Credit: Mark Stivers Cartoons

I’ve written often about the need for a brand to define who it is and what its core values are. I wanted to take that further by saying that it is equally critical to define the goals of a brand in terms of purpose for the year. Without doing so a brand is likely to slip backwards within a marketplace that is moving so fast. You only need to look at the leadership positions Nike, Pepsi, Starbucks and Coke are taking in the social space to see major brands that are tracking with the marketplace.

To be fair brands are often so overwhelmed by the need to survive, meet their next quarterly projections or turn themselves inside out in the face of social media, that they don’t get time to sit down and articulate how the next year can contribute to what the brand wants to be. Yet there is time if a brand puts it first at the beginning of the year.

When I speak of goals in this way, I don’t mean the number of visitors to its website, its profit or market share. I mean how will it change what consumers think about it so that their perception is more closely aligned with the brand’s core values.

The compass in this area is the brand’s purpose, and on the flip side, its that purpose that generates meaningful exchanges with consumers in the social space. For example, Timberland demonstrated its committed to the environment by jumping into the fray over climate control in Copenhagen. They saw that as an important contribution their brand could make to achieving their purpose even though brands don’t usually protest or dialogue with heads of state.

If a brand does this work, it reaps unexpected benefits. Their clearly stated purpose and yearly goals become a filter for all the incredibly confusing decisions they have to make in the face of technology and consumer behavior shifts. And this translates to time, money and anxiety saved.

If a brand doesn’t do this work, the consequences are dramatic and often unseen. Not only will a company waste time and energy on marketing efforts that are schizophrenic and inefficient. But without a clear goal as to brand purpose, they further compound their lack of definition and uncertainty.

A brand must be its own compass in an shifting marketplace.

Consumers are not looking for a something to buy. They are looking for extensions of what is meaningful to them.

By simply articulating your purpose, a brand can set itself apart from the majority of brands that are second guessing what consumers want them to be or what the marketplace will do next.

As 2009 fades from memory and 2010 lurches forward, a brand must steady itself with a clear sense of purpose as it enters the social flow. Without it, a brand will stumble and consumers may not reach out to lend a hand.

How important do you think a brand’s purpose is as a goal? Should that goal be built into its yearly planning?

-by Simon Mainwaring

Nike released a new iPhone app last week that demonstrates why they continue to be a marketing leader. Called True City, it provides unique insight into six European cities by detailing information that only people who live in that city would know. Basically, an insider’s guidebook.

What’s unique about the app is that it combines premium, geo-tagged content, the latest iPhone technologies, and social media integration that is constantly updated by real people in real time.

What interests me about this app is not what it does but rather how it shows what a brand must do to respond to the impact of social media on marketing. Here’s what Nike has done right.

1. Nike has clearly demonstrated a willingness to adopt new technologies. I wrote last week about the most recent social media efforts of Coke and Pepsi that echoed earlier and equally brave efforts by brands like Skittles. And here, once again, we see Nike not only adopting technology but taking it one step further.

2. The True City app demonstrates how the brand not only embraced social media, but assimilated it into its brand culture. By this I mean Nike looked at the existing tools, took the time to understand them, reconstituted them and took them to market in a form that is consistent with its brand voice. As such, it takes ownership of the technology and the community it generates.

3. True City demonstrates that creativity can always be brought to bear on the new technology space. By combining insider knowledge with geo-tagged content and the latest iPhone technology, Nike has created a unique tool that is peculiar to its brand just as it did with Nike +. As you can see from the True City film, the information is provided with Nike’s typical irreverence and unmistakable attitude.  What this means is that as consumers enjoy the app, they literally take the brand on the road building community in real time.

4. Finally, this application is a clear demonstration of a leading brand’s ability to move with the marketplace,whether they be changes in technology, how consumers are communicating or where those conversations are taking place.

No doubt other brands will take confidence from Nike’s example but that’s the point. No amount of copying or technology can replace the ability of a brand to take a risk, to leap into the unknown and define the future for others. There will be mistakes, but in a real-time world, the rewards to early adopters and innovators are greater than ever.

In True City Nike has demonstrated the three most powerful drivers of social transformation todays – connection between consumers, connection between consumers and a brand, and the willingness of a brand to lead rather than follow.

Let me know what you think of the application and whether you’d use it?

-by Simon Mainwaring

I really appreciated the fantastic feedback on this week’s post about The Death of Corporate Websites. Lo and behold, last night I spy a quote (thanks, Frank Reed) from Anne Carelli, Digital Marketing Manager for Coke saying:

“Several years ago, Coke realized that Coke.com is not their home page – it is Google.com, digg.com and YouTube. Take the time to keep abreast of what is showing up for your brand in these new social sites and search engines.”

What’s more New Media Age now tells us Coke will no longer be creating one-off-campaign-websites in favor of building out its existing social media presence on YouTube and Facebook.

If brand managers need evidence of the need to leap out of their corporate site nests, they need only look at Coke and Pepsi.

The Pepsi Refresh Project is crowdsourcing and funding ($20+ million) the best consumer ideas to positively transform communities and, ultimately, our world. It is doing so in replacement of a 23-year long run of Super Bowl advertising (a handy snapshot of the shift in consumer attention from traditional to social media and a big brand’s response). Now it hasn’t been without the inevitable snafus. This week faulty security settings comprised personal information of those submitting proposals. You only need to visit Pepsi’s Facebook Fan page to see the response. Yikes. No hugs going on there at that time.

Pepsi will undoubtedly recover and now Coke has wholeheartedly jumped into the social media frey shifting investment and attention from its corporate site to community (rather than corporate) hubs. Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe explained why Coke has stopped building Coke-hosted pages for every campaign:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

He went further:

“In some cases some of our campaigns won’t need a coke.com-hosted site. In most cases these will still exist as it’s the most obvious destination for a consumer, but it might only be a page linking to YouTube encouraging people to join the community there.”

So here we see two major brand – arch- rivals – in lock step in their shift towards social media with each choosing a different strategy. Pepsi is creating a brand-sponsored, stand-alone, community building hub, while Coke is leveraging the dynamics of pre-existing social hubs like YouTube and Facebook for the long term.

If nothing else this should convince brand managers of two key issues:

1. Follow consumers. They’re not looking for you any more, they’re looking for each other.

2. The most evolved brands already exploring various strategies within this new space. You need to join them.

Even if you don’t believe corporate website are completely dead, their are dramatic signs of life in the community space that brands cannot and should not ignore. To do anything else is like standing in the corner at a party either waiting for people to come over to you or yelling at them to do so. Quite lonely really. Especially when everyone else starts having fun together on the other side of the room..

This is not a bad time for brands. There has never been more opportunity, potential and uncharted waters than what exist in the social space today. Wade in – fast. You’ll even have a choice of sodas!

What do you think about Coke’s latest move and Pepsi’s snafu? How brave is your brand?

-by Simon Mainwaring

Cartoon Credit: Dave Coverly @ Creators.com

In the not too distant future static corporate websites will be replaced by their social equivalents.

This will happen because more and more consumers are engaged in daily conversations, often involving brands, across multiple applications, platforms and networks, wholly independent of these sites.

As these conversations become increasingly independent of these sites, falling traffic will render them ineffective in their current form. Instead, the online presence of each brand will necessarily expand out into the social space to stay in touch with their audience.

As a result, the online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

Corporate sites will change in many ways:

1. They will be forced to constantly reconstitute themselves as a function of ever-shifting dialogue with consumers. (Have you ever noticed how every time you re-do your website, as soon as you’re done, you have to re-do it again because technology and conversations have moved on? It’s just like that and isn’t going to change).

2. The compass for a brand in this shifting marketplace will be it’s core values and purpose. The strict definition, execution and adherence to values allows for a brand to move and morph without cannibalizing itself.

3. Corporate sites will serve as launch pads for outreach rather than destinations for inbound interest. Their main role will be to constantly engage consumers in conversation (wherever that is occurring) and actively damage control any mishaps in brand messaging.

4. Information will no longer sit idly in corporate sites waiting for visitors. Rather, it will constantly flow through moving conversations in the social space.

5. Corporate sites will have no beginning or end. They will live, breathe and die in conversation. As such the online hub of a brand will be distributed rather than centralized in a site.

6. The focus of brand awareness at any given moment (specific to the brand at large, a product launch, or some larger conversation to which it is relevant) will be a moving target driven by conversation flow, engagement levels, technology tools and context.

7. Brands will no longer be places to visit but people you meet on the road. By this I mean consumers will intersect with brands at different points in the day, wherever they are, often indirectly and unexpectedly, rather than a destination they consciously visit.

8. A brand manager’s job will become that of the social officer, facilitating as many moments of authentic interaction with consumers each day as possible. As such, part of their job will be understanding where to find their customers and how to help them find the brand.

9. Control isn’t what it used to be. In a consumer-driven marketplace the tension between granular data/ROI and consumer-focused messaging will be greater than ever. Brands will have to rethink how they measure success for these new distributed sites looking to  attention and engagement rather than number of visitors or click throughs.

10. As community becomes more mobile, consumers will increasingly be defined by where they are. As a result, brands will be everywhere all at once and constantly on the move to stay in touch with consumers.

Steve Rubel tweeted this weekend that his big takeaway from CES was that “wireless and social are getting embedded into every device”. To paraphrase Ben Harper, “When consumers lead, brands should follow” and this includes their websites.

How is your brand reaching out into the social space? What other changes do you expect?

-by Simon Mainwaring