Not A Solo Affair

In the book Brand Together, the authors elaborate on the need for companies to involve employees, clients, and customers in the process of co-creation and innovation, to enable a brand to succeed. Companies, the world over, have started understanding the importance of ‘co-creation’ as an act of engaging with all stakeholders and shaping collective thinking into business ideas. The advent of social media and its sweeping impact across consumer segments have lent a new meaning to this concept.

- Morgen Witzel

Social media is changing the game so far as brand management is concerned. This has both a positive and a negative side. Brand managers are certainly having to work a lot harder to cope with the influences and pressures social media brings to bear. But at the same time, there are also some great opportunities waiting to be exploited.

Brand managers too often take their brand for granted. They believe that as managers, they and they alone are custodians of the brand. The brand ‘belongs’ to them. They fail to appreciate the powerful role that consumers play in shaping the brand and building its reputation.

More recently, however, the concept of co-creation has begun to emerge. In co-creation, brand managers recognize the role played by the consumer and actively engage with consumers to build and evolve the brand together. Social media can play a big role in this process of co-creation. I will come back to this point later in the article, but first, let us remind ourselves of what a brand is.

you are only as good as your reputation

As I wrote in this column a short time ago, a brand is not a name or a logo. These things are symbols of the brand, in the same way that words are symbols of ideas, but they are not the brand itself. Brands are built through people’s experience of them. Did the brand deliver on the promises it made? Did it provide the value, the expected utility that consumers want and need? This is what marketers refer to as the ‘bundle of benefits’, the whole package of tangible and intangible, physical and psychological benefits that we derive from the purchase and consumption of goods and services. We choose brands that provide the benefits we are looking for; in other words, we choose brands that satisfy our physical and emotional needs and make us feel good about ourselves.