Don Tapscott is an internationally renowned speaker and the bestselling author of The Digital Economy and co-author of Blueprint to the digital Economy, Paradigm Shift, and Who Knows. He is chairman of the Alliance for converging Technologies which represents the collaborative effort of ca. 40 of the world’s leading technology, manufacturing, and retail organizations. He is also the president of the New Paradigm Learning Corporation.

Sean Moffitt is President, Agent Wildfire Strategy & Communications Inc., a leading social influence, word of mouth and customer engagement firm. He is also an internationally respected and connected web expert and sought-after speaker, lecturing to corporations, associations and universities throughout the world on cultural trends and the reinvention of marketing and business. With one foot in traditional business and another in new digital worlds, he has led the efforts behind established brands Molson, Guinness and Procter & Gamble and now partners with many Fortune 500s and startups as an evangelist for web-enabled customer engagement and collaboration in business.

Mike Dover is the Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations for New Paradigm (later nGenera Insight), he oversaw the research programs underlying Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and Grown Up Digital: How The Net Generation is Changing the World. He also provided review support for more than a dozen other books including Authenticity: What Customers Really Want by Joe Pine and James Gilmore and DIY U Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz.

WIKI BRANDS

REINVENTING YOUR COMPANY IN A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN MARKETPLACE

By SEAN MOFFITT, MIKE DOVER

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright ©2011 Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-174927-5

Contents

Foreword: Reinvention of the Brand, by Don TapscottAcknowledgmentsPART 1 THE WIKIBRANDS STORYCHAPTER 1 The Birth of WikibrandsCHAPTER 2 The Wikibrand Rallying CryCHAPTER 3 A Wikibrand Road MapPART 2 REINVENTING THE MARKETING PARADIGMCHAPTER 4 The Six Benefits of WikibrandsCHAPTER 5 A Wikibrand CulturePART 3 THE FLIRT MODEL—BUILDING A WIKIBRANDCHAPTER 6 FocusCHAPTER 7 Language and ContentCHAPTER 8 Incentives, Motivations, and OutreachCHAPTER 9 Rules, Guidelines, and RitualsCHAPTER 10 Tools and PlatformsPART 4 INCUBATING YOUR WIKIBRAND COMMUNITYCHAPTER 11 Community DevelopmentCHAPTER 12 The Graying Line Between Employee and Enthusiast ChampionsCHAPTER 13 Community ManagementCHAPTER 14 Measurement and MetricsPART 5 APPLYING WIKIBRANDS BEYOND THE CORPORATIONCHAPTER 15 The Personal WikibrandCHAPTER 16 The FuturePART 6 THE WIKIBRANDS PRIMERCHAPTER 17 Reference GuideEndnotesIndex

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH OF WIKIBRANDS

From, Ownership, Trust, Want, Preference, Love, and Now Partlclpation—a150-Year Fascination

wikibrand(s): noun

A progressive set of organizations, products, services, ideas, and causes thattap the powers of customer participation, social influence, and collaboration todrive business value.

Derived from the Hawaiian word wiki, traditionally meaning “quick” butmore currently meaning “tribal knowledge” and “a collaborative website,” and theMiddle English word torch, whose current business meaning is “adistinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.”

Wikibrands represent the future of business—a future that calls for afundamental shift in long-held business management tenets on how we approachcustomers. We have entered a new generation of brand building. The litmus testfor a thriving business in this marketplace is “Does your brand deliver genuineparticipation?” This issue does not touch marketing alone nor is it solely apublic relations concern. Neither is it single-mindedly a technology or socialmedia manifesto. However, if you are in the business of driving companydirection and delivering winning performance in today’s customer-controlledmarketplace, wikibranding is a wake-up call, strategy guide, and execution roadmap, as relevant for the C-suite as it is for front-line managers.

Let us take a step back. Since 1875, and likely even before, when Bass Aleregistered the first branded trademark, brands have become a controlling forcein the marketplace, representing something customers look for alternatively tobuy, trust, want, prefer, or love. In many companies, the brand has become theirsingle most important operating and financial asset.

For more than a century, businesses have effectively cultivated customerloyalty, competitive advantage, and positive benefit perceptions for theirowners through the tools of brand management. Traditional mass marketing effortshave acted as long-term value generators, allowing brands to command significantprice premiums over commodity and price-based adversaries. Coca-Cola, IBM, BMW,McDonald’s, and Heineken have epitomized the strength of a well-positioned brandmarketed to a mass consumer audience through traditional media channels. Infact, Coca-Cola corporate lore claims that if the company suddenly lost all ofits physical assets, it could get funding to rebuild the entire enterprise usingonly the power of the brand as collateral.

Although there are many more recent headlines like “Can the Wrong Fame SmearYour Brand,” “Attack of the Blogs,” “Brands Under Attack,” and “The Decline ofBrands,” we assert that brands are still very relevant to the evolution ofpostindustrial business strategy and the building of business value. Face it:brands still belong, even in the marketplace of the future.

Business founders and managers can depart or retire. Organizations can be”right-sized.” Media can be overhauled. Production can be completely outsourced.Logos can change. Whether you like it or not, what remains is still a mystifyingbelief in brands. Don’t take our word for it. Think about what might tempt you.If Apple launched a refrigerator, wouldn’t you be the slightest bit interested?If Google opened a restaurant, wouldn’t a good chunk of you line up around thecorner? If BMW launched a personal computer, wouldn’t you give it a test drive?If World of Warcraft launched a real-life amusement park, a large percentage ofits eleven million players would probably make the pilgrimage.

Before we appear too defensive on the side of the brand flag and conventionalmass marketing theory, be assured that we believe a significantly new practiceneeds to exist. The status quo is not an option. We’re not entirely throwing the”brand baby out with the bathwater,” but we see all too clearly a call tochange, particularly in how business goes about building itself up in acustomer-controlled marketplace. We must guard ourselves against laziness,against allowing our vision to blur what is going on in the world outside thecorporate walls. Too often it is easy to become comfortable and stopexperimenting. Even entrepreneurs and start-ups can be guilty of blindlyimitating outdated best practices and consultants’ advice that worked in abygone era. As John Lennon summarized, “Life is what is happening to you whileyou’re busy making other plans.” Perhaps the famous Beatle was a wikibrandadvocate ahead of his time.

Wikibranding provides a manifesto that allows progressive-minded souls—andeven some establishment types—to implement the change required in theirorganizations. In Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by SocialTechnologies, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff make the math pretty simple:engaged brands are growing their value by 18 percent; those that don’t engageare declining by 6 percent. This is a chicken-or-egg argument, but the choice ispretty obvious: engage.

For a long time, companies created products and services and then pushed themout to customers using the tools of the period. The Four Ps ofmarketing—product, place, promotion, and price—were sacrosanct (wewill present two alternative versions of this model). When strategies wereformed, the role of the customer was in the business of planning and pushing outthese messages through media intermediaries. The message was controlled; therole of consumers was to listen and buy. Now faced with a dramatic shift in howtechnology-enabled collaboration changes relationships, an Internet-savvygeneration will bring about huge changes in business and culture. How businessescreate value through brands will be transformed by the relationships andexperiences these businesses have with customers. Brands will no longer be anabstract concept in the mind but will require a new, more sophisticatedarchitecture that involves two-way conversation and integrity.

What caused the shift? Consumers found that, through peer-to-peer connection andsocial media, they had a voice in the brand conversation. It has been suggestedby both traditionalists and some early Web adopters that five years into themainstreaming of social media, people will become tired of these tools. Inexchange for the return of their privacy and leisure time, they will gladlyplacate themselves with the passive consumption of entertaining messages via bigmedia funded by organizations, albeit in different formats. For those peopleseeking relief from this social media pollution, we’re sorry to say the genie isout of the bottle for good.

Collaborative technologies and social media that connect family, friends,colleagues, and interest groups are not just a fad; they are the currency thatruns the future marketplace. The growth and reach of new media and newtechnology is mind-boggling and undeniable. Compared to even a decade ago, thepace of change is staggering. As recently as 2000, could we have conceived of aworld in which five hundred million people from around the world spend anaverage of forty-two minutes a day chatting with, liking, checking in with, andplaying with each other in a digital playground called Facebook?

The early twenty-first century is distinguished by the pace and intensity ofchange in the marketing and media landscape. Trends such as the emergence ofmore than one hundred million citizen bloggers, more than two billion Internetusers, and more than four billion mobile phone users (which is more than haveregular access to running water) only begin to tell the story.

Could we have predicted, even optimistically, that Internet use would vaultahead of the incumbent media heavyweight TV? Well, it has. With a reach of morethan two billion and one-hundred-fold growth since 1995, the Internet hasknocked off marketers’ mainstay, and it isn’t looking back. Although some userfatigue has occurred in the blogosphere and on social networking sites, peopleare collectively spending 82 percent more time on social networks in 2010 thanin the previous year.

We admit this is a real paradox. Brands have never been more important tocompanies than they are today, even in an atmosphere in which customers havetaken control. The tools to build these globally known stalwarts or hungryunderdogs are far less predictable than they’ve ever been. Stasis is not anoption, but that is what a lot of companies exhibit. Marketing organizationsfigure prominently among the casualties of this new age. Two-thirds oforganizations have rebranded themselves in the last three years. A majority ofsenior marketers are feeling dissonance within their organizations and distancefrom their external customer base. The average tenure of a chief marketingofficer is hovering at around twenty-eight months, a full two years less thanthe next most tenuous executive position: CIOs.

In the first decade of the millennium, spurred on by the global economiccorrection, the proverbial pin dropped on the marketing function.Forward-thinking marketers have begun to recognize the gap. Only 6 percent ofexecutive marketers rate their digital operations as excellent; the biggest needidentified in new plans is to construct a digital marketing makeover in theirplatforms, programs, and people. Senior marketers have begun to realize that ifthey want to avoid having their corporate stars eclipsed, they need to switchtheir attention from what they do (advertising, communications, publicrelations, and sales) to how they do it (customer connection, brand engagement,and online community participation).

If marketers have recognized their loss of influence inside their organizations,they almost certainly know of their current diminishing status outside of ittoo. The environment can be downright hostile. Small groups of well-organizedcustomers have publicly exposed market titans such as Dell, Wal-Mart, and Sonyfor employing less than ethical or substandard company practices. Not only hasthis ripple effect of well-connected customer dissatisfaction disrupted the waycompanies operate, but it also points to a power shift in the emerging brandlandscape—a shift toward customers.

Why? Quite simply, the levers of brand development have changed dramaticallyover the last twenty years. Since the height of mass marketing’s efficiencypeaked in the early eighties, a number of trends relating to media (such asfragmentation), marketing (such as customization), marketplace activity (such asabbreviated product life cycles), and broader cultural behavior (such asheterogeneous consumers) have collectively diminished the effectiveness oftraditional branding efforts.

Winning companies and brands are succeeding by learning to engage and co-createbranding efforts with their most loyal and engaged customers:

* Traditional packaged goods marketers such as Procter & Gamble are creatingpowerful new customer connections through frequent and experimental use ofFacebook; word-of-mouth relationship forums such as Vocalpoint, Tremor, BeingGirl, and Home Made Simple; and traditional/social mashup hits like the OldSpice Guy video campaign.

* Fashion upstart lululemon is harnessing the evangelical passion of itsemployees and ambassador networks.

* Software company Intuit is opening itself to a steady stream of innovation andapplications, as well as customer support, based on online communityinvolvement.

* Open source companies, like Mozilla, are tapping brand enthusiasm viacomprehensive, community-based marketing efforts.

* Retail icons, such as Starbucks, are making marketing and customer orientationcentral to their brand by mastering customer experience.

* Maverick start-up company Naked Pizza is revolutionizing customers’relationship with fast food through a preachy, healthy brand image thatinteracts with its clients via Twitter (to the uninitiated, a microbloggingplatform that allows users to text messages known as tweets of up to 140characters).

Rather than lobbing promises and messages ceaselessly over the chaos of today’stone-deaf marketplace, these smart companies are thinking about how activecustomer participation can get their brands noticed, talked about, and endorsedthrough their customer grapevine. Instead of controlling the brand, marketersare opening it up to exciting new possibilities. In short, these brands aregoing “wiki.” The wikibranding movement is reshaping the way in which companiesbuild brand value. Traditional notions of stage-managing brands are shifting infavor of an open and authentically shared ownership among marketer, employees,and customers.

The Evolution of Brands

Perhaps the march to a wikibrand world is Darwinism at play. A historicalperspective suggests that we could have predicted the next wave of brandbuilding. For a long period of time, a brand was simply a logo indicatingownership, as shown in Table 1.1. As mass production emerged in thenineteenth century, early packaged goods companies used branding to establishfamiliarity and trust in markets that were more accustomed to local products.

The sophistication of branding increased in the early twentieth century asbrands began to convey attributes and associations that implied ambition. Therising standard of living in the West increased discretionary income, while theemergence of new media, like radio and TV, enabled companies to market theirproducts in an engaging fashion to broader audiences. Brands became less aboutsatisfying basic needs and more about satisfying desires and communicatingsocial status through ownership.

By the eighties, as markets became increasingly saturated with importedproducts, line extensions, and generic competition, brand positioning and brandequity management became essential tools for marketers seeking to highlight keyproduct attributes and establish preference over their competitors.

More recently, the narrowing of product performance differences, record levelsof customer cynicism, and the increasing depth of media volume have had brandowners striving to establish emotional connections with customers based onkindred values, likable brand stories, and enhanced design aesthetics. KevinRoberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, anointed these popularly as “lovemarks.”Today, the “plan-and-push-and-love-us” approach to branding is increasinglyimpotent, and brand owners are being forced to consider new options. Customertrust and satisfaction in brands is declining precipitously, while thecustomer’s ability to find pertinent information, inform others, andself-organize has never been stronger.

Positive and negative brand experiences and content now spread rapidly acrosssocial circles as barriers have virtually been erased by evolving Web software,multimedia, mobile, electronic, and file storage technologies. Today’ssuccessful brand strategies rely less on “managing perceptions,” “spinninginformation,” and “controlling the message”—the hallmarks of an earliertime.

If we can learn anything from this recent history of brands, it is thefollowing:

* Fundamental changes in brand management coincide with big shifts in media,communications, and marketplace conditions. We have that now.

* Branding shifts have all been a reaction to some kind of scarcity. At onetime, these were constraints on capital, distribution channels, markets, mediaavailability, and shelf space; now the scarcity is consumer attention, time, andtrust.

* Every era of change has brand winners and losers; the winners adapt to changebefore it’s too late. We’re seeing this play out firsthand in the meteoric riseand fall of companies.

* While most changes are evolutionary, the windows of opportunity betweenchanges are getting smaller, as society adapts to new paradigms more quickly. Intoday’s business climate, cultural adoption of change has never been more agile.

* Each brand epoch has been marked by a distinct generational tribe with commoncultural hallmarks that hold sway over the culture for a time: the flappers andGatsbys of the Roaring Twenties, the liberal and free-loving baby boomers, theinnovative and anticorporate Generation X, and now the connected andcollaborative Net Generation (also called Generation Y, or Millennials).

The Marketing Divide: The Customer Is in Control

The branding power of traditional media (TV, print, and radio) has beenseriously eroded by new consumer technologies such as personal video recorders(PVRs), satellite radio (such as Sirius), online social networks (includingFacebook, Bebo, Orkut, and MySpace), and user-generated sharing sites likeYouTube. Simultaneously, there’s been an explosion of product choice,competition, and variety, which will only increase as rising giants China andIndia spawn a growing number of truly global competitors across differentindustries.

At the intersection of all this technology and choice stands a customer who isfaced with the challenge of keeping up with this fast-moving world. Digitallyadept people are arguably the best-positioned market segment to deal with thisglut of activity, and they have become amazingly good at multitasking, filteringout marketing messages, and arriving at purchase decisions based on informationfrom their peers. The net effect: the customer is in control (Figure1.1).

The Media: The Noise Grows Louder

Network TV viewership is at its lowest point in history. Music radio is in steepdecline. Newspaper circulation has been slipping since 1987. Magazine, book, andbox office sales are stagnant, while physical CD and DVD sales are declining.Increasingly, these traditional media formats are being augmented and evenreplaced by a cacophony of Web-based media and other alternatives, such asringtones, game consoles, digital signage, branded entertainment, andsponsorship avenues.

Paradoxically, the diminishing returns on traditional media have sparked avicious media spiral. In an effort to bolster waning audience attention andlessening impact, traditional media have hiked advertising volume. The averageduration of commercial time has risen to eighteen minutes for every hour ofprogramming on some TV stations. Every year, TV clutter increases 1–3percent. This tidal wave of noise serves to increase consumer dissatisfactionand “tune-out.” Even more ironically, this spawns even higher investments intraditional media advertising. The result is that marketers are payingsubstantially more to reach diminishing audiences of disinterested anddissatisfied consumers.

At the same time, cross-media usage is on the rise. Today’s “eyeballs” do nothave the same value as their predecessors did a century ago, when undividedattention was the norm. For example, 70 percent of current media users claim tobe consuming multiple media concurrently on a regular basis. Members of the NetGeneration are notorious multitask jugglers and voracious media consumers,enjoying an average of twenty hours’ worth of media within a seven-hour period;it’s a safe bet that today’s eyeballs are strained from plenty of dartingaround.

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from WIKI BRANDS by SEAN MOFFITT. Copyright © 2011 by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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