Branding in the digital age - the merits of riding a tiger

First off, let me confess that I'm 64 and, therefore, a real real late-comer into the digital age. Thanks to pressure from my students, my son and his peers, and the countless nephews and nieces that I'm blessed with, I decided to jump into the deep end of the digital age and got myself accounts in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the last of which I've since discontinued.

What took me by surprise was not the behaviour that I noticed on such "social" media spaces, but in the e-commerce and m-commerce spaces. I would have sworn that we Indians would never buy clothes and shoes without going through our 'touch-feel-see' and 'trial' routines - but thankfully I had not taken any vows about it, since I would have to eat crow, and large quantities of that indigestible bird.

On closer study over the last few years, I noticed some significant changes in the way consumers, particularly young consumers in India, interact with offerings, messages and brands. This has significant impact in the way marketers need to go about creating strategies and tactical plans in order to bring their brands emotionally and physically closer to their consumers.

A New Paradigm

Changes we've seen can perhaps define a new paradigm in consumer behaviour, but let's go ahead without caveat:

1. The consumer today has far more choices than she had in the past. That's of course a given, but it also means that power is now more assuredly in the hands of the people, and not in the hands of the manufacturers and/or channels. 
2. The consumer today can and does bite back, and hard. Had a bad holiday experience? You will go onto FB and create a shindig. The product you bought off Amazon is not up to your expectations? Sure you'll yell and scream - and you'll get heard too. 
3. Consumers are learning faster than ever, and much of their learnings come from other consumers. So, you don't just have to satisfy one consumer but a whole community. Word-of-mouth has never been so powerful.
4. The consumer's attention span has become shorter in most cases. If you want to tell her something, make it quick, fast and straight. But, you can't be boring - you must engage, entertain, excite her at the same time. "Buy me because I last longer" is still a good message, but now you must prove it in a fun way. Exhortation has to give way to excitement. 
5. At the same time, the consumer is prepared to spend more time in search, evaluation, and post-purchase validation. In an article entitled "Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places", the author writes "In the June 2009 issue of McKinsey Quarterly, my colleague David Court and three coauthors introduced a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands: the “consumer decision journey” (CDJ)...Their research revealed that far from systematically narrowing their choices, today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond." An interesting sidelight was that consumers today spend a lot more time in the post-purchase stage than they did earlier. 
6. Consumers' relationships with brands can fracture quicker than ever, but if cemented strongly can last for much longer - in other words, the marketer can move the consumer to such a stage of satisfaction that she can become an advocate and brand ambassador. Here, I don't mean 'likes' in an FB page, which is a meaningless word in that context and totally without validation. What I do mean are consumer feedback without incentives, or sometimes incentivised post facto. 

Riding the Tiger

So where does that leave the marketer? Does she have to unlearn everything that she's acquired over the years? No, not really - but she must be smarter at picking up nuances from the consumer universe she's dealing with. Let's look at a few guidelines which may be useful:

1. The first fundamental rule of brand management has not changed - if your proposition is not addressing a need or a want, go back and start all over again.
2. The second fundamental rule remains the same - be differentiated and be relevant to the consumer's needs or wants.
3. Don't think 'product', think 'augmented' product, and better still, think 'possible' product. Consumers are already doing so, and so are your smarter competitors. 
4. Mass media is not dead, yet. As long as mass markets exist, the validity of mass media will remain. However, how a marketer needs to carefully blend and manage how mass media communication (one-way) meshes in with the two-way communication in other consumer engagement spaces, particularly when many consumers are engaging with each other over a single brand acquisition issue - think of it as a multi-way conversation in a multi-verse. 
5. Time has shortened. The consumer decides faster and adopts or jettisons brands faster. The marketer must deal with faster decision times and ride this tiger in order to build a successful brand today. 
6. The consumer is teacher, professor and mentor - always and forever. Alexander Pope's dictum "The proper study of mankind is man" has never been more true.

The good old-fashioned virtues of solid product performance, excellent after-marketing, caring for the consumer and showing that you care, building trust and confidence - these are still highly valuable today, perhaps even more so, in a highly fragmented market space of multiple choices. I venture to suggest that these virtues are permanently desirable for a brand.

The marketer who works towards building these virtues will build very strong brands indeed.