A premium brand like Hermès should know that. Hermès was founded by Thierry Hermès back in 1837 – the brand name is therefore not just a pseudoword, it is a ‘real’ name – and is about as premium as it gets.

They have a store in Munich and I’ve been a customer for several years. I happen to like their ties, even though they are insanely expensive. Every January they invite me to a sale (if you can call it that at Hermès), which is nice.

What annoys me however is that they seem to be unable to get my last name right (see photo: no ‘Umlaut’, no ‘s’ at the end).

All the fancy brochures and expensive advertising campaigns will ultimately fail, if you don’t know your customers and that includes their names.

Opportunity missed!

Why don’t you define and treat your customer like an afficionado? Consider the potential endorsement “I enjoy this brand” as opposed to “I consume this brand”.

Words can make all the difference in the world and attitudes most certainly do. It’s worth the extra marketing effort.

In 'Consuming Life', the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman describes how people are goods and practice marketing. They mutate into products capable of generating attention as well as demand, in order to obtain what he calls social gratification.

We see this happening every day in new media and in particular in social networks: Followers, friends, retweets, feedbacks etc. are just a few examples of social gratifications. The fact that these gratifications are often instant adds to their value.

Whether we want to admit it or not, the majority of us is and always has been very receptive to social gratification. In my opinion this is another major reason for the popularity of new media. After all, how could the average human being obtain social gratification in old media?

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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.

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Over the years, monocultures have become very popular. It is all about planting crops with genetic similarity. These have uniform growing habits and requirements, which result in greater yields on less land. Planting, maintenance and harvesting are standardized. Sound familiar? Isn’t that exactly what marketers try to achieve with traditional advertising in mass media?

Next time you look in the mirror, just imagine seeing a head of lettuce. After all, you’re being treated like one.

How do you feel being manured?

Equally important is horizontal integration. In many companies – especially old economy – the caste system is still very much alive: There’s the R&D crowd, the guys from production, sales people, marketing people, finance people and so on. Sooner or later many different ‘esprit de corps’ develop.

For example the production guys will insist that they obviously do a great job, but R&D always wants fancy solutions, HR doesn’t give them enough people, finance doesn’t give them enough budget, purchasing doesn’t give them the best parts, sales wants the product yesterday and marketing insists on USP’s. Depending on the perspective, other divisions will argue in a similar way.

The system is held together by the good old hierarchy. Board members from all divisions usually meet once a week, but what about the rest? They only meet when working on a common project, which usually doesn’t involve all divisions. It is difficult and time-consuming to develop positive relations and common understanding under these conditions. Some employees, which are more proactive than others, develop their own ‘private’ and ‘personal’ networks. But this is not the solution.

Customers don’t differentiate between divisions – for them there is only one brand. Companies are well advised to break down the caste system and facilitate horizontal and vertical integration. It improves the relations: inside and outside.

What’s your view?

Is your CEO still reading a newspaper?

In many ‘old-economy’ brands we still find very hierarchic ‘command and control’ structures. The Social Media platforms are the exact opposite of ‘command and control’, they are about listening, sharing, supporting and facilitating conversations. They are about co-operation on equal footing.

If brands do decide to engage in Social Media, they have to review their corporate attitude and culture first. They have to engage with their employees the same way they intend to engage with their consumers. Companies have already lost the absolute control over their brands to the consumer thanks to Social Media. Trying to preserve that control internally is a futile mission.

The entire organization has to adapt, because Social Media potentially benefits all divisions. Think about the potential for R&D, production, purchasing, HR, sales, internal communications and of course marketing. Therefore it is only logical to conclude that Social Media shouldn’t be left to the marketing department.

As Gary Hamel put it ‘Organizations loose their relevance, when the internal rate of change is outpaced by the external change’. Markets and consumers are changing rapidly, brands need to catch up quickly.