There is a distinct correlation to success when you recognize how the brand believer (consumer) embraces these attributes as personal;

• Quality - “I do not require the highest quality, but will never accept the lowest”
• Community - “I am not alone in my quest; my passion is shared by others”
• Timeless - “It’s not about brand sustainability, it’s about the sustainability of my interest”

Unfortunately, not every brand is an Affinity Brand, but fortunately every consumer is a Believer (in something).  Remember, everyone on the planet shares one characteristic; to be accepted.

The Brand can’t fake affinity or artificially manufacture it.  It must be as honest, complete and as sustainable as the need of the believer.   The brand only exists to fulfill that felt need.

Focus less on your Brand Affinity - focus more on Believer Affinity.

The vocal minority is in-vogue, easy to access, entitled, and can be incredibly effective when they posses two attributes; believability & credibility.  Believability is important.  Credibility is required.  Neither are negotiable.  If they do not posses these attributes, they are also easily ignored.

Remember this when (not if) you are encounter a vocal minority.

Why?

Because they are reachable and they are now just as eager to join the conversation.

PS. It’s also required.

Brand maneuvering, once exclusive to the use of newspapers, prime-time networks, and a handful of cable news agencies is now being imitated at a personal level; meaning those individuals managing personal-brands via ever-expanding social media channels.

(How many friends are you now following?   Can a brand really be a friend?  Facebook certainly doesn’t know the answer; first we were friends, and then they said we were fans, and now we just ‘like’…?)

The complexity of daily brand-management will continue to increase due to the emerging volume of personal-brands competing in an already overcrowded social media space.

Midstream brands (those hoping to be mainstream) are clamoring to access social media networks. Unfortunately, this requires fiercely competing for available airtime.  Today, more user-generated commentary will be posted on Facebook and Twitter than all traditional media outlets combined.  This equates to roughly 110 million posts - every 24 hours.  (And every single post is important to someone.)

Midstream brands are better off to pretend they are going-through-the-motions while actually focusing valuable limited resources solely on those efforts producing results.

The secret of successful midstream brands is that they know how to quit that which isn’t working and move on to the next thing.

The opportunities for brand-exposure are mostly self-serve.  They are numerous, sometimes a dead-end, and often risky.

Potential public opinion fuels within us a readiness to react for fear of it being negative, which sometimes results in a retreat to safety. For some brand managers this fear can be paralyzing; an unfortunate thing considering the number of channels currently available.  (and not all equal)

Three things to remember when putting your message out there:

1. Target by audience.  Brands messages should always be unique to the specific audience they intend to reach. While your brand positioning and/or tag-line is sacred, how you say it should adapt to the targeted audience.
2. Be specific.  Content accumulates (meaning; content attracts more content).  This requires the message you develop to be specific to a task or call-to-action.  What are you expecting the response to be? Be specific enough to narrow the possibilities for responses. It is also easier to measure.
3. Check back often.  The brilliance of social media is that people will react.  This requires that you check back often to see what is being said and how people are reacting to your message.  If they engage you, be available to respond and answer as best you can.

Yin and Yang?

This fast-growing economy of information is vast, whereby we ’share’, ‘recommend’, ‘like’, and ‘friend’ our way to market (or to death).

Feeling it is impossible to go it alone, social media relieves the pressure for personal connectivity whereby information can be generated and consumed by all participants; all at once, in real-time, and at any time.

The requirement to monitor and react can be overwhelming and even addictive for some.

But remember, social media is a playground of people.

Brands are best represented by people. Who are your people?

Just as true a century ago, everyone can now participate in the flow of information.  As we enjoy access to a multitude of channels, the ratio of content creators to available channels has significantly broadened.  There’s simply not enough content to fill all available channels.

Yet interestingly, over 20% of professional journalist found themselves unemployed last year. And what of reliable sources? A Harris poll conducted this past January reported 3 out of 4 adults as unwilling to pay anything to read news online.

For many years now traditional media has suffered from a serious case of over-supply.  If you visit the scene of any national news event you would agree the number of cameras and journalists are unreasonable and demonstrate a lack of efficiency.  And now, even journalists are difficult to identify due to the enormous number of lookie-lou’s leveraging smart devices to push information online as news events occur.  Enter social media.

And as expected, reliable sources for information were very hard to come by, and thus traditional newspapers exploded at the dawn of the 19th century as the demand for accurate information grew and the public was increasingly willing to pay for it.   Yet ultimately, the United States would have fewer newspapers by the birth of the Internet than in 1940 (267 fewer to be exact). This decline was mostly due to the emergence of alternative sources of information; namely broadcast television and radio.

Aggregating content and information will certainly take on new forms for the purpose of validating information.  The public will be willing to pay for aggregated and validated content.

(A great example of this is AOL’s new push to reinvent itself as a content provider.)

In the future, the demand for the printed page just might be in its inability to provide distraction.  Could print actually be the ultimate “airplane mode” for life?

In the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Neil Postman argues the medium is the metaphor.  He describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge.

We must recognize the distinction of mediums lest sometime in the future, somewhere on the planet, someone will say “digital is dead”.

In exchange for (mostly free) access to content, people now accept lower quality, and in many cases outright mistakes.  After all, you are reading a blog.  :-)  And what about Wikipedia? Facebook?  Who checks spelling anymore on Twitter (or sources for that matter)?  As long as we are “in-the-know” we can forgive a few errors here and there.

So what is the requirment for quality anymore, and will anyone be willing to pay for it if we continue lowering the threshold of acceptable - for the sake of accessibility?

What if your doctor only gets the diagnosis close?  Would that be acceptable?  Maybe so, if you have no access to health care anyway.

What is it that sets our precedents for quality?  Money? Technology? Resources?  Do we loose our way with much?  Too much money?  Too much access?  Too much informaton?

We make better choices when we practice and live restraint.

 (…yes the spelling errors are intentional)

I grew up in a Chevy/GM community.  Honestly, I know very little about cars but was influenced enough to believe Chevy beats Ford every time.  As a kid, we loved to make up demeaning acronyms (e.g. F.O.R.D. = Found On Road Dead and Fixed Or Repaired Daily)  I must confess a bent toward GM products; and you can tell by looking in my garage (e.g. 2 Camaros, a Corvette, an Escalade, and a Suburban).

While playing the game I selected a Chevy Corvette as my vehicle of choice; I was shocked to hear my son’s reply, “Dad, Corvette is a dog“.  I almost dropped the game controller.  I asked him why he would say such a thing; I thought he loved my Corvette; even getting to drive it occasionally. His response, “because there are so many better cars to choose from“.

Forza 3 is an amazing game teaching players about performance; allowing you to tweak the performance of your vehicle by adjusting parameters of each car.  And if you damage your car on the track, just like in real life, the performance adjusts accordingly. It is stunningly realistic.

The bad thing about Forza 3 is that is serves up all vehicles on the screen as available options, at the same time.  This leaves the game player comparing all brands in every class of vehicle.  Yes, brand impression, and brand confusion, all at the same time.  Chevy doesn’t stand a chance (and neither does Ford).

I select the Corvette (50k); he selects the Bugatti Veyron (1.8 million).  Can’t wait to look in his garage one of these days.  A tradition broken.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Imagine a time when no beeps were heard.

The word beep originated following the invention of the klaxon horn around 1910 and was common vernacular by the end of the following decade.

There are also historical references to military equipment invented during World War I emitting the sound of “beep”.  The word officially entered the dictionary in 1927.

How many beeps do you hear each day?