6 comments

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  James Penman

  1 year ago

  Nic, very interesting post.
  
  Agree about brands needing to engage for our attention but I wonder about the argument that brand power is waning/will wane. Fundamental to the majority of good and enduring brands is an enduring product or service and that costs serious money and time to produce. If I go climbing in mountians I'm not going to take a chance of 'New-fleece-product' recommended by Jim from Sheffield above The North Face. If I'm reading a literary novel, I'm not going to download one from the net because Henrietta from Bath gave me the nod when Penguin offer me a Nobel prize winner like Coetzee. The North Face and Coetzee are quality products and I trust them. This applies to new website ventures as well.
  
  Teasing out the logic of this, and with reference to recommendatios from the net, why should I trust the recommendation from some stranger on the net? Some of my friends are miserable gits, some are incredibly optimistic. This informs their views and I'm aware of that and they are aware of that. We all operate like this, sifting and editing information as each day progresses.
  
  Yes, advertising is going to change irrevocably owing to technology, our ability to track the efficacy of that advertisong through technology, because of the massive over-supply of advertising/media space relative to a gently increasing pot of advertising, because of the massive over-supply of content for people's attention. Will brands suffer? To take the extreme, I'm not going to put my life on the line up a mountain because of some recommendation via Google - I'll bank on the brand.
  
  With information overload, perhaps brands are ideally placed to strengthen their positions??
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  nic

  1 year ago

  Interesting thoughts James. I agree that the notion of a brand as "a good promised delivered" will endure. I guess my point was more about companies that try to use marketing as a substitute for product or service quality - i.e. a good promise, not-delivered. Moben falls into this category, and Dell used to.
  
  With regard to internet recommendations - I think we will learn to filter these just as we do all other forms of recommendation. We will pay most attention to advice from people we know and whose opinions we generally trust. Due to the web we might see more of those than we do today, but the real power comes from matching us with people we don't know, but whose opinions we are likely to share.
  
  To take your example - you wouldn't care which fleece Johnny Random bought for his holiday, but you might be interested in recommendations from people you can see are serious about their mountaineering (and maybe also share your geography and income bracket).
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  Hi-Tech-IT

  1 year ago

  Brand is hell important. Part of augmented product, and often is what makes a customer purchase. See perceived value vs actual also. We can go deeper, into things like names etc.
  
  Buygoodsonlinecheaper.com vs amazon.com ? No contest.
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  nic

  1 year ago

  What I was trying to say here is that brands will have to change to survive. I agree that they will always play an important part in purchasing decisions.
  
  In a nutshell my point is that in the old saying "a brand is good promised delivered" the delivery part is increasing in importance.
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  Claire Stratford

  1 year ago

  It is very hard to make a decision after looking on the internet at the product/service you may be about to buy. More people will call a company up to complain than will call up to say what a fantastic service they have provided, and more people will post negative points on the internet than good comments.
  
  I think the internet has actually made our decision harder in a way, in choosing the product/service we are looking for.
  
  As a designer, it is my job to design a website sell its product, and know how easy it is for a customer to trust a professional design and decide they are making the right choice. I do it too. If i am looking in the internet, i will search google and if i am looking for kitchen designs in say stratford, i will perhaps look to the bottom of the first page and find the best - most professional looking design out there. It is human nature, we all judge a book by its cover. To be fair, smaller kitchen companies will probably give a better service and product than the overbranded UK 'leaders'.
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  jeremyead

  3 months ago

  Completely agree. I've posted about this recently too:
  http://www.travelblather.com/2009/04/trust-trav...
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