January 8th, 2007

Blogs enable more than they begin

From Brands for the Chattering Masses (NYT - link works right now but may go behind pay wall at any moment)

“FOR many, many decades, successful branding — one of the corporate world’s holy grails — involved a clear set of rules. Produce quality goods at the right price. Frame the value in memorable messages seen by millions on television and in print. Then fine-tune the pitch by measuring sales and evaluating consumer responses through letters, phone calls, focus groups and surveys.

Nowhere have those rules been applied more effectively than here, the home of Procter & Gamble, which made a fortune turning Crest, Pampers, and Tide into must-have items on household shopping lists. But the branding game has changed radically, largely because of the myriad choices the Internet provides consumers and because of the economic influence of widespread Web pontificating, known as the blogosphere, which barely existed as a popular force until about four years ago.

As consumers eagerly post word-of-mouth commentary in online communities, message boards and Web logs, a straightforward question confronts brandmeisters: Who wins and who loses as time-tested practices of mass production and mass marketing are undermined by the informed and often cranky voices of the knowledge age? “

My question is: if the blogosphere didn’t exist 4 years ago, what did? Weren’t those same people experiencing the same brands and sharing their thoughts via word-of-mouth? Of course they were!

Blogs do enable more conversation. But, the reason isn’t that the conversations weren’t happening before, the reason is that they were just never recorded and easily accessible.

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Comments ( 4 Responses so far )

1. Pauric on January 8th, 2007 (Comment) #

Forgive me for stretching the evolution analogy a little. Word of mouth is climbing out of the primordial soup and growing legs in the form of blogging. Some aspects of marketing will die off, unabe to adapt to the new environment. Some new forms will appear such as pay to post. As the consumer voice get louder I think successful marketing will become more focused, ’specialised’.

2. McChris on January 9th, 2007 (Comment) #

Isn’t the big difference that blog comments are easily retrievable by strangers while traditional word-of-mouth requires some degree of social connectedness and being in the same place? I may hear friends complain about a product and file it away, but if I’m thinking of purchasing a product, I’ll do a Google query to see what the message boards and blogs have to say about it. Even if most customers are satisfied, some very negative stuff is apt to appear in the first page of search results since a user needs to be sufficiently motivated (either by irritation or pleasure) to post about a product, and other blogs are more apt to link to a negative post about an established brand. Consumers have access to a far broader range of information via the Web than they would have in a mass-media and word-of-mouth world.

3. Teddy Schroeder on January 10th, 2007 (Comment) #

Conversations among blogs is still not “easily accessible.” The problems of older brand marketing and new media marketing among the blogosphere still have the same problem: getting the word-of-mouth process started. McChris’ comment about search summarizes exactly the use case of how blogs and review sites are used. Or, in other words, social web design must tackle the other end of this problem. That is, push people to what other people are talking about and what’s getting word-of-mouth, not just record the word-of-mouth that’s happening for people looking for the information. Corporate branding will always require some amount of centralization, or corporations at least will always try to impose that structure, for the sole reason of making sure that the word-of-mouth process starts.

4. 占い on May 16th, 2007 (Comment) #

Blogs enable more than they begin

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