Today brands are defined by communities

September 4th, 2006

Nice mention of our book by Guardian journalist Vic Keegan

It just doesn’t pay to be a loyal customer

Vic talks about the experience of being badly treated by a mobile operator. He says…

It is worth mentioning all this – and to be fair the experience might have been just as bad with another operator – because in the long term it spells commercial suicide for the operators. As books such as Communities Dominate Brands (Futuretext) point out, brands are increasingly being defined, if not actually controlled, by communities as the user power of the web, including blogging, is brought to bear on the products we buy. By treating loyal customers with contempt, the mobile operators are creating anti-communities, the inverse of what they need to prosper in the digital age.

What Vic Keegan is pointing out is that it is no longer possible to pay lip service to the idea of putting customers first.

As Peter Friedman says

The majority of the world has time in the day to meet other people, and they want to do it. But as great as technology is, over the past 50 years it has functioned to isolate people. The internet and particuarly online communities venues turns that round and enables people to connect with eachother and go back to the fundamental need that the last 50 years of society and technology and marketing have hindered. So this is really getting people back to what they are all about, and they want to do it, and that is for any age group

It is worth quoting Soshana Zuboff here, from her book the Support Economy

These individuals are seeking new consumption choices that can redefine commerce. The new individuals want to make a difference, they want to be heard, and each wants to matter. Their new political choices begin with an apparent dilemma for leaders. The new individuals are educated (and increasingly more so) opinionated, rights claiming and keen to act. They have concepts, ideals, and information. All of these characteristics ought to make them avid participants in the political process, but despite these credentials, the political participation of the “postmaterialists” is, by conventional measures, lower than of the modern generation.
In contrast, the values surveys of Ronald Inglehart indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today’s individual rejects organisational mediation seeking instead to have a direct impact upon matters that touch his or her life.
They shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.
Young adults place a premium on the efficacy of small groups of people working together to effect change in tangible ways. And they showed strong preference for leadership “that emphasises the collective participation of many individuals over the strong leadership of the few.”
This rejection of mediated influence also helps explain the growing interest in the concept of “direct democracy” as a natural evolution of representative democracy.
The new individuals seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity based community because they are comfortable using their own experience as a basis for making judgements.

Ignore the newly empowered consumer at your peril. Building relationships does not fall into the category of harvesting the cash flow for the quarterly numbers!

Thanks Vic