I recently spoke with Ginger Conlon in the 1to1 Blog about how consumer behavior is changing, especially in the way customers communicate and interact with brands. Consumers are much more empowered. Increasingly they interact with businesses when, where, and how they want. Today, one of business’s greatest challenges is to keep up. 

There are four four areas that businesses should improve in to keep pace with customers’ changing expectations:

We spend a lot of time thinking about our clients’ brands. Brand Beliefs drive all online experiences — as well as traditional direct marketing.

Part of our Envisioning process for online initiatives includes a workshop to dig into Brand Beliefs, Measurement Objectives and Brand Relevance (online experiences).

This morning I discovered an interesting experiment on crowdsourcing and brand. Brand Tags describes itself as “a collective experiment in brand perception.”

The home page presents a brand logo and asks users to “enter the first thing that pops into your head.”

“A brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is,” the site explains.

Scores of companies — from Acura to Ziplock — have already been tagged with nearly a million unique tags.

The tags are displayed in the tag cloud form so you can easily see the most popular responses. Apple, for example, has dozens of tags. But what comes across most clearly are the Brand Beliefs — Awesome, Clean, Computer, Cool, Creative, Cult, Design, Expensive, Hip, Innovative, ipod, Love, Mac, Overpriced, Overrated, Pretentious, Quality, Simple, Sleek, Steve Jobs, Style, Trendy and White.

If you have a few minutes to explore, also check out the backwards tags where you can guess the company based on the tags.

The Railroads Did It
The need for brands was initially spawned by national companies who wished to compete with local manufacturers — an opportunity brought on by mass production and Rail’s ability to distribute products more widely. Brands have since evolved from a “logo and mark” to complete personalities which capture the essence of how businesses wish to relate to their customers.

Brands became handles for consumers – through which they could not only engage with the personality of a company but also get reasonable expectations of quality and consistency. “Brand” was invented as a standin for a real person — making the same assurances a local maker or shopkeeper had traditionally made.  And, over the last 100 years or so, brands became product “personality” itself.

TV Put it Together
Along comes TV.  With a brand infrastructure in place, manufacturers could now broadcast awareness of their products across the entirety of their distribution area.   In this world (broad reach, broad distribution, and little branded competition) national brands grew and prospered.

And the Internet Broke it Apart
With the broad adoption of the Web and rapid penetration of even the most personal of services being offered online (e.g. banking), we can declare the broadcast era officially dead.

Suddenly, consumers can experience brands directly: through online events, interaction with products, or by visiting the online environments of brands; or they can experience them vicariously: through an eBay Seller’s feedback, a compelling blogger, or a reviewer on Amazon who seems to share their likes and dislikes.

As the online channel becomes the primary delivery point for brand experiences, it’s critical that marketers take advantage of the enormous growth opportunity this trend presents. If your company will participate in this new branding paradigm, it needs to be ready for the voyage. Changing your mindset from a broadcast mentality to a narrowcast mentality is the first step.

Imagine: “brand marketing” that is focused on customer acquisition and conversion and which drives real value in the business in a measurable way.

The challenge, of course, is that brand marketers and direct marketers speak very different languages. Bridging the gap between these disciplines will take real investment from both kinds of marketers — learning the skills, talents, and approaches of the other — and it will take a bit of gumption as well.

The PURL is all the rage.

As a long-time DMer, this makes me smile. After all, it’s reassuring to know that the things we have spent decades learning in the offline world continue to be relevant and impactful in the online arena.Way back when, we always said that customers scan mailings for their name…the address vehicle is the first place they look. Then the Publisher’s Clearinghouse folks took it up a notch…using personalization techniques to bombard readers with their name. Guess what. It worked. And it still works, both in the mail and online.It signals relevance.The problem is, if you don’t deliver against the promise of relevance, you are hurting your brand.

So use PURLs and other personalization techniques…but use them with purpose. Provide truly meaningful information based on your customer’s purchase patterns, interests, and needs. And make it easy for your customers to provide evermore-meaningful information to direct the conversation further. Ultimately, this will make it easier to build brand in all of your interactions…online or offline.

Time and again, general advertising and marketing communications agencies have invested, purchased, persuaded, cajoled their way into Web work – without ever really understanding it.

I remember one such example vividly: an agency director muscled his way into a meeting about a Web platform redesign and commandeered the first twenty minutes to highlight the many faults and problems with the client’s existing site. We sat patiently. At the end, the agency bigwig posed the killer question: “Who built this for you anyway? It’s horrible!” To which the client replied: “You did.”To be fair, that general agency exec was setup for a fall. After all, the birth of brands was in the late 1800s, and the birth of the agency came coincidentally with wider distribution of broadcast technologies such as print, radio, and television. It was a “setup” because the Internet is a narrowcast technology—not a broadcast one. While the birth of marketing came in broadcast form, the future clearly lies in new “narrow” ways of reaching customers.

Narrow markets demand narrow marketing

Concepts like the endless aisle, the long tail, the sudden and dramatic line extensions in even our oldest and most revered brands, and the general success of niche marketing on the Web, all tacitly suggest that a narrower approach to marketing will be more successful in this “more narrow” brand and product landscape.

Over the last 30 years or so, only one marketing discipline has been increasing focused on technologies that capture the power of narrowcasting: direct marketing. And while DM agencies have long focused on print/mail, telephone, and television, the rules they apply to their work are a strangely appropriate launching point for Internet success. They get it. They narrowcast. Auragen’s 12 years of experience confirm the best Web applications are built by …

• … matching customer information (e.g., Mary likes apples)
• … with the right content (…so we’ll show her apple recipes first…)
• … in the right display format (… in a format that fits her iPhone).

It’s the knowledge of Mary that helps us tune the offer appropriately and deliver the proper creative execution. You will immediately see how this approach echoes the most basic of rules in direct marketing:

1. focus first on the right list of prospects
2. ensure that you have the right offer for them and…
3. deliver it in a creative package that breaks through the clutter.

The approaches are the same, but for a long time we’ve worked on separate projects for separate objectives, with separate corporate clients.

No longer.

Direct marketing replaces general advertising

The promise of DM 2.0 is the promise of narrowcasting, for sure. But it’s also the promise of true and final integration of Internet initiatives into the marketing mix. But instead of waiting for general advertising to accept new media and direct into their fold, we realize now that the general advertising is an old approach with waning utility and reach. Instead, the promise of truly integrated direct marketing initiatives—spanning and leveraging all media types and formats—is the big opportunity for smart marketers.

Traditional direct marketing has finally merged with interactive services and the Internet. Expect to see integrated approaches and models that result in dramatically more targeted and more effective campaigns. Expect to see brands take on a far more personal and direct relationship with their prospects, members, and evangelists. Expect the brand experience to literally be delivered to customers on an individual basis. And expect this approach to define marketing communications for the next 50 years.