ONLINE BRANDING
“THIS IS SOCIAL BRAND-BUILDING AT ITS BEST: IT’S NOT BRASHLY TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING, BUT IT’S INTUITIVE AND MAKES YOU FEEL POSITIVE TOWARDS THE BRANDS.”
opening hours are an impediment to spending, are surely a thing of the past. When your target market is accustomed to mobile transactions, you don’t make an advert—you make a sale.
Well-connected smartphones enable rich and regular interactions with customers. According to MarketingSherpa, video content is already the most effective tactic for mobile engagement. Tis isn’t so surprising when you consider that people spend more time and visit more pages per visit on YouTube than any other social network. What is surprising is that brands don’t seem to be making the most of this channel. Many aren’t really treating it like a social network at all, more a repository for movies.
Touchstorm’s analysis of the top 5,000 YouTube channels reveals that only 74 are ‘branded’. Tere are questions over the study’s qualification of ‘brand’—curiously it doesn’t count celebrities and media companies—but even so, for big companies with big budgets to command, less than 2 percent aſter seven years of YouTube, is staggering.
Within that, there are some notable successes, eg, Red Bull. You’d expect a video of a man jumping to earth from space to get some attention (35 million views), but the video of
street trial bike rider
Danny MacAskill bunny-hopping his way from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye has nearly as many hits (29 million).
Content is not king—content is the masses
When the web became social, brands had to shiſt their marketing mentality from broadcasting content to curating conversations. Tis is a vital part of managing brands online, and will continue to be so. A recent Twitter love-in involving Tesco Mobile, Yorkshire Tea and Jaffa Cakes went viral, showing the value of social media managers who
36 Trademarks Brands and the Internet
are empowered to use their initiative and have a little fun. Tis is social brand-building at its best: it’s not brashly trying to sell you something, but it’s intuitive and sets an attitude that makes you feel positive towards the brands involved.
Social media disasters, on the other hand, tend to involve a breakdown in normal human decency or common sense. A classic fail is when brands exploit sympathy to hoodwink a few extra followers. When a brand asks you to “click ‘like’ to pay your respects” it makes you wish there was a ‘hate’ button. It’s okay to promote. Social media platforms are a good place to do it. Just don’t use tragedy as your vehicle.
We’re now on the brink of another big development, one that will change
the way brands create
content and engage customers. Te billions of smartphones out there are more than just screens waiting for sticky branded content. Tis misses the point, or at least half the point. Tose phones are also cameras—input devices that people are using to capture, express and share their lives in exponentially increasing numbers. And people are surprisingly good at taking a theme, adapting it and making it run and run. Tis adoption and transfer of cultural memes is one of the key characteristics of viral ‘living’ content, and the brands that harness it will strike gold. Tey will enlist an army of roving creatives, and embrace and affirm them like never before.
Brands have already started doing this. Burberry’s Art of the Trench campaign encouraged customers to upload Instagram pictures of themselves to create ‘a living document of the trench coat and the people who wear it’. It’s part social brand engagement, part fashion time capsule, and it gives people a chance to stand alongside professionally-snapped models.
Tis is just the tip of the iceberg. Te Google Glass Explorer Program is asking people to help them test and develop applications for its super
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smart specs. When people realise that they can use brands as vehicles to promote themselves or explore their interests, the creation of brands becomes a social thing. Tis has huge benefits. Relevance becomes hardwired. Having distributed, ad hoc content generation makes it easier to localise and discover. And we’re not just talking about lo-fi content. Tere’s every reason for brands and social platforms to find ways of monetising this content so people are incentivised to get involved, and rewarded when their content makes an impact. If you mobilise the ‘ad hocracy’ in a culture of directed but flexible co-creation, the possibilities are mind- boggling.
What about protection?
If brands are assets that should be protected, fundamental shiſts in the way brands are created and managed presents a changing legal landscape. New interpretation and legislation is oſten the case with new technology, but it’s never been seen on this scale at this pace.
Protection of digital assets, which are by their nature easy to replicate, is a challenge in itself. A combination of utility and design patents, and copyright and trademark law, gives brand owners a good web of protection, but as always, these are only as good as their enforcement. Unless infringements are detected and the law applied consistently, the measures in place won’t serve their purpose.
Tere’s also the issue of who owns the assets when content is user-generated but propagated by the brand. Clarity up front and fair remuneration will do a lot to make this side of things work.
One can’t help thinking that the solutions to all these issues lie in the nature of the thing in which they arise. Technology promises untold opportunities for brands, and it should play its part in safeguarding the assets that emerge from it. If brand creation becomes more social, so should brand protection. If content generation becomes more distributed, more people need to be educated about the responsibilities that go with that, including trademark law.
Above all, marketers, brand owners, trademark and technology specialists need to use the new tools available to work together to help brand protection evolve. However exciting it is to sail off into the great unknown, it pays to make sure your boat’s sound.
Chris Davenport is head of verbal identity at Interbrand. He can be contacted at:
chris.davenport@interbrand.com
www.worldipreview.com
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