An interesting brand discussion through the eyes of reviewers and end users is shaping up. Not about features, or equity and all the typical stuff, but about the how companies treat the customers of their brands –and the media attention they get.

On its blog, Direct to Dell, Dell came back fast on the post by Robert Scoble who posed the question as to why Apple gets better treatment, and Dell gets all the bad media karma.

The language (and hopefully the attitude) is largely influenced by the early Scoble

“We entered the blogosphere in part to take on negative issues. Will we make more mistakes along the way? Sure, but we are listening and learning as we go. In fact, the blog is all about those conversations, and it’s why I’m recognizing this debate that goes on about and around us.”

Scoble’s comments are interesting, because Apple does get a pass, and great reviews. In a previous comment about the bad customer service his son got over a Macbook, he called on the heavywright media tech writers such as WSJ’s Walt Mossberg to show off Apple for what it really is. (Note: Mossberg, who has been featured in an Apple ad, always acknowledges his Mac preference):

Hey, Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy, why don’t you call up my 12-year-old son and write a column about Apple’s customer service failures instead of giving them tons of praise about the new iPod cell phone that’s gonna come out at MacWorld in a week?

So Dell would have relished this, and reader comments to their post. Speaking of which Scoble was accused of turning his son’s experience into a company face off, and doing it for the kind of traffic that Jeff Jarvis got for his Dell hell post. People see conspiracies in what they want to. If I write passionately about a great experience, or a bad one, does that mean I am going off at the deep end? This might turn out to be less of an Apple vs Dell debate and more about the reviewers and bloggers. Interesting.

This post was adapted from a post on my Marketing Communications blog, Hoipolloi.

Start here, if you haven’t seen it already.

This little internal morale-fluffer seems innocuous enough, and by middle-aged corporate white guy standards it might even pass for clever. Hey, maybe if you’re part of the Bank of America context and you know all the people personally, this rip of the U2 classic is actually pretty funny and uniting and let’s-run-out-of-the-room-and-conquer-the-industry inspiring.

However, in a world with YouTube and zillions of people who see everything they ever cared about commodified and used to sell toothpaste every day, BoA has perhaps crossed a line. No, there won’t be torches and pitchforks and a mad dash to the barricades (a la the OJ/FOX “If I Did It” trainwreck, which has now been cancelled), but there is this: now the BoA brand is being mocked by a very popular comedian and an alternative guitar icon in a way that effectively positions the bank as the anti-brand of choice for millions. A former student of mine told me a few minutes ago that he was going to call his friend, who’s in a very popular band, to suggest that they start covering the BoA version, too.

Wow - how very viral.

There are lessons here. For one thing, corporate meetings ain’t Vegas (what happens there doesn’t necessarily stay there), and for another, when you do something that you think is funny, you need to be sure that your key constituencies agree with you. If the Pat Boone crowd you work with is laughing but your customers are more the Green Day type, you might oughta seek some external validation. (And if you need to be told this, you’re probably in the wrong line of work to start with.)

Time will tell whether this achieves the sort of mythic status of, say, the Appalachian is Hot Hot Hot debacle, but as somebody who doesn’t believe art’s higher purpose has anything to do with moving product, I can only hope so.

:xpost:

I am at the Ad:tech conference in New York, where everything from the coffeecups to the floors are branded. People walk around with flatscreens attached to their bodies, and you can definitelyfeel the sense that brands guardians -and that includes ad agencies– are feeling the sense of urgency to become more relevant.

The discussion here is not so much about brands, per se, but about things that are changing branding forever. I’m talking of issues such as social media latforms, mobile access and the anywhere customer, viral distribution of content (whether or not they are ‘ads’) and gaming.

This session on viral and word of mouth campaigns has standing room only. Three case studies are being discussed. One of which was Philips which introduced ‘body grooming’ because 50% of the target audience consider body grooming (defined as ’shaving below th neck’) as important. They knew that he media advertising was not going to cut it in building this brand. The goal wa to develp word of mouth, or ‘word of monitor’ for the concept. How did they reach 25-45 year olds?. They had traditional agencies, and PR as support.

To create the buzz, they launched a website, shaveeverywhere.com, with a highly watchable story on the landing page. Traffic from pasalong was 32%. Sales skyrocketed to 300%. It won a Gold cyberlion, to boot.

How did they do it? No seeding, was done, but simply organic. It was featured on 500 blogs, and got 103 reviews on Amazon. Behind all this was researh and testing that indicated it would be well received. But Philips credits the creative team behind it who understood the consumer sensibilities, and took the problem (or opportunity, in this case) head on. Let’s face it, bodygrooming, that shaving below the neck proposition is not something you can easily dance around. But unfortunately that’s what many brands do, because people who manage or dare we say ‘control’ brand messages, are trained to phrase things in brand language, not consumer language.

Today that era is passing away. Just to segue to another part of the floor I was covering, there are blog tracking companies who can tell you what customers ares saying in real time about brands. Just today, they are tracking the politicial brands that will make it or flame out by the end of the day! Customers don’t talk with feature-infested vocabulary, but in what the product does well or doesn’t. The blogosphere is suddenly becoming a down and dirty way for brand managers to have a ear to the ground, as some 100,000 blogs are created by ordinary people everyday.

So yes, we may obsess about our brand messages in the right font, surrounded with the exact pantone as specified in our brand guidelines, but ultimately, the reputation of a brand, whether is as a result of a word of mouth campaign or not is ultimately what the consumer defines. As someone who’s always been at the forefront of branding, this is unsetling, but heck, it’s creating a lot more exciting opportunities for all of us.