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

Brands and their marketing will change significantly in the Shift Age. A good bit of this change has to do with the fact that the Shift Age is basically coincidental with the beginning of the twenty-first century. The twentieth century was the century of media as we know it. Newspapers reached unprecedented mass, radio reached into the home, movies became mass entertainment, and television changed the world, followed by cable television. Finally, in the last decade of the century, the Internet brought the century and media as we knew it to a transformative close.

Brands and marketing were completely shaped and driven by this media-centric century, as it was media that allowed marketers to create branding through it. Much of the legacy thinking that defined brands and marketing was formed in the last fifty years of the twentieth century. However, in the twenty-first century and now the Shift Age, all of these definitions and axioms are being challenged and destroyed. The Internet has assumed supremacy. It has subsumed many formerly dominant individual media forms from the last century and instead is becoming their connective tissue. It certainly has fundamentally changed consumer behavior, and of course it is to the consumer that brands are marketed.

Brands through the Ages

We need to take a larger historical step back to look at brands, as much of what is about to happen to them in the Shift Age will in some way be analogous to their earliest stages.

Brands and trademarks predate the modern era and capitalism. They began to appear when long distance commerce began. Initially people exchanged goods locally and therefore tended to have personal connections to the local producer whose business reputation was known and who had an interest in maintaining ongoing trade relationships. When people began to trade long distance, this personal guarantee and reputation was no longer available, and various forms of marks were used to help ensure the buyer of the quality and quantity of the goods being sold. Then, sometime around 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, with the structured beginning of long-distance trading, elemental brands, or marks, were used to represent the origin of the product or the maker as one whose reputation or quality had been established.

When the Industrial Age began brands took off. Mass production enabled large-scale production of goods, and steam-powered transportation vastly increased the breadth and speed of distribution. This was when still-existing brands such as Bass Ale in 1876 and Coca-Cola 1887 were trademarked, and Quaker Oats was trademarked as the first breakfast cereal in 1895.

Brands really came into their own in the twentieth century, particularly in America. This was when mass markets were created with the aforementioned media, and mass production further drove down production costs, eliminating the local supplier. Brands became large and national and then, later in the century, multinational.

Brands were institutional and had institutional authority. They were large, defined categories and were corporate. Ivory was 99 percent pure, Tide was the laundry detergent for the family. The Good Housekeeping seal of approval was a mark of authority and acceptance. This was particularly true when television grew to dominance in the middle part of the century. Brands sponsored entire shows and then moved to the thirty-second commercial, a model still largely in place today.

However, there is disruption that is clearly present with brands as we enter the Shift Age. This is due in large part to the fragmentation of media over the last thirty years. It is much harder for a company to reach the full potential audience for its brand. In addition, with the advent of social media, the institutional power of brands has been greatly diminished.

We have moved from a twentieth-century America, and world, that was largely driven by institutional authority to one today that is often driven by personal authority, as in Ill ask my friends what they think first.

This ascendant power of networked friends who seek each others opinion greatly decreases the almost godlike authority of brand marketers of several decades ago.

Through the past few years I have been working with Owen Shapiro a partner at Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a well-respected market research firm. He has provided me with insights into how the ideas I first presented in The Shift Age , the Three Forces of the Shift Age primarily, have been manifested in consumer behavior, in the effect of personal technology now has on purchasing decisions, and how much institutional authority has moved to personal authority.