advertarian/360 degree branding

Video - Rory Sutherland life lessons from an ad man

Improvement of intangible value as a more viable alternative to a consumer future.

excerpt of an interview with Rory Sutherland
http://blog.ted.com/2009/10/qa_with_rory_su.php

Associated with your name is the phrase "360 degree branding." What is that exactly? What makes a campaign or an approach 360 degree?

I don’t think it’s something you can ever actually say, “OK, right. Mission accomplished.” I think it’s a vector, a direction, an aspiration. What it really understands is that there was a period of some mass media dominance, particularly with your advertising package groups, where the brand resided in the decisions you made on packaging, distribution and price, and mass advertising. If you had more or less covered those bases, you could say, “Well, a brand was created. Job done.” Of course, more and more brands now are highly experiential, and to some extent brands which were once considered product brands are now very much service brands.

Dave Ogilvy was a very early person to understand this. He was a massive enthusiast of, for example, direct marketing, long before other advertising people were, and he was also a very early person to spot the significance of brand value and long-term brand building as a role of advertisers.

What happens now, in a different media world, is we take our cues from far, far more diverse sources. One interesting perspective that obviously involves social media is that to some extent you might say that recommendation is the new promotion. Many people seeking reassurance on making a purchase decision will look to their peer group to provide it, often more than they might look to advertising. In some cases, people prefer a peer group even to experts. Even though Amazon pays for professional book reviews and provides them right next to the book, 80 percent of people prefer to read the reviews written by ordinary book readers. And maybe they just think that the average buyer of this book is more likely to reflect their tastes than a professional writing for the New York Review of Books -- not a totally insane assumption, by the way.

So, brand cues can be anywhere, as well as the heuristics people use. For example, there is an advertising heuristic, which is a fairly good rule of thumb, that advertised brands are of a higher quality than unadvertised brands. Two things: You’re unlikely to spend an awful lot of money promoting a product that isn’t actually much good -- it’s said that advertising a bad product merely speeds its decline in many ways. And, secondly, the assumption that someone who invests in a long-term reputation, through building a brand, is far less likely to risk that reputation by producing a crappy car or useless DVD player than someone you’ve never heard of before. And this applies to everything. Nearly all transactions are based on asymmetrical information. It’s the same in the case of investing in a bank. What is there to reassure me that this guy isn’t going to disappear with my money? One of the signals that banks traditionally use is architecture. They build a big bank branch, with marble pillars and an impression of permanence.

There was a Nobel Prize won, by I think Joseph Stiglitz, on the concept of “signaling,” which is what people do in markets where there’s a lot information asymmetry. What is it that businesses do to create enough trust that they can actually sell what it is that they’re selling? Advertising is one of those, recommendation through social media is another one, design is probably another, as is the quality of your online interface. There are a lot of cues that people take when deciding whether to trust a brand and whether to respect it, and 360 is just the acknowledgment that it’s not enough for an advertising agency to say, “We’ve done your advertising. Your packaging looks quite good. So, it’s a slam dunk, job done, we’re off to the races.”

One of the things you notice now, because brands can be experienced in more and more ways, is that the 360 idea is used to regard every interaction and point of contact as a brand-building opportunity. The extent to which social media, in some categories, may be almost a substitute for advertising in creating trust and reputation, is an important one. In some categories, it’s less important, but there are some high engagement categories such as buying a digital camera. It’s something to look for, certainly.