In a world of branding documents, core messages and related causes it might be hard for a marketer to face the skull-blazing truth; brand identity is no longer owned and created by a company. Scared yet? You should be. Today the consumer owns and defines your brand- for the good and the bad. The days of using re-brands and multimillion dollar ad campaigns to magically solve corporate health are gone. Now, the modern consumer decides just who your company is, what you stand for and what that means to them as a consumer.
No one can deny the active role ratings and reviews, online discussion and online communities have played in the way companies are perceived in the current market. However, it isn’t just social media that’s played a role in the transformation of the modern brand Identity. Savvy consumers are making more brand decisions based on their perception of a brand from personal and related experiences than ever before. It might even be argued that social media and digital technologies have finally grown to support this existing need, not the other way around. The internet is now a the home of the mass collective of consumer thought.
This should not be taken lightly. For example, a person’s opinion of a brand is a like stick. A negative perception in one person, like one branch, is easy to break. However if you culminate together several individuals together with mutual negative opinions, you’ll need a chain saw to cut through the bundle. Thought silos are gone. People are leveraging the collective information to form a new brand identity. So the question is, do you like the brand consumers have given you?
