There's a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussion about "who owns brands" being stimulated by the impact of social media.
For example from Beth Harte of MarketingProfs:
If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure you’ve heard “you don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Nothing can be further from the truth and why we need to be very careful with how we phrase this as marketers, consultants, agencies, etc.
FACT: You do own your brand and brand messaging
FACT: You don’t own relationships customers have with your brand.
And I've weighed in thinking that while brand is alive and yours, "branding" is dead as in sending messages which "position" your brand into the social media.
But I'm on the fringe, and so when someone at the heart of consumer marketing speaks, from a company active in social media, I listen. Here's what Jose-Alberto Duenas, marketing vp of ready-to-eat cereals of Kellogg U.S. said in an interview in BrandWeek:
BW: What’s the greatest insight you’ve learned from using the digital/social media space?
JD: It’s an enabler of the relationship between consumers and the brand. It strengthens what you have. It gives you an opportunity to listen to what consumers think and feel about the brand, and also, one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is “transparency is key.” That’s basically because you are moving from “my brand” or “your brand” to, actually, “everyone’s brand”. And that is a very interesting [transition].
So it's everyone's brand, and the key is transparency - and it is a journey.
Planning the journey, recognising the true starting position, managing the risk as you go, understanding the organisational change, the cultural change - perhaps these are now the things on which we should be focused and not the debate.
