love Apple” into your Google search bar. You will get 3.27 million hits. If you type “I love Starbucks,” 2.7 million hits. Zappos: 1.19 million.
“I love Citibank” gets you 21,100. AT&T Wireless: 7,890. Exxon: 4,730. Dow Chemical: 3. Out of 7 billion human beings, three! Just to put that into context, type “I love Satan” and you get 293,000 hits. Now consider that in the past 12 months, Citibank, AT&T Wireless, Exxon Mobil and Dow have spent $2 billion on advertising. How’s that working out for them?
The methodology here may not be especially rigorous, but the results dramatize two immutable facts of contemporary marketing life:
1. Millions of people will, of their own volition, announce to the world their affection for a brand. Not for a person, an artwork or a dessert but for a product or service. Congratulations. People care deeply about you.
2. Whether you like it or not, your brand is inextricably entwined in such relationships. If you were to type in “I hate Exxon,” you’d get 2.16 million hits—not counting the “I hate Exxon Mobil” Facebook page. Though people are listening less to your messages, it doesn’t stop them from thinking and talking about you. And each of those expressions of like, dislike, ardor or disgust has an exponent that reflects the outward ripples of social interaction.
In short, as you have realized but most likely not come to grips with, you are being evaluated 24/7 in countless conversations that have zero to do with your ad slogan. On the contrary, they are about your brand’s essential self—which behooves you to think very hard about your essential self.
This has ceased to be an option. History has made that decision for you.
