Brand Spanking New: The changing meaning of ‘mark’ in marketing, ‘relationship’ in CRM and ‘social’ in branding and business

Branding used to connote something done with a hot iron to mark ownership of a steer.  If there was a relationship quality to this it was only in the fact of being an owner of the thing possessed. It was certainly not about building a relationship, or any important social bonds, with your livestock.

In business, the definition of branding evolved to mean identity.  You owned your own identity by defining (aka “marking”) yourself; then pushing that definition out towards your customers. Marketers adopted the term to encompass a range of “marks”: name, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies the seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.  The meaning of brand continued to evolve, coming to signify a promise made to a consumer (aka, a “making good on your mark”).

Savvy marketers learned that the promise they made would not be meaningful, or deliverable, absent a meaningful relationship between them and their target audience. They strove for coherence – an alignment between what they offered and what their customers related to and perceived about their product, company or service. Without coherence, they could be way “off the mark” and would go out of business.  However knowing this, and knowing what it takes to build a meaningful relationship, are two different things.

When we talk about our “relations” we mean folk with whom we share a kinship connection.  We feel connected in some sort of tribal way.  We share something important with these people – blood, background, beliefs, values…

What happens when we talk about customer relations, however?  Suddenly we put these folks at arms length.  They are only connected through “marketing” or “management.”  Even when we understand that it’s as much about pull as push, it’s still something we do to them, rather than something in which we engage with, and receive from, them. Brian Solis, author of The End of Business as Usual, has posted provocatively on the subject, asking: Are You Building a Social Brand or a Social Business? He notes that businesses are evolving from traditional CRM to social CRM. It’s no longer about “branding” as it’s traditionally been conceived.  It’s about our very essence.  Solis notes:

With the advent of social media, coherence suddenly became a lot more difficult to manage. Branding has been around since the industrial revolution, but application of branding to the technological revolution is relatively new.  We can no longer keep our relations at arms length.  Customers are interacting with our brand every minute, even while we sleep.  And in their interactions, they are pushing back at whatever we try to impose.  The cattle are stampeding.

To get everyone into the same corral requires building a community of like-minded folks. You can’t impose this any more than you can make people in a family like one another. People in a community interact voluntarily, engage and care about one another.  They socialize. It follows that to be a successful business in the social media age we must socialize.  And we must remember that people in our community are also socializing across other communities, networks and platforms by which they are both influenced and influential. The only way for us to exert any control over this socialization is to (1) organize group participation, and (2) actively participate in the group. We don’t own the brand anymore; we have to share.

Shared responsibility for the brand extends internally. Just as we can no longer separate who we are (brand identity) from our relationships with our customers (CRM), we can no longer separate responsibility for customer socialization.  Customers don’t care what department we work in (I’ve recently posted on how this is particularly true for nonprofits, who tend to have two separate marketing departments with different names!).  Customers see the business as a whole. They
aren’t just looking at our (social) media; they’re looking at our entire (social/interrelated) business. IBM’s recent “From Social Media to Social CRM” report is revelatory in that it shows how much responsibility for social media is siloed within marketing, marketing communication, or public relations. Notes Solis in the aforementioned blog post:

When we think about the primary function of each of those functions, it’s clear to see why the premise of many of today’s top social media best practices are marketing driven rather than market driven… The difference between a social brand and a social business is internal connectedness, preparedness, and collaborative approach to customer and employee engagement.

We are all marketers – inside and outside the organization.  The cattle are free to roam.  The only way to get our mark on them is to inspire them to put it there themselves.

The mark of true champions will be adoption of a holistic, connected, social approach that puts the ‘mark’ not just in marketing, but also in every single department across the organization – including the “C”-level suite.  The new paradigm requires strong leadership buy-in.  Leaders can no longer to afford to stick their heads in the sand, ignoring the growing social dimensions of their brand. Leaders, in some way, shape or fashion, must become Tweetie Birds. The IBM social media report found only 30% of businesses report strong executive sponsorship for social media. If consumers are changing, one tweet at a time, we must change with them. Without leadership we may be able to evolve to social branding; but we won’t get to social business, and this is where the heart of our transformation to an engaged community really lies. A brave new paradigm requires brave, transforming leadership.