THE SYSTEMIC BRAND: SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE IN AN INTERCONNECTED BRAND SCENARIO

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Take
for instance the dilemma of today's smarter brand marketer. The prior
notions about a 'brand' being the connector of ideas from the mass
marketer to the consuming masses didn't include today's interconnected
scenario; and our aspirations couldn't see past ideas like progress
equalling mass production, mass consumption of seemingly unlimited
resources, and mass marketing. In today's connection economy, the
Internet, Tivo, and Instant Messaging have likely nailed the coffin
shut on the idea of a 'mass-market', where consuming masses supposedly
respond like Pavlov's dogs to positioned brand propositions from the
mass media.
The other side of it is of course how
brands are built and capitalised upon. Human nature is a constant
everyone can rely on, and the more we understand how the mind works,
the more we think we have control over our market, right? Perhaps
that's somewhat true for the time being, but isn't someone's mindset a
result of concurring circumstances? How does the marketer control that?
So here's the dilemma: Just because we're at a point
of recognising the irrelevance of thinking like mass marketers, and
focusing more on the human aspects of brand development, how do we
still get past the hurdle of time and place relevance in a dynamic
interconnected marketplace?
In our interconnected
world, the more we know and can access, the more we can see the
holistic and systemic nature of things and how they interrelate. This
interactivity seems to be revealing where we are interdependent, and it
puts the marketplace as larger system at work, way beyond marketer and
customer.
Interestingly, in nature, everything
already is systemic. Our whole planet works because its simple,
beautiful and elegant systems are all interconnected and all dependent
on each other. By contrast, just look at our attempt at solar energy.
We waste non-renewable energy to shape limited resources into bulky
panels that kind of mimic a crude form of photosynthesis...nowhere near
the efficiency of a common leaf! Not to undermine my enormous respect
for scientists who've even gotten us to this point, but you see the
comparison...nature plain works better.
The reason
that nature works better is that it always takes this interdependent,
interrelated 'all-ness' into consideration. 'All-ness' referring to
unlimited access to everything from knowledge, goods, services, and
conversations about all of the above. As we near economic all-ness with
an interconnected global marketplace, perhaps nature has a lesson or
two for us to learn.
The Emergence of the Systemic Brand
Today's
brands already realise the irrelevance of the one-to-many communication
paradigm like broadcasting. However, smart, networked markets require
more than shifting media focus, they require examining the propositions
that brands currently build their value on. The promise of efficient
and sustainable one-to-one brand marketing point to a need for
realising where we fit and how we connect to each other in the
marketplace.
The business world is already adjusting
to this. Competitive pressure mapping systems are moving from trickle
down theories to cyclical ones. We once believed that the big companies
competed with each other for one market, the mid-sized served the
market that the big guys didn't want, and small businesses got
leftovers from both. Today, it's all up for grabs, and even the
smallest of players can have a formidable presence in the market
system.
Competition based on a scarcity has also
undergone a paradigm shift. Unprecedented access and mass customisation
leads brands to collaborate with former competitors to serve
overlapping dynamic markets. Having a successful American coffee chain
like Starbucks at the supermarket helps rather than hinders the grocery
business.
In the workplace, top-down command and
control management practices are rapidly becoming declasse.
Entrepreneurial individuals and workgroups are more productive and more
empowered, as the phenomenal success of enterprise social networking
software can testify.
Brands emerging in this
environment can't afford to be anything but systemic. A systemic brand
derives its value from the power of its connections, and not by the
polish of its positioning.
For example, suppose that
you are a travel-related brand. The traditional approach to building
your brand may be to focus exclusively on the traveler and try to
understand their mindset so that you can effectively market to them
right? The concept of 'targeting' as if to assault and manipulate in a
war-like manner the minds of the very people who sustain you might seem
silly intellectually, but how else do you make your quarterly quota?
The identical scenario for a systemic brand first asks some new questions.
Questions
like: Which other activities enhance travel? Who else is already
reaching the same people that would benefit from my brand's value? What
kinds of paths already exist that reach these people with the least
amount of effort? Why do they need to travel in the first place? Where
do markets that also serve our customers intersect with us? How can we
evangelise our brand at those intersection points efficiently?
Questions
like these allow us to discover for example, that an increase in
communication is directly proportional to the increase in the desire to
travel. Such observations allow for branding initiatives that support
communication brands that serve the customers in our same market
system. We benefit another brand who benefit customers who benefit
us...a simplistic example to be sure, but it's one that illustrates the
inclusive efficiency of the systemic brand. Just like a natural
interdependent ecosystem, our customer's interdependence on motivating
factors can be revealed when we start to think this way.
A
systemic brand allows us to collaborate with the right partner brands,
philanthropic, and market systems. It's no longer supplier against
consumer or limited markets defining opposing competitors, but more
like ongoing exchanges between what's needed now to enhance the supply
or the demand side and under what circumstance. Everything can
potentially benefit each other, and everything has the potential of
self-sabotage by disregarding the actual system at play.
That
may sound vague, but it is actually more specific than how we've been
looking at brand marketing to date. Even the idea that 'marketing' is a
necessary action is in question here. If we are approaching a truly
interconnected paradigm of civilisation, then isn't realising the
significance of each customer and each marketer within the bigger
market system more important?
Just ask yourself, what
combination of the following information is most relevant is
establishing a true connection between your customer and you:
- HOW somebody behaves in a certain place and time so that you can react to them in that context?
- WHY you think they are behaving that way?
-
Or is it interdependence of WHAT connects them to that decision, so
that you can engage in a real, relevant conversation with them in the
marketplace?
For tomorrow's brand stewards of the
interconnected marketplace, perhaps the way to look at how, what and
why is purely systemic.
About Ray Podder
Based in the United States, Ray Podder is an entrepreneur, brand strategist and designer with a unique focus: to help companies build on ideas that their customers can connect to and grow with over time. With over a decade's experience as a unique thinker, he helps companies develop inventive business cultures to produce stronger brands with leaner use of their resources.