Marshall McLuhan famous said, "The medium is the message" to imply the influences of the medium in how a message is perceived. He went so far as to say that specific content had little effect on society -- for example, broadcasting children's shows or violent programming on TV made little difference because it was the medium of TV that created the basis of our perception. (And I personally love that phrase because of its spiritual undertones; in particular, its relation to Gandhi's "My life is my message.")
But Jonathan Salem Baskin, a branding expert, argues that with ubiquitous interactivity on broadband Internet, the message is now the message. And what this ultimately implies is that branding is dead. Brands used to be mini-stories to help us fill in the blanks, but as each consumer became a producer (and a watchdog), companies no longer can/need-to serve that purpose.
We, as CharityFocus, have never been any good at branding. I, personally, am terrible with branding; I have no problem talking about other people's brands but promoting CharityFocus always feels a bit selfish to me. I've often spoken to large audiences without ever saying the word CharityFocus. The negative side effect of this is that people start ascribing value in singular personality and fail to see the nuances of collective effort. But on the flip side, it radically increases our integrity because unlike every other organized effort that pushes itself, we let the message do the talking. Twenty years, we would've never scaled with this approach; but coincidentally, we live in a paradigm where this approach works wonders.
Here are Jonathan's reasons why brands don't matter anymore:
Vague is out. Details are in.
While every generation has likely bemoaned the coarsening of daily life, the digital revolution has captured even the smallest bits of experience, so people expect to see, hear, or otherwise experience detail, not suggestion.
Trends are fragmented into moments.
The two founding tenets of a cultural trend -- a topic and an audience -- have been blown apart into millions of fragments, as people can aggregate for any subject, large or small, and often concurrently. There are no more trends, only moments.
Repetition risks becoming noise.
The logic of advertising used to be that repetition built brand retention. The opposite seems to be true today, as people have learned to tune out information that isn’t directly relevant to them. Worse, if it’s repeated, it risks becoming perceived as a negative.
Choice is real-time.
It’s hard to even imagine a world wherein people couldn’t shop, talk, or otherwise interact anywhere, anytime, but branding used to address set points in time/behavior (shopping trip, meal time). That’s no longer the case.
Virtual experience is the new dreamscape.
One of the drivers of brands has always been associating a product, place, or service with a sense of ‘escape’ or relief from the daily routine. Now much of that escape is available virtually, which threatens to obviate one of the primary drivers of consumer purchase.
Recognition isn’t the same as relevance.
The renaissance of viral communications -- funny videos or ads that you share with friends -- is based on the traditional branding premise that recognition matters about all else. But busy consumers care more about relevance to what they’re doing; if an ad is relevant to 'being funny,' it's not necessarily remembered for much else.
No more secret codes.
A typical branding tool has always been to create some word or technical-sounding term—X12 power, or ultra-surfactant quotient, or something like that -- and presume to then "own" it as an exclusive brand attribute. Consumers can look that stuff up now, and discover that it’s usually about as real as the Battlestar Galatica spin-offs your marketing gurus are also imagining.
Conversations are just the beginning.
While most of the attention in the mediaspace has been about conversational, or social media, branding has been embodied as participation in said dialogs. Yet, as just more fodder for conversation, brands are reduced to what they once were, perhaps 100 years ago—names, and little more. The brand ‘ing’ occurs by the very conversations themselves.
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