rehumanize

Three years ago while speaking on an Ad:Tech panel, I coined the term wikibranding to convey an observation that brands are in fact wikis, entities that are increasingly defined by the crowd and less so by the manufacturer. Given the disruptive forces in social media that have taken hold since then – YouTube and Facebook weren't yet the mass forces they are today, and Twitter hadn't yet tweeted – I believe this to be even more true today. So the question is not whether customers are talking, it's whether marketers are listening.  What are marketers doing with the flood of peer-to-peer likes and dislikes that travel around the world at light speed? I've grown tired of traditional dashboards.  They provide heat but little light.  They report but don't inspire ideas.  That's because most analytics are a dizzying blur of data that are disconnected from the building blocks of brand equity ; disconnected from product innovation; disconnected from the CEO's

Interbrand just released its annual ranking of the Top 100 most valuable global brands .  The usual suspects made the Top 10 – e.g., Coke, IBM, McDonalds, GE, Microsoft and Disney. This year, while looking at how Toyota and BP fared, the study made me think about the value of crisis management.  Both brands faced a major crisis of consumer confidence.  Toyota suffered through problems with sudden acceleration and customer fatalities, made even worse by the company's slow and confused response.  BP created an epic environmental disaster, and then had its CEO make matters worse by having us feel as though we were inconveniencing his summer holidays. So how did each do in this year's ranking? Toyota dropped from the Top 10 to the #11 position, while BP dropped off the list all together. Why did Toyota's brand value hold up better than that of BP?  Certainly years spent building brand equity and consumer trust worked in Toyota's favor.   And despite Toyota's halti

We live in a world where we can access the entire knowledge base of the human race within two clicks.  Why, then, do we increasingly find ourselves in an echo chamber? The echo chamber happens when we tune in only to the cable news channels or blogs that reinforce our political points of views; when we use Twitter to hear ourselves speak but not to listen; when we only absorb topics within our comfort zone of daily water cooler chatter.  It's human nature to hunker down during a storm, and the interweb is a virtual tsunami of information. Today, Christopher Taylor and I riffed a solution:  An app that monitors our daily intake of media, web searches, entertainment, appointments, tweets, social network interaction, etc. (which largely exist on our computer or smartphone) and provides a daily infographic illustrating whether or not we made it out of the chamber. (My DV% to avoid the Echo Chamber.) The app would require us to establish desired pre-sets – similar to the % Dail