Dave Cushman from FasterFuture interviewed Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) on brands and branding a way back. I had the film stocked in my YouTube favourites and finally got around to look at it. During the interview Clay argues that brands often act too clean, which inhibits people from taking them and doing interesting stuff with them.
I think the idea is true for a lot of web stuff. But even then: getting people to play around with your brand on the web probably won't happen if you're not already attracting them on another platform. And looks and fascination play a bigger role there.
The whole idea of the web changing markets into conversations is too often used as an excuse to come up with something shoddy and hope people will make something of it. But if you look at the brands that really make it onto the web, you'll notice that it often means they did their homework really well. It kind of reminds me of the comment I wrote in response to this article (see bottom of linked page or below):
The problem is that you need to have a story first. And those tend to be monologues to start with. Nike can start conversations because they have established a story and a dramatic tension within their brand (empowering people to perform better than they normally do, to challenge themselves). If that story wasn't there in the first place, noone would even bother to get involved. The story about Tiger being 'that good' is one that has some mileage in it as well, so that makes it suitable for an EA rebuttal. without the EA lifelike connotation (which they exploit in may of their sports titles), this conversation would not make any sense. Fun, sure, but nothing added to the brand. I'm seeing far too many brands out there who start inane online initiatives to get consumers involved without having the slightest notion of what they are or what they should be in the first place. Resulting in desperate pleas for attention or irrelevant bandwagon jumping that only serves the clutter the online advertising realm is starting to suffer from. So please, before you start the conversation, ask yourself why people would want to talk to you. And it really doesn't matter if you're 'digital' or not to start with...
I'm sure Clays plea is not one for lazy marketing, but there are a lot of people out there who really take this as an excuse to start portraying themselves as branding experts. Thinking a brand through and spending some time getting it right is the only thing stopping us from being swamped with ill thought out work on every web page we visit before you can say 'user generated craphola'.
Comments