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Building Brands: The Human Art of
Branding Meets Today's Content Users |
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9 February 2004 |
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According to BrandChannel.com's "Reader's
Choice Brand of the Year" award, Google is the number
one brand in the consumer's eye these days, with nary a
traditional content company in sight. Brand value is one of
the most important assets that a company can have, and yet
in their focus on protecting intellectual property rights
many content companies have taken their eye off of brand
value as based on something more important: the perceptions
of their clients. In a world where new mountains of
content are being invented every day, trying to
defend your mineral rights for those mounds doesn't sound
like a growth strategy for most content brands. Tuning in
to what people perceive as valuable brands in general these
days may be very useful for content companies to consider
when plotting out their futures. |
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This must be branding week for
content, perhaps due in part to the
McGraw-Hill Media Summit starting today in New York. I
opened up my local paper today to find a full-page color advert
from Disney, touting themselves as "The World's Leading Family
Entertainment Brand." But over at BrandChannel.com more than
4,000 web respondents chose Google for the second year in a row
as their
"Reader's Choice Brand of the Year", eking out Apple's iPod-driven
popularity and with nary another content company in sight.
Branding awareness is everywhere in the content industry, but
it is ironic that the one brand that captures more attention
and loyalty from (online) audiences than any other is a company
which may protest somewhat softly that it is not a content
company at all and is nowhere to be seen at the Media Summit.
Yet surely the Google brand has become synonymous with being
able to find the right content in the right context at the
right time, a means of providing satisfaction previously
reserved for revered content publishers and producers. "All the
News that's Fit to Print," the New York Times has declared on
its front page for over a century. But through the automated
opinion-gathering of Google and other similar content
technologies, the fitness of content is being determined less
by specific content source brands than by the branding of the
capabilities that bring the content to us in ways that take
audiences into account as much as the sources themselves.
In looking at today's content brands, what are the key
factors that will promise long-term success? Here are a few
suggestions to consider in developing content brands that can
respond to today's user-driven marketplace:
- Think about what's truly new first, what's clearly not
second. Given the copyright craze that has gripped many
major content and media producers in the face of digital
piracy efforts, you'd think that a long-established
copyrighted content brand would be somewhere in the top ten
on BrandChannel's list. But apparently not: copyright only indicates the value of content in the minds of the
producer, not the consumer. Disney's efforts to extend
copyright protection to fourscore-old works has allowed the
rodent hero of the 1928 movie cartoon
"Steamboat Willie" to recycle and reestablish his brand
value to new generations of consumers in Disney's worldwide
amusement parks and create new demand for its icon-driven
content. But the copyright enforcement and extension movement
ultimately reveals the underlying weakness of the brands that
they are designed to bolster. If Ford tried to pass off its
classic autos from 1928 as highly marketable products, it
would close its doors very quickly, yet content producers
wonder why consumers revolt when asked to pay 2004 prices for
generations of out-of-date premium content products. We may
think that we're masters at making old things seem new, but
apparently consumers state their strongest allegiance to
brands that work for them today.
- Think relationships first, units second. The true
genius of Disney's brand lies not in any specific icon that
it recycles but in the human manner in which it markets them.
Go to a Disney resort or amusement park and your youngsters
can go hug a life-size Donald Duck. Do they really know who
Donald Duck is from a cartoon? Probably not, they just know
that it's a neat figure. Having a relationship with content
is far more important to long-term profitability than
establishing individual unit sales for something that does
not provide for an effective relationship. Google provides
the concierge-like relationship that makes people trust that
they will be satisfied no matter what their needs might be,
an approach perfected in content ecommerce to Nordstrom-like
perfection by Amazon. Publishers and producers still fixated
on the mass production model of content may have a hard time
adjusting to the concept of selling usability, interactivity
and community as a primary content brand attributes, but
truth told, it's far more important to create an environment
where audiences can define through their participation a
product that cannot be reproduced elsewhere than to try to
prevent audiences from reproducing a product that can be
found anywhere.
- Think of intellectual property as a real-time asset
first, an archiveable asset second. Before all of the
database owners click away from this statement, this is not
to suggest that stored content is worthless. To the contrary,
well-archived content is as important as ever, if not more so
with corporate compliance regulations pushing institutions to
track every scrap of thought and interaction carefully. But
with the overwhelming preponderance of electronic content and
the universal ease of storing it, ownership of content
becomes far less important than enabling it for specific
valuable uses. Content brands that are based primarily on the
premise of "I have this" are not as likely to survive as
brands that say "I do this." Google owns virtually none of
the content that it serves up to its users, yet makes these
properties valuable because of what the content does for them
in the moment. The speed with which major companies and
institutions can turn their raw information assets into
valuable content, increasingly with marketable value in and
of itself, emphasizes the importance of publishing entities
recognizing that owning the "mining rights" to a particular
mountain of content is diminishing in importance to owning
the railroads that take the raw materials to the marketplace
- especially when there are new mountains springing up
overnight.
A strong content brand, like any other brand, certainly
provides a great goodwill asset to a company to protect them
when individual works are less than masterful. Not every Google
search result is a gem, and we are grateful to forget more than
one Hollywood flop from a major studio like Disney and yet
still extend the brand some loyalty. Content brands like Google
inspire loyalty because they leave the details of long-term
intellectual property to others and concentrate instead on
identifying and delivering what's valuable content in a given
moment to a given person in a given venue. Words, images and
sounds can always be copied: the moment in which one finds them
to be of greatest use cannot.
-
John Blossom
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