I work in an advertising agency and often wonder if what life revolved around is really something of mass and matter. We build brands, giving a unique identity to products and companies. It takes a lot of effort in terms of thought, money, research, ideation, visualization, creation and development to build a strong brand.
Our fathers laid a strong foundation in print - carefully choosing visuals, colours, type and text to convince and put faith in people about the brand. I remember, as kids we used to swear by the big names – Levi's, Nike etc and became tribes which accumulated specific brands and not even look at other alternatives, which would have worked out cheaper or better. The foundation that the "fathers of advertising" laid down, were so strong, that, people became more "brand ambassadors". Each one of us held brand(s) to our heart and made sure it stuck that way. Did the brand become "personal"? It is a strange outcome if you think about it actually. On one hand, companies wanted to establish their identity and the identity of their product/service. They communicated with people telling them that the company A made product A and that product A was awesome! The people believed in product A so much, that, it won its own identity and got away from the company a bit. People knew Product A and talked about product A. Web 2.0 didn't change this even a bit, in fact, it became a medium. Anyone can get online on Twitter or Facebook and talk about a brand/product with opinions. People can contribute to these opinions and the actual company can do nothing about it. Marketing and PR agencies are kind of helpless in this respect and can do very little to actually change people's thoughts and feelings. A hundred million banner ads displayed every 15 seconds hardly has an impact. Tribe 2.0 believe in a more strong and interactive mechanism to build and affirm faith. That's where interactive agencies took their form. A lot of interactive agencies build brands using these medium. If you have more controls on things, they fail. Freedom of interaction and speech gives you that much more depth.
During the 80s and 90s, brands were product driven and customer driven. Now, it is all about the "Brand experience". The "total branding" seems to be just lying on the internet and print has become just a reinforcer. People search, people read, people blog, people interact, people experience..all on the internet. Before I went in to buy my old i-mate, I rushed to an internet cafe to actually read multiple reviews about it rather than read a 20 page catalogue that came with the product. I also went to the imate.com website to go through the various offers and support options etc, which, would finally help me decide. People review when they experience and people believe what people say their interactions.
[more in Part 2.0 tomoro]
