You Brand

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?

Governments, economies and communities require trust to function and a society without trust ultimately dies. Even so, surveys keep on showing us that mistrust in on the rise. Besides politicians it’s usually managers, bankers and marketeers that we trust least. Why did our trust compass break?

Is it because of a general moral decline? Or because the value ‘trust’ was considered to be old-fashioned, meaning it didn’t sell well in a society shaped by an ‘anything goes’-mentality? Or because of the communication breakdown between producers and consumers in a world dominated by one way media before the Internet arrived?

The results are devastating: Companies have lost brand control, but many still refuse to realize and accept that.

Restoring trust therefore belongs on top of the agenda. That implies a change in corporate attitude: more entrepreneurship and less management. Entrepreneurship meaning discovering the chances, implementing the innovation, tapping the resources and using them and bearing the risks. Back in 1912 Joseph Schumpeter called this ‘creative destruction’.

Consumers are the most powerful ‘resources’. Including them in the corporate architecture of value creation will ultimately lead to a new, more successful business model.

Gary Hamel, einer der führenden Experten in Unternehmensstrategie weltweit, fordert, dass sich das Management in Unternehmen, aufgrund neuer Herausforderungen, neu definieren muss:

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/02/moon-shots-for-management/ar/1

Emsige Netzwerker, Denken outsourcen, E-Commerce, Nanotechnologie und 6 weitere Ideen für 2009. Wir werden sehen, welche Ideen in nennenswertem Umfang erfolgreich umgesetzt werden:

http://www.harvardbusinessmanager.de/heft/artikel/a-603697.html