Brands and Marketing (Entering the Shift Age, eBook 9) by David Houle

Author:David Houle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2012-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

The level of brand engagement on a personal level will only increase as we move more into the Shift Age. Brands have always been somewhat aspirational and to a lessening degree that will continue. Brands that are personal and will speak to individuality will increase in value. “Devoted” is not an aspirational word, it is a word about personal commitment. Successful brands in the Shift Age will be the brands that gain personal, devotional commitment.

This leads to how brands will need to be marketed in the Shift Age.

Marketing

Marketing, as stated earlier, has been around for millennia. However it was only in the last 100 years or so that it moved to the forefront of business. This was due in large part to the explosion of wealth in the twentieth century and the creation, due to national media, of national consumer markets. Again, it was the creation of mass media that allowed marketing to become what it was until the end of the Information Age in the early part of this century.

The power and wealth of large corporations—and smaller ones that got in early on new media—attracted the best and the brightest minds and creative talents. Companies outsourced much of marketing to agencies, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. Both the company marketing departments and the advertising agencies grew hand in hand with the mass media entities of print, radio, and most of all, television. Looking back from the vantage point of 2012, it all seemed so simple before the Internet and totally simple before cable television.

Aside from the issue of legacy thinking that is no longer valid, the real driver of change in marketing is the disruptive technology of the Internet and how it has largely “disintermediated” the media business.

As students of media and technology know, there is a life cycle of new technologies in media. They are disruptive, then dominant; then they go into decline; and finally they are dormant but still around. Radio became a mass medium and disrupted the cozy world of print by adding sound to sight. Then television came along and disrupted radio and print by adding motion, then cable television added segmented and targeted audiences to a mass medium, and now the Internet is front and center.

The Internet, however, is different from any preceding disruptive media, with the possible exception of Gutenberg’s moveable-type press. It is the first media that not only can replace but has already replaced prior media, or at the very least driven consolidation and dramatic change in the business models of prior media.

Prior to the Internet, most media had been described and defined by their respective distribution models. Newspapers were sold in newsstands and delivered to the home. Radio came through radios, television through television sets, and magazines on newsstands and in the mail via subscription. High-speed Internet subsumed all of these physical distribution models. High-speed Internet connectivity has put the newspaper business on life support, has ravaged all other print businesses, and is the fastest growing part of the television business.

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