Look around any airport departures area and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands, of logos. Destination stations are an iconographists nirvana.
Those excitedly stating the day of the brand is over need only wander through an environment like this to think again. Brands are signposts, identities encapsulated, and put in your face to say ‘buy me’.
With more information coming our way than ever, these signposts are a shorthand to navigate quickly, to help make the most of blink decisions, to tune in or tune out in a nanosecond.
If a brand is distinctive and recognizable it serves a helpful purpose by standing for something an audience can recognise. So much for brands as signposts.
Some brands go further than this. They’re recognisebly a signal, a conversation, and not just a company. They’re brands coming to terms with two-way dialogue and enabling their people to have those conversations in real time. These are the types of organizations I like to work with.
Enabled by social technology and communications, these brands recognise that data is the new oil, a new lubricant for business performance, and that data streams flowing back and forth are a vital force, a lifeblood.
By monitoring and understanding perceptions, they’re also honing their abilities to move according to dynamic information, they’re going off the page to be fleeter of foot than a business plan, tuning into their ecosystem to become biologically more agile than their peer group. They’re gearing up to be the mainstays of their communities.
But even these are not necessarily businesses with a pulse. There’s a difference between making a noise and generating a powerful experience. And the key to powerful experiences? They linger and they can be recalled.
Measuring click throughs, page rates and dwell times are of course useful in terms of signal measurement, they can determine some signal strength, but a visceral business can also possess the scope to harness the action potential within a relationship, and it is retrospective analysis and recall that registers the depth of an impression. That’s what tells us when something has moved us.
Digital media may be inching towards real time dialogue, but it’s still not built into the way many organizations interconnect with their users. We have a long way to go. While we’ve been busy looking forward at brave new social futures over the last year, there is, as yet, little recognition of the power of harnessing hindsight, and the importance and the opportunities to be gained from retrospective search.
Particularly at this time of the year, as we take stock and gather perspectives on the last one, it becomes easier to realize what things stood out as making a difference. If something can’t be remembered, it’s questionable to define it as having had much of an impact.
The way the web has virtually eliminated the cost of transaction means without this kind of visceral interrelationship it’s arguable whether any value creation has taken place.
Truly social businesses will have memories, something to incorporate into the communications equation. Along with dramatically reducing the cost of distribution and transaction, the web also dramatically lowers the cost of organization. Enterprises and ideas with a pulse are the ones around which people convene all over the world, and the ones that people want to flock to.
It is their strength of vision that’s the differentiator within these enterprises. Being able to connect with a well articulated vision lies at the heart of ability to move people and engender commitment within them. What lies beyond the bottom line is the anti-factory mantra and what’s likely to generate the most out of people.
If the social web powers new levels of relationship and lowers the cost of transactions, then inspiring movement figuratively within people is a big part of its potential. And, as mentioned in this blog before, if the hashtag defines new meeting points around which interests can accumulate, so new value can be found in enterprises that connect, that pulsate, inspire and organise people in this way.
Brands with pulses are essentially experiences, whether they are corporate or personal brands. The best ones are powerful experiences, they are fabric of life brands and linchpin ingredients in people’s lives.
it’s interesting to think how all this will affect marketing in the future, whilst this is being typed at 40,000 over the mid Atlantic, and I’m travelling to meet up with a #linchpin of some magnitude.
Interesting too, maybe, to think what your brand is about. Is it a signpost, a signal or a pulse?
