There are a number of different ways brands can establish leadership online, from providing a groundbreaking service like Amazon.com, to creating a strong brand position that completely resonates with a core customer base, which is what RedBull has done. To identify potential leadership strategies that a brand can adopt in any given category, I have created a 7 stage positioning chart.

Brand strategies for traditional and empowered consumers

Now the first 4 stages are the brand positions that have defined traditional marketing since the 1980’s. These are Stage 1: Generic or unbranded, Stage 2: Brand as reference, Stage 3: Brand as personality and Stage 4: Brand as icon.

Stage 1, or Generic Brands are often commodity products, such as oil or aspirin – products which, for the most part, are all pretty much the same. In generic brands, volume, price and accessibility determine sales. As you see in the chart, it occupies the bottom corner of our “differentiation versus consumer” matrix. Which basically mean’s that it’s a brand positioning that appeals mainly to value-oriented consumers. As such, loyalty is practically non-existent. The cheapest item typically rules. Marks & Spencer has used this positioning recently when it created its new low priced, value line of “Basics” as a way to keep their recession concerned shoppers from defecting to Tesco.

In Stage 2 we move to the Brand as Reference stage. This is when a brand becomes the category. Think Xerox or Gatorade, where your product name becomes synonymous with it’s benefit. Gatorade = sports drinks and Xerox = photocopying. Interestingly, Google has been trying hard to ensure that “googling” something, to mean they are searching the web, doesn’t appear in any dictionaries as a way to keep their brand out of this troublesome space – a strategy that has so far proven effective.

Stage 2 brands often live in areas of intense competition. Take Colgate for instance. It’s a toothpaste competing with Aquafresh and a number of other brands, which all, to varying degrees of success, do exactly the same thing – clean your teeth. So marketers of reference brands tend to focus on traditional value-based segmentation models to understand needs, “I need/want to look good,” so “white teeth is important”. Advertising then looks for hooks to find good ways of matching rational product benefits with these needs.

Because Stage 2 brands are often low involvement brands, loyalty is often based on “points and rewards” schemes, essentially turning loyalty into a commodity business that you can buy and sell. Naturally this is problematic because a challenger brand can always offer to “buy” up loyalty by purchasing points from customers who defect. Frequent flyer miles are a good example, where airlines have been known to purchase each other’s customer’s frequent flyer miles.

Stage 3 brands work hard to differentiate themselves by using personality as a point of difference. The UK softdrink Tango used this to brilliant effect in its advertising in the early 1990’s. Historically, the strategy was effective because it made brands more humanistic and appealing. It also created emotional reasons to purchase rather than rational ones. In markets where TV still dominates, personality can still work as a brand strategy. However, in the online world, its impact tends to be more limited. Once you start, you have to constantly reinvent the creative to keep it fresh, alive and interesting. And even then, consumers eventually grow bored or tired with the effects. Just track the rise and fall of Diesel Jeans. What was the last ad from them that you can remember? When was the last time you visited their website? And why would you anyway?

Much of the value-based segmentation that exist today came from the drive to give brands a personality that resonates with consumers. Loyalty for Personality Brands tends to be driven around brand experiences. This is why you have a lot of product trialling in supermarkets for instance. Or why brands like Kraft spend millions on creating recipes around its products to get you to try them in new dishes.

Most of today’s top global brands, from Nike to Nokia, are at Stage 4, the Brand as Icon stage. In this stage, the brand is part of the psychological make-up of the consumer. It becomes a way for people to identify themselves. So the 18 year-old football fanatic wears Nike and Quicksilver and drinks Red Bull because those brands help him define who he is. Loyalty among icon brands tends to be fairly strong, as it’s built on an emotional basis that is linked to the way the customer wants to be perceived.

As much of this brand ID creation is influenced by the brand behaviours of peers and tribes, the community, both online and off, plays a growing part in our brand preference list. If we extend this thinking further, we see an evolution where the brand itself becomes a type of community, one defined by common interest and preferences. This is why owners of Harley Davidson motorcycles often feel a bond or affinity with other owners. Or why drinking a can of RedBull is like being part of a club of hi-energy fanatics.

There is an interesting variant on this brand space which is quite strong among today’s prosumers, and that’s called the Brand as Activist/Philanthropist. Currently this is a highly attractive and powerful niche positioning that appeals heavily to prosumers. The more empowered a consumer is, the more cynical they become about corporate behaviour and blatant profiteering. By linking the brand to its social/CSR behaviour, the brand gains real meaning and impact online. The opportunity for customer involvement is also very high as you can make the customer part of your “giving back to society” activity.

With the exception of a few key brands such as Newman’s Own in the US, which is founded as a social enterprise, most brands utilise this not as a brand positioning, but rather as a tactical strategy. Which is a shame really, because as global problems increase, the opportunity for brands to stand out with this strategy are significant.

One could argue that the Brand as Activist/Philanthropist is not really an evolutionary step up from Brand as Icon stage, but rather a comparable strategy in itself. However, I have put it here simply because I believe that Iconic brands will have to align their brand values with their behaviours to survive. Prosumers are looking for brands with real meaning. Not just marketing fiction. And how the corporations and the people behind the brands behave determine that meaning. We have seen enough evidence of this in the last decade, between Shell, Nike and now Texaco, to know that a business and brand has to be more than its products and marketing. It has to be also its mission, beliefs, values and most importantly, its behaviours against the first three.

An equally powerful brand position to adopt online is Brand/Customer Partnership, our Stage 6. I see a lot of Iconic brands trying to move into this coveted online brand space with mixed results. The idea is that the brand becomes defined with the participation of it customers interacting within a community or conversational framework.

The power of this position is that it leverage’s the needs of prosumers to create deeper reasons to engage with brands beyond marketing fluff. Remember, most of society lives in a world beyond their control. Corporations and government seem to have all the power and generally are seen to exploit people. The Brand/Customer partnership strategy recognises this and helps empower customers more directly by allowing then a greater degree of control over key aspects of the business, from product creation using Customer Made strategies, to distribution and sales using social affiliate marketing. The customer becomes a virtual member of your business and hence is rewarded for contributing to the business. In a sense, the customer becomes a “brand owner” via their active involvement and participation. This sense of ownership offers them the psychological rewards of being more in “control over their lives” while also being able to contribute to something larger than themselves that they can believe it.

The last point it critical and is why many iconic brands continue to fail in this strategy. Most iconic brands were built up off the back of stellar marketing budgets over decades. If you have spent a billion dollars or more on building your brand, it can be very hard to suddenly start surrendering its development over the masses. The other problem is that Iconic brands typically see their CSR initiatives and marketing as completely separate entities. In fact, some see Brand and Corporation as separate entities as well. And this is where the positioning becomes hard to implement.

To work in true partnership with consumers, you not only have to be willing to surrender a degree of control over your brand development, you also have to give them a reason, that is larger than themselves, to want to become involved. So just letting customers create commercials for you or asking them to give ideas for new products simply isn’t enough. You have to have a goal, a mission that they can believe in and want to be part of. Think of Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. The effectiveness of the campaign was that it not only gave people a reason to believe, but it also empowered them to contribute to the debate and be part of a mass movement.

Which is why the Brand as Activist/Philanthropist sits before Brand/Customer Partnership. If you adopt the first strategy, you will have powerful motivators for customers to work in partnership with you to make it happen.

In this space, the community of like-minded buyers are key to thriving in this space. Suddenly the brand is no longer a brand of me, but a brand of we. As marketers, we need to look beyond the individual to also look at their networks.

The final positioning is Stage 7, Brand as Democracy, in which you literally use your brand as a platform for tackling global problems working in tandem with your customers. Brand as democracy enables the community to turn the power of the brand into direct social action in an effort to affect global change. Whether it is to use the brand as a media or to use the brand as a platform for doing good.

In essence, you allow them to decide what problems you should be addressing to solve. For instance, if you are Coca-Cola, your customers may dictate that you should be addressing the problems of global obesity and water shortage. Using democratic principles and digital platforms, you can empower your customers to vote, debate, propose and participate in finding solutions to these problems together with you. To make this work, you would need to align your agenda with that of the community and create a triple win alliance between you, the customer and NGOs. Here, the customer and society win through the community action; the NGO wins through greater reach, participation and finance; and you win through a level of loyalty that cannot be beat by any other brand or strategy.

The key to making this positioning model work is to know how to apply positioning strategies of this nature is to have a detailed understanding of your market, competitors, business trends and consumer behaviours. This is why I typically recommend starting with a quick internal and external audit that involves your marketing and sales staff, as well as anybody else with who may have a unique insight. I then work with you to define a number of likely brand positioning scenerios to find the one or ones that best fits the business needs and objectives. As it’s possible to be at different stages at the same time in different markets or for different consumer groups, it helps to look at your business holistically and understand which positions are the best for which markets.

Many of the more competitive brand strategies rely on new forms of online marketing, or even require the creation of new online services and products. In the later articles, I will explore some of the more popular methods being used today.

A famous example of this community policing was seen back in 2005 in what is now known as “the Dog Poop Girl case.” In South Korea, where everybody and their toddler have a mobile phone, a girl and her dog boarded a local subway train.

Naturally, the dog must have mistook the bland floor for dirt – or then he was just making a statement against bad design – and decided to defecate on the floor of the train car, apparently by accident. Nearby passengers were naturally appalled and asked her to clean it up. Surprisingly, she replied something akin to “mind your own business.” 

As all phones today are also spy cameras, a fellow passenger fotographed the girl and posted it on a Korean Website. The  photograph was picked up by the hyper-active asian social networks, retouched, mashed up, commented upon and generally spread around like the pandemic flu. It was in effect, a national user generated “name and shaming” policing exercise.

Naturally, the girl in question became famous for all of the wrong reasons, and probably a social pariah among her friends as well, causing her to drop out of university. Most likely today she is dog-less (and forever so), living in a new city with a new haircut and maybe even a new name. 

Now let’s apply this social policing strategy to our local British burglar. Let’s say a burglar (who we all call Yobs over here) breaks into a property. The house however, is wired to the local community owned and monitored CCTV network (no government or police oversight here) so our Yob is caught in the act by a nearby neighbour, an old lady living on her own and battling an ongoing insomnia problem. Either that or she’s catching up on back episodes of “Eastenders” on the Beeb’s iPlayer. She hurriedly sends text alerts to all the residents in the area. They rush around to the house just as the robber/yob exits. He turns (it is always a he isn’t it) only to face a horde of angry residents, all armed with mobile phone cameras and busily filming the unfolding drama.

Now, assuming our angry horde doesn’t turn into a vigilante mob, they instead run a mobile Internet search on Google’s new Face recognition service, which matches images to those on the social networks to quickly get the yob’s personal details and those of all of his friends and family. His surprised and angry mother is contacted, as is his grandmother, his father, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, etc, who all are suddenly calling the Yob’s mobile phone to berate him in what J. K. Rowling would describe as a “Howler Mail”.

To make matters worse, the entire drama, complete with the yob’s very public shame, is posted on the Internet site, www.Gotcha.com, a newfound wikipedia-style public database of social shame and now his very public police record. If he was a repeat offender, then he might even be placed in a prison. But not the usual countryside retreat with drugs, Sky Movies and a free gym membership, but rather a very public room in the town square with glass walls so that everybody can watch him. No curtains. No privacy.

Naturally, the gaping whole in this approach is that we currently live in a fame-obsessed society where criminal activity is glorified as being a “cool profession” with few real downsides, well, except for that potential death thing of course. But as fame has become more important than achievement, we are seeing gangs of youth challenging each other to commit crimes. So when our group of concerned and involved residents show up with their mobile phone cameras buzzing away, a burglar is now more likely to mistake them for paparazzi, break out into a big smile, and perform a little jig for the cameras.

Once on Internet, he would become famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Hollywood or Fox TV would then offer him a lucrative Film/TV deal, only to find themselves outbid by the BBC, using millions from the public purse of course. Books titled, “Why I Burgle” would become runaway best-sellers, making it to the top of the RIchard and Judy list, who would praise it “for its moving hardcore realism” and “as a telling indictment of modern society”.  Even our PM, fading in popularity as he ever is, would invite the famous crook over to No. 10, whereupon our now famous Yob would nick the silverware, which everybody would find hilarious.

Sources: 
On Internet Vigilantism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_vigilantism

On the Dog Poop Girl case

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/07/06/AR2005070601953.html

http://blog.japundit.com/archives/2005/06/30/808/

On Google and Facial Recognition

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10026577-39.html

Whenever I read an article on privacy, I realise that the vast majority of writers are always in the first two camps, with even the modern pragmatist leaning further and further into the fundamentalist camp. So I wonder. Are the conspiracy theorist correct and we are living in Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s future where privacy will cease to exist all together? Or perhaps there is a more obvious explanation. Perhaps the pace of change is so fast that even hardcore pragmatist have difficulty keeping up with them. 

The data collecting capability of business is expanding at a phenomenal rate. In a year, business’s will have collected 40 exobytes (4.0 x 10 to the 19th power) of data on us. How much of that data people have agreed to give up is completely unknown. 

And that number will only go up as Google, the mobile operators O2 and 3 Mobile, and handset manufacturers all continue to leverage people’s willingness to surrender data in exchange for better personal service. Google for instance, has now made its social network, Orkut accessible from mobile phones, but added a location service that allows friends to know where each other are, as long as all of one’s friends are on Google and signed up to the service. Likewise, Nokia has countered with a similar service called Friends that links its Maps 3 software with Ovi accounts and your phone book. Then there is Google’s controversial introduction of its Street View service in Google Maps, which caused so many complaints from even the normally “unconcerned” that Google had eliminate the service in some regions.  

The telecoms industry have even more aggressive plans. We have all seen the movies where national security agencies use  wireless triangulation to pinpoint the location of runaway agents. And yes, that’s based on fact as all mobile phones ping the closest wireless access node or receiving station. So by triangulating between three nodes, they can pinpoint you to an area of roughly 10 meters of so (though don’t quote me on that number as it’s probably a lot less). 
 
Now, according to The Guardian, two telecom leaders have increased their data ambitions. Both O2 Media and 3 Mobile want to match location data with customer’s age, gender, web browsing habits, home addresses and buying habits to order to predict your future behaviour, essentially the holy grail of mobile data.  With operators forecasting greater declines in revenue from voice (in part due to the growing use of Skype on mobiles) they are urgently looking for ways to monetize data and to promote different location and time related services. An example of this is a service I mapped out  good decade before all of this existed called location-aware entertainment (or LAES for short). Basically, LAES is a kind of concierge service that literally personalises the entertainment selection you receive depending on where you are, and what you are likely doing at a given time of day. So in your morning commute, the service would send your favourite newspaper. During lunch, maybe the next chapter of a book you are reading. On the commute home, the next episode of a TV program you’ve been following. All without you ever having to enter your preferences, as the service simply learns them as you go along. 

Cloud Computing raises data privacy concerns to a whole new level. The idea behind Cloud Computing is that instead of having applications stored on your own computer, they would reside on the Internet, in much the same was that many blog word processors do today. The goal being that every file you create, you also store on the Internet, just as people currently store huge personal libraries of photos on Flickr. Privacy activist fear that companies will start tracking every keystroke as we work and write; a notion that will convert many of the pragmatist to the fundamentalist camp. In truth, Cloud Computing could be the end of privacy as we know it, as well as a major security risk for users. Imagine what information a hacker could steal by gaining access to every keystroke not only you make, but everybody who uses a popular service such as a Cloud version of Microsoft Office. And let’s face it, they’re server software is known to sometimes look a bit like Swiss Cheese.  

So is this really the end of privacy then? Or will corporations get better at managing and securing data? The answer is, business’ won’t have a choice. Companies are increasingly facing a growing guadmire of legislative, security and reporting requirements that will inflate their cost almost as quickly as they inflate their ability to leverage all that data. Which makes senses given that politicians have the most to lose if corporations leak or misuse data. Because ultimately, politicians are the ones people blame when corporations behave badly. 

Still there are grey areas. Although current EU legislation on data privacy dictate that customer’s have to opt-in for specific uses of data, companies can simply package this opt-in requirement around a “cool new service” that is so generic that it allows them to do whatever they want with the data and even in some cases, share that data with “selected partners” that are made available over the service for your benefit. So customer’s still need to choose carefully before signing up to new services until these loopholes are closed.  

Already now, marketers are constantly debating what can and cannot be done with customer data. And yet, never have I met a marketing manager willing to live in the dodgy grey areas of the law to marginally increase sales. They all fear their legal departments far too much for that. Besides, why bother? Is it really worth the potential political and PR fall-out?  So can company’s be trusted with your personal data? In most cases, yes. But proceed with caution and read the fine print, carefully.

Now if we only had a regulation that controls what the government collects on us.

Imagine if you will, having the power to see what is happening anywhere in the world, and at any past or present time. And that power was shared eventually, to everyone in the world. This was the premise of the book, “The Light of Other Days” by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, which discusses the problems which arise when a wormhole is used for faster-than-light communication. In the novel the authors suggest that wormholes can join points distant either in time or in space and postulate a world completely devoid of privacy as wormholes are increasingly used to spy on anyone at any time in the world’s history.

What’s interesting about the story is it’s parallel to what is happening today in the world around us. Before we get to that however, here’s a short summary of the story.

Hiram Patterson is the founder and CEO of the fictional company OurWorld, who the author styled after a cross between Richard Branson and the controversial media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. His company happens upon the most revolutionary technological breakthrough of the century; the creation of a stable wormhole. Not the promethean-sized wormhole that you could fly spaceships through to get to the other side of the universe. Nor the kind that transports you naked back in time. Or even the kind that opens doors into parallel universes. No, Hiram’s scientists created a minute wormhole, so small it could only be detected through specialized equipment.

At first, they didn’t know what to do with this breakthrough, as it didn’t seem to have any discernable usage other than expanding the niche knowledge of a handful of relativistic physicists. More frustratingly, they discovered that without access to near limitless energy sources, they would never be able to expand the size of the wormhole beyond its minute proportions.

However, OurWorld is a business, hence it’s out to make a buck. So driven by the forceful personality of Hiram Patterson, the scientists eventually found out that although microscopic wormholes were too small to transport anything useful, like a person, they could however transmit data. So they set out to create the WormCam, the world’s ultimate fly-on-the-wall camera. One that sees not only what is happening at the present, but also at anytime in the past.

At this point, Hiram completes his transformation from Richard Branson to Rupert Murdoch and applies the new technology to his own higher purpose: to get exclusives for his media empire. He quickly dial’s back the WormCam’s time viewer to expose the truth of political conspiracies and scandals dating back to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to present. Naturally, the guy makes a mint on his exposés. All the while, politicians struggle to figure out he’s doing it. Although he also reveals fantastic historical nature documentaries, he can’t resist the ultimate reality porn of exposing celebrities and famous personalities sunbathing naked.

The resulting societal changes are dramatic. Politics undergo what can only be described as a complete top to bottom cleansing, with anybody having committed even the smallest indiscretion quitting public office before they become public fodder.

Over time, the scientists miniaturise the technology to produce a portable, mass-marker version of the WormCam. With everybody having access to these devices, even the smallest notion of privacy evaporates for all. Spouses use it to expose affairs. Teachers to expose students cheating. Men to view naked women, women to view naked men. Imagine, what happens with everybody can know everything that another person does, now and throughout their entire past lives. Entire generations of youth even have wormholes embedded into their brains to enable collective minds; the ultimate form of social networking where one is never alone.

By now, you can see where I am headed with this. The story of this all-transforming technology is a mirror of what we see happening with the Internet.

Consumer movements endless exposing every corporate misdeed and government lie.

Every minute of a person’s life and death – Jade Goody style – recorded and exposed in gory, pornographic detail for people to dive into, comment on, praise, rip apart, criticise and fantasize over in orgiastic delight.

The complete exposure of private and public lives, thoughts, friendships and personal and professional networks exposed on an up-to-the minute basis on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The ordinary, the extraordinary, the unbelievable, the absurd, the bizarre, the inspiring and the provocative behaviour of millions of people, fictional and real, captured and viewed by millions every second over YouTube, Google Video, Tudou and other social video sites. We even see the collective mind in action thanks to Wikipedia.

The Internet is our very own personal wormhole to every aspect of the world. Thanks to Google Earth, we use it to see remote far-away places, or even far away stars. Thanks to Google Maps and Street View, we use to find out where we are, and view everything from our own neighbourhood, to those of neighbours we will never know nor see. We use it to discover truth and fiction in equal measure. Employers use it to check up on their competition and their own employees, while employees use it to check up on their colleagues and employers alike, both as individuals and as corporations. And naturally, marketers use it to continuously try to understand what it is that we all want, and how to exploit that knowledge to either the consumer’s and the corporation’s mutual gain, though more typically to the corporation’s gain at the expense of the consumer, the environment and the rest of the world.

The now continuous debate over privacy already seems somehow pointless. Because thanks to the Internet, we have willingly surrendered privacy in favour of collective knowledge and truth in the hope and desire that by participating in the bold experiment called the Internet, we will carve a brave new world out of the carcass of the dinosaur we have to grown up with. One which is somehow kinder, more honest, less greedy, and more equitable than the world it replaces.