INTERVIEW WITH HILMY CADER

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BEYOND THE BRAND  (continued)
NEW COMPANIES.  NEW THINKERS.  NEW MODELS.  NEW MEDIA.

Marketing the Experience
So what are the guideposts for the new approach to advertising this century?
(1) Be daring --be the one that throws the challenge, not the one that responds to the client brief. The old distinctions of client and agency are eroding. Marketers don’t want answers to problems. They expect solutions to opportunities that may have not yet arisen. (2) Interact with the customer. Not as obvious as it may seem. In a fragmenting media climate, the business of the ad agency will be acting on the consumer’s behalf, rather than on the marketer’s behalf. (3) Partner with the media. We are going to see unusual alliances in resources. As the traditional media discovers that they are more than conduits, brand communication will take on new dimensions. The lines of content and commerce are already blurring. (4) Creativity –how could branding do without it? (4) Y&R talks of investing in ‘Multiple Communication Pathways’. The point here is that advertising, which tries to be economical (the 30-second commercial, the small-space ad etc) risks diluting the message. A more holistic approach may require seamless integration with new media (and even non-media) to deliver the message. (5) Re-engineer the agency culture. Agencies are very good at recommending changes in the marketplace, but hold fast to their time-worn cultures and hierarchies. The ‘Account Manager’ the ‘copywriter’, the ‘Art Director’ and the ‘Media Planner’ are vestiges of a buttoned down corporate structure. Agencies need people with titles such as ‘cultural planner’, ‘urban guerilla’, a ‘minister of cyberspace’, and a ‘media maven’. As any agency will tell you about advertising, it’s the experience, stupid!

If all this sounds very daring, these ideas have a very sound economical backing. In an economy largely shaped by the Adam Smith principles, sellers and buyers have fixed locations, and tightly defined norms to exchange a fixed type of goods and services. In the networked world, the thinking is that end users are more ‘protean’. They no longer enter a market to exchange property (money for a pair of shoes, for instance), but to exchange time and experience (attention span for a music CD). In this kind of temporary, ever-changing relationship, brands don’t have the value they once did. The experience is more important because the brand is in a state of perpetual motion.

A good example of marketing the experience using Multiple Communication Pathways is Richard Branson’s slew of companies that comprise the Virgin brand. The Virgin experience is more powerful than the Virgin brand. There is no visible synergy (another word from the brand strategy toolbox) between the brand experiences here. There’s Virgin Energy, Virgin Wines, Virgin Books, and Virgin Net working alongside the features of the original brand –Music, Airlines, and Trains. Branson rewrote the rules of branding even before the death-of-a-brand theory was in place. His first record store, albeit a tiny unpaid space above a shoe shop, set out to be "a place where people could meet and listen to records together, somewhere where they weren’t simply encouraged to dash in, buy the record, and leave. We wanted them to stay longer, chat to the staff, and really get into which records they were going to buy." This was 25 years before chat rooms and Web rings would be discovered as ‘stickiness’ – term born of the networked economy that refers to a way to get patrons to stick around in the brand environment. Virgin records unwittingly created a ‘holistic’ environment for the shoe store downstairs which sold Doc Martens to the people queuing up for the music experience. What a concept! Today co-branding is being hailed as a way to enrich the customer experience. The sale is never the end-point of the transaction.

Scott Bedbury, the person behind Nike's branding, describes the exercise of marketing a gym shoe "a metaphorical story that's evolving all the time". It is therefore not a set of rules or a fixed currency. The 'untold story', he speaks of makes people transcend the product, creating "the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience." Nike Towns, the ability to have a massage on a Virgin Atlantic flight, or a cup of coffee and an easy chair in a book store are all part of this new experiential branding trend.

CONTEXTUAL COMMERCE
In the networked economy, one manifestation of this larger experience is referred to as ‘contextual commerce’ –that seamless experience between consumers, content and products. Here’s a scenario involving a credit card, a cup of coffee and a TV station. You’re on your sofa and the TV network will know that you are watching (because you've provided them with that information, via a smart remote, in exchange for the free cup of coffee at the neighborhood Starbucks). The price of that transaction will be borne by the TV station that uses the data to sell commercial airtime to companies like Starbucks targeting your demographic. So at the commercial break, an ad invites you to a book-signing event featuring an author you have just discovered. How did the bookstore know your literature preference? It culled the information from a credit card company that tracks your book purchases at Amazon.com. Additionally, your hand-held device receives an email reminder from the author, with a link to his site featuring an excerpt from the book. How could you miss this highly caffeinated event? Especially when there’s ‘no purchase necessary’!

Contextual commerce is one of the many attempts to compensate for the erosion of brand loyalty. Consumers today live more nomadic lifestyles, often acting out of character, frustrating marketers' attempts to predict --and target-- them. The media will begin to leverage contextual commerce too, and play a bigger role in the customer century.

Forbes magazine rolled out an ambitious interactive project in October last year using a hand-held device called the :CueCAT. The device, a hand-held scanner it gave out for free, works with special bar codes or ‘:Cues’ placed at the bottom of articles and ads in its Forbes, Forbes FYI, and Forbes ASAP magazines.

Readers have to hook up the scanner with their computer, swipe the bar code and this gives them access to more content within a Web site. It's not just the marriage of content and commerce but the heightening of the media-brand experience. This is not the media or the advertiser pushing content at the reader or consumer. This is the reader initiating and participating in the brand experience.

Are ad agencies prepared to serve a new set of marketing needs? Every agency today has moved away from image manipulation as its core strength, toward a more integrated marketing discipline. Marketers are now beginning to treat ad agencies as partners in this process – the brain cells, rather than the muscles in the strategy. Marketing, we now know, is not something you do to people, but with people. Today they seek to serve the whole communication spectrum, and creating ads is just one of the functions. As someone in the Omnicom Group (parent to BBDO and DDB) once facetiously put it, "consumers are like roaches —you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while." Or, to put it another way, branding is not the killer application anymore.

NEXT: The Pros speak out