Brands Now Belong To You
If you’ve been following the twitter craze and how the marketing world is experimenting with it, then you’ve probably heard about the Skittles fiasco. In a bold stroke of bravery (or short-sightedness), the agency folks covering Skittles decided to make the Skittles.com homepage a twitter stream of the world’s commentary using the word “Skittles.” Anyone who wanted to could twitter about Skittles and see their 140 character “tweet” on the frontpage of Skittles.com. What started as a clever and amusing marketing campaign quickly got out of hand as people started to take advantage of their control over the brand. Postings about Skittles and political affiliations, diarrhea, and outright off-topic and offensive musings quickly put an end to the experiment.
More than a marketing faux pas, I saw the Skittles experiment as a key milestone in the ownership of brands. One could argue that brands have always been the property of their constituents - the customers, employees, and partners. Afterall, a brand is ultimately determined by what people think. However, individual opinions of a brand have always been overpowered and washed out by the power of advertising and mass-media. Until now, there has never been a mechanism to showcase individual opinions as a collective consensus.
The Skittles incident is a sign of the times. Any brand that searches twitter, the blogosphere, or facebook updates will now see countless peoples’ missives about their brand experience. Packaged and presented for all to see, this could be the greatest or worst thing that ever happened to a company.
Alas, brands have been reclaimed by the people who always owned them in the first place – the constituents. It makes you wonder if the value of “brand equity” listed as an asset on a company’s balance sheet is now up for grabs? Perhaps there is a new measure of brand equity – the consensus of the brand’s constituents? Will the future of a product or service now be determined by “brand consensus?”
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