You Brand

This morning I was in a hurry and called the taxi stand close to where I live. A guy picked up the phone and I gave him my address. Apparently he did not understand me and confirmed a different street name. I repeated my address, he still didn’t get it and responded with yet another street name. I repeated my address again, he still didn’t get it and asked me, whether I was sure to have dialed the right number. I confirmed, repeated the address and this time he understood. He showed up 5 minutes later and told me that he’s been driving a taxi in Munich for over 30 years and knows every street in town and insinuated that I had ‘mumbled’, which is why he didn’t understand me. If I can, I will obviously avoid this taxi driver in the future. After all, he tried to make me feel like an idiot. Brands often behave the same when ‘dealing’ with their customers. Like the taxi driver, they consider themselves to be ‘perfect’. If something does go wrong, it must therefore be the fault of the customer. Sorry is not just a word, it reflects an attitude. People don’t have a problem with taxi drivers or brands because they make mistakes, as we all make them. We have a problem, if they refuse to admit it and try to blame us.

Posted via email from achimmuellers’s posterous

With more and more brands sending more and more advertising messages daily, consumers are increasingly switching off. With approximately 5.000 advertising messages being presented to us every day, this is hardly surprising. Brands are loosing their relevance and trust at alarming rates. Besides the sheer amount of ads, the content is a major reason for this development. Many brands aim to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but forget about people’s needs. Brands need to deliver value, solve problems and enable people: People want the hole in the board and not the power drill.

Posted via email from achimmuellers’s posterous

I just read Seth Godin’s great post Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law and I hope that brands will do the same. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that, due to the size of our neocortex, the number of people with whom we can have social relationships is limited. As Seth Godin put it “One hundred fifty people in the tribe”.

There are 2 very valuable lessons for brands in this:

Empower your organisation. There is no way that 1 social media manager alone (which is the wrong job title anyway) can have social relationships with hundreds of thousands, may be even millions, of customers, let alone potential customers.

Make sure to do your research well. Find your most fervent 150 brand advocates out there and empower them.

In 1999 Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote ‘the cluetrain manifesto’, announcing ‘the end of business as usual’. Where do we stand 10 years later? Has everything changed? To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed.

Mahatma Gandhi said ‘You must be the change, you want to see in the world’ and that is exactly the point. I believe that we – the human race – are actually the major obstacle to fundamental change.

The technology is available and affordable. Are we exploiting the potential of the social web, are we leaving our comfort zone, are we liberating ourselves and really putting the pressure on? The answer is ‘no’. Many of us are happy to hitchhike down evolution alley.

2000 years ago, the Roman empire was built on several principles, one of which was ‘bread and games’. That still works for many of us today. Have you ever noticed that the party is always organized by the same people? The majority is waiting for the invitation and is happy to participate. The majority of the human race is not proactive. We wait for somebody to lead the way and take the decisions for us. This behavior has the added benefit that we always have somebody else to blame. We blame the politicians (who don’t usually elect themselves in democracies) and we blame the brands (who don’t usually force us to buy their products). Do we blame ourselves – of course not. We may change leaders and directions, but we’re happy to follow.

When asking people, why they are so passive, I usually hear ‘one person can’t make a difference’. People forget that ‘we’ is the sum of many I’s.

What are we waiting for?

Numerous reasons have been put forward recently as to why brands are slow in embracing social media: productivity concerns, security concerns, lack of adequate metrics etc. But ‘who’ is thinking that? Corporate management in most companies is still a man’s world. Could that be the real reason?

Numerous surveys have shown that women are more social than men. They favor building relations, whereas men love to broadcast. As a logical consequence they outnumber men in social networks.

Would more women in corporate management facilitate an authentic corporate engagement with consumers in social media and elsewhere? Would more women in corporate management enable the necessary restoration of trust?

The population in the Western world is almost evenly distributed, meaning that there are as many female consumers as there are male consumers. Of course this varies depending on the product category. Looking at the car industry where I used to work, one could argue that 50% of the cars are bought by women and the other 50% are bought to impress women! In other words, the influence of the female consumer is much higher than the gender ratio would suggest.

One more reason for brands to reassess their hiring practices.

What do you think?

‘Father knows best’ was a very successful US sitcom in the 50s. As the name suggests, moms were moms, kids were kids and father knew best. It reflected the paternalistic attitude that fathers – the kings of the respective castles – were wiser than mothers and kids. This empowered fathers to make decisions on their behalf, presumably for their own good. It resulted in the authority of the powerful over the less powerful, responsibility was not shared. Communication relied on commands and instructions rather than on conversation.

Many brands still have that attitude today: Consumers are consumers and brands know best. Social media have effectively proven that brands don’t know best, which is why many brands have a problem. They have to change their attitude, not just apply some new tools and technologies.

‘Father knows best’ was successful in the 50s and 60s. Times have changed dramatically since then. Brands are well advised to realize that. Prisoners of the past will not win their freedom in the future.

Who knows best?

A lot has been written about the social web and its rules of conduct already. I decided to write this post to add my personal experiences and recommendations for brands thinking about establishing a presence in the social web.

Be prepared to be surprised, as your brand is most probably already there, effectively being managed by fans and customers!

- There is no meeting atmosphere with an agenda waiting for you.
- There is no microphone waiting for you.
- There is no reserved seat waiting for you.
- There is no on-off switch allowing you to control things.
- Actually nobody is desperately waiting for you.

Look at it it as a get-together and you are late. So what should you do?

- Introduce yourself and remember that you only have one chance to leave a first impression.
- Be unbiased, listen and show respect, since you’re the newcomer.
- Add value and don’t try to harvest what you didn’t seed.
- Know your stuff, be authentic.
- Be available 24/7/365. In the social web prime-time is all the time.
- Be spontaneous, flexible and entertaining, since this is live.
- Be consistent across all channels, reliable and transparent.
- Take your time and build personal relationships.

Many of these suggestions will sound very familiar, because they apply in your private social life. Remember the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. That holds true for people as well as brands.

What do you think?