Back in the days when the internet was young, many believed that as it grew brands would become a thing of the past.
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This has clearly turned out to be wrong. In fact, the web has become dominated by, yes, a few big brands.
Still, the notion that a bigger worldwide web means smaller brands is surprisingly resilient. Most recently Stanford professor Itamar Simonsen and author Emanual Rosen have argued in their new book Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information and in their recent blog post here that marketers need to reevaluate the idea that brands are critically important in consumer’s purchasing decisions. They claim: “brands are less needed when consumers can assess product quality using better sources of information such as reviews from other users, expert opinion, or information from people they know on social media.”
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Because brands still matter immensely. The mistake Simonsen and Rosen make is to confuse the value, role, and meaning of a brand in today’s digital economy with the methods used to build the brand.
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So instead of discussing “brand versus not brand” marketers and executives should ask themselves: How can we strengthen our brand when the traditional tools such as advertising, corporate identity programs, and PR are becoming impotent?
Part of the answer is in making the brand more—not less—central. In a hyper-transparent digital world, consumers instantly know the difference between what a company says and what it does. Organizations can no longer draw clear lines between marketing and product development, between communications and services.
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