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PUBLICATIONS FINANCIAL FIRMS GOVERNMENT/NGO
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AUTOMOTIVE Chrysler Motors Corp. General Motors Mercedes-Benz NA Mercedes-Benz USA Mitsubishi Motor Sales Nissan North America Volkswagen of America Harley-Davidson TECHNOLOGY ENTERTAINMENT CONSUMER PRODUCTS
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With all of the controversy going on about broken business models, brain-dead agency management, no account accountability and the like, one thing has become perfectly clear. The old days of “client-agency relationship” are dead and deservedly gone. Hoo-ah! Long live the new days of client-anybody-who-can-move-the-needle relationships. Time was when a brand management executive might have had four or maybe five direct reports, externally. Now the number is more like twenty-four to twenty-five. With good reason. What famed screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood holds even more true today about Madison Avenue. “Nobody knows nothin’.” But then you knew that. For our part we have certainly been cheering clients on in this “Dump the Brain Dead” war chant of theirs. We did our part to fire up the User-Generated Content movement. We warned them about the onslaught of the Post-Advertising Era. And most recently we have been urging them to embrace the Adaptive Branding mantra of “change or die.” From the correspondence we’ve been getting from the guys and gals on column right, it seems like folks have been listening. The decline and fall of the “Agency of Record” status is certainly a strong indication that this new client skepticism is spreading like the Black Plague. Attaboys all around. For our part we are doing everything we can to continue to define our Adaptive Branding initiative to anybody who will stand still long enough to listen. Certainly the relationship between the Brand and the audience (as with any social system) is an innate mish-mash of complexity and constant change. As social agents the members of brand management and audience alike are constantly enmeshed in a web of connections with one another. Through a variety of adaptive processes, both brand and audience must successfully navigate through a world of attraction and rejection scenarios that never end. Modeling this world is the essence of the Adaptive Branding work being done by GASP and the IAPIA. Our objective is to accurately predict and react to the actions and predictions of both brand and audience alike. What we know is that the Adaptive Brand and the audience have the power to alter the world in which they live. What we do not know is how much sophistication is required on both parts to alter their world effectively. What is also unknown is an understanding of what other conditions are necessary for these alterations to happen. In general, the link between brand/audience sophistication and system outcome is poorly understood by all of us who brand stuff for a living. It is our hope to learn more. What we do know is that both brand and audience receive information about their worlds and then act. Traditional economic modeling tends to have a very narrow view of the issues that arise in acquiring information, processing it, and then acting upon it. Economists love to work with best-case scenarios, where agents get the best info, process it with absolute logic and then act accordingly. Which is one reason the current business model for marketing is “in the shop.” This ability to ignore reality has become a crucial component in scientific progress, just like answering some brat’s incessant “But whyyyyyys?” with “Because I said so.” The truth of the matter is that even if we knew the fundamentals of the world that binds the brand to the audience, we may not be able to use that knowledge to reconstruct a higher-level system or world. The whole may not only become more, but very different from the sum of its parts. This “more is different” hypothesis provides a strong motivation for attempting to model such a complex system. Perhaps the answers lie in scrapping what exists between the brand and the audience and starting from scratch. Which is a lot like saying to the body of knowledge we know as traditional branding, “Drop dead .” Stay tuned. |
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