The marketing director and his team had spent months agonising over the brand’s positioning. Brand wheels, brand keys and various other brand positioning models had been used in an attempt to define the brand’s core values, essence and customer proposition. A design agency had made a few subtle adjustments to the brand’s logo and produced a definitive set of guidelines to protect the integrity of the brand’s image across all potential touch-points. The intellectual property experts within the legal department were tasked with cracking down on any trademark violations.
A week later the marketing director, in an idle moment, decided to type the name of his brand into Google Image. The results were hardly flattering. His beautiful brand image had been subverted and manipulated by people who appeared to believe that their right of self expression allowed them to undermine all of his good work. How could this be allowed to happen? He called the lawyers, he called Google, he shouted at his digital agency, but all admitted that there was little that could be done.
An apocryphal story? Try typing McDonalds, Microsoft or Mastercard into Google Image and see what you get, although be warned, some of the images that appear towards the top of the rankings are not very pleasant. The Google Image rankings are merely a symbol of a fundamental shift in the balance of power between brand owners and brand consumers.
It has become something of a marketing cliché to suggest that consumers own brands, whereas brand owners merely control trademarks, but the reality is that the way that companies and agencies talk about brand development and management is predicated largely on the notion of absolute control; a naïve belief that a brand’s image and positioning can be set in stone and protected from any outside interference, whilst the brand’s consumers will treat it with reverence and respect.
This belief runs counter to what is actually happening in the wider world. Consumers have been emboldened and enthused by a new spirit of self expression. They want to have a greater say in the look, feel and behaviour of their favourite companies and brands; why else would they spend precious time creating their own versions of brand advertising, customising brand logos or volunteering their ideas and opinions for new products and marketing initiatives on corporate web forums.
The American radio personality Earl Nightingale described how “Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.” Unfortunately, too many brand managers recoil at many of the expressions of this creativity and forget that these are the, often inspired and imaginative, outpourings of the brand’s most enthusiastic supporters; people like Jose Avila.
American Jose Avila is both untidy and highly creative. Finding his apartment full of used FedEx cartons and being a bit short of cash, he came up with the radical idea of turning them into furniture. He started creating designs for his friends and as word spread, he decided to market his alternative form of recycling on www.fedexfurniture.com. They are not the most beautiful designs in the world – there is only so much you can do with a FedEx carton – but they are certainly original.
How did FedEx respond to this fantastic PR opportunity, that could only boster their environmental credentials? Were the company’s marketers smart enough to spot a great publicity opportunity and sufficiently influential to convince the higher authorities within FedEx of the merits of Avila’s project? Of course not. The FedEx lawyers were unleashed and told to shut -down his site, claiming a breach of its copyrights and trademarks. Fortunately for lovers of the underdog, Avila was well connected and able to enlist the help of some lawyer friends at Stanford Law School to help him in his fight. The results were all too predictable for those of us who have witnessed other corporate attempts to silence the little guys; Avila became the hero and FedEx was villified in the media. It also missed a great opportunity to harness the creativity and enthsiasm of one of its consumers, at no financial cost to their business.
I shared this story and a few other anecdotes with the team at Coley Porter Bell a couple of weeks ago and there appeared to be a consensus that a new model of brand building and development may be required in response to the empowered consumer. To quote CPB’s planner (& old mate), Christian Barnett: “How long will it be before we create a logo of parts and allow people to create their own versions of it, or have an open source brief with a global call for submissions for a new identity?”