Branding And The Rise of I-to-I

Marketers and marketing firms are accustomed to categorizing the world of commerce into business-to-consumer (B-to-C or B2C) or business-to-business (B-to-B or B2B). All of this neatly assumes that the marketer is the sender of the brand message to a specific audience. It also assumes you can classify individuals into a giant segment of spenders called consumers.

This is old world, mass-media, marketer-in-control thinking. Today, a good portion of brand communication goes on at the individual-to-individual (I-to-I) level. Smart companies know this, but there still remains a substantial amount of marketing rooted in the antiquated command-and-control style.

The Web and other communication technologies have empowered individuals to have a huge influence on brand perceptions. The intended or unintended brand messages that are sent from individual to individual through blogs, online social networks, video sharing sites, text messages, IM, and email are immense. The amount of messages a company (even big, rich companies) can control because of a paid or planned effort, pale in comparison to what I-to-I traffic can produce. Word-of-mouth communication has always been important in marketing, but technology has now multiplied word-of-mouth exponentially via Metcalfe’s Law into a word-of-keyboard juggernaut.

Today the term “brand manager” is an anachronism. Someone can serve in the capacity of a brand steward or guide, but asking someone to serve as a brand manager is asking a great deal of a person when essentially every individual now has the means to be their own personal media company endowed with the power to write/publish/broadcast to others in seconds. How do you brand manage millions? You can’t.

All this is why the brand experience is becoming more important than ever. The brand experience will eventually determine the messages people send to one another. Advertising, public relations, trade shows, and other company-directed marketing can certainly continue to serve a valuable function to inform people of products or services and point out their benefits, but in an age of instant and easy I-to-I communication those planned marketing efforts had better match reality, or people will swiftly disregard or diminish brands that are prone to message hyperbole or deliver a poor brand experience at the point of contact, sale, or after the sale.

The ultimate goal of a brand steward in the contemporary marketing environment should be to help build brand information and experiences into a community of advocates or evangelists that will serve to initiate positive messages in today’s most pervasive and powerful communication channel: the I-to-I network.