How To Wikify Your Brand

    Top executives have locked marketing out of many boardrooms because of its insistence on using unmeasurable, dated tactics from the mass economy. But brand wikification, based on the customer-driven imperatives of today’s world, will once again give marketing the power seat in executive suites.

    The last commentary discussed the death of “positioning” and the rise of wikification (See “The Death of "Positioning" & The Birth of Brand Wikification” in the FusionBrand blog, http://fusionbrand.blogs.com/fusionbrand/2005/05/the_death_of_po.html “Positioning” died because its DNA lacked a vital component prized in boardrooms – measurement.  By elevating “mind share” over “market share” in their marketing classic “Positioning,” first published in 1979, theorists Jack Trout and Al Ries ensured that the success of “positioning” would always be unable to be quantified in a spreadsheet.

    “Positioning” had other flaws as well. By making mind share the primary goal, “positioning” unfortunately uncoupled marketing from sales. All the mind share in the world doesn’t mean much if sales don’t result. Just ask failed brands like Oldsmobile. Finally, the emphasis on “positioning” isolated marketing from the rest of the organization. Manufacturing, R&D, logistics and especially finance well understand such measurements as delivery times, MTBF (mean time between failures), order-to-cash cycles and more, but are perplexed by any “positioning” discussion.

    “Positioning” thrived for two decades because it provided a tool for leveraging mass markets and mass media. But as the Economist magazine and many others have pointed out, the growth of the Internet, rise of the empowered customer and market fragmentation have made “positioning” a relic.  Because of the changes that have transformed business and customer relationships, attempting to use “positioning” as a branding strategy is like trying to circumvent the globe with one of those quaint 17th century world maps.

    As “positioning” fades, especially for any manager under 35, brand wikification is taking its place. Wikification, which takes its name from wikis, the companion phenomenon to blogs, is based on the fact that brands are now defined by customers. How companies “position” brands is irrelevant to the only force that matters – the experiences of prospects and customers. Brands today are collectively defined by customers, based on the economic, experiential and/or emotional value received. This means that companies focused on branding must devote resources to defining, delivering, measuring and sustaining value that customers seek.
   
    Wikification represents good news and even better news for marketers. The good news is that it incorporates two elements that no boardroom can ignore – measurement and knowledge of what customers value. The even better news is that wikification forces everyone in marketing to value metrics more than “mind share,” “creativity” or any other eye-of-the-beholder concept. It also leads to greater marketing involvement in databases and operational issues that deliver customer value.

    Admittedly, wikification is not as easy as “positioning” yourself as “a leading provider of…” (a term that must be retired immediately because it describes a company in terms of goods sold, not according the customer value received). But hard work is needed to avoid marketing being eliminated as a separate department, a reorganization now under consideration by multiple firms, according to Forrester.

    So how can companies wikify a brand?   

• Incorporate Six Sigma’s VOC/VOTC (voice of the customer) program: Why did manufacturing -- not marketing! – come up with a metrics-driven approach to incorporate customer input? Six Sigma, of course, seeks to eliminate variability in products and processes. This improves quality, reduces cycle times, and increases throughput, which leads to lower costs and higher profitability. Six Sigma has been widely adopted by manufacturers and is spreading into other areas, such as HR and finance.

The lack of customer input can be costly. More than 80% of products fail to become brands, according to major consultancies. By contrast, 80% of products based on customer suggestions succeed, according to New Product News.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology estimates that not incorporating customer requirements costs U.S. corporations nearly $100 billion a year in failed projects.

    To ensure that products reflect customer priorities, the Six Sigma VOC process includes collecting customer input, primarily through customer surveys. The process not only identifies problem areas but also their costs and revenue implications. For wikification, customer input must be used to increase customer loyalty and  profitability. Additionally, marketing can expand the repertoire of VOC-collection tools, including customer councils, help desks, etc.

• Become the organization’s data central: The power of marketing departments is directly proportional to the amount of customer data owned. Today, most marketing departments own little more than unqualified leads. Marketing will start ruling the corporate roost when it controls a centralized and consolidated database that incorporates all customer information, including sales data and acquisition and contact history. Other vital data includes warranty information, returns, complaints, retention rates and referral rates.

• Live with your customers: When was the last time you met with a customer? More important, when was the last time your purchasing, HR or other manager met with a customer? If it hasn’t been recently, then you are losing touch with the most powerful force involved in your branding.

    The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about A.G. Lafley, the chief executive of Procter & Gamble. The reporter accompanied Lafley as he climbed the steep stairs of a small Venezuelan apartment with peeling yellow paint to listen to Maria Yolanda Rios describe how often she washes her hair. The one-on-one session symbolizes a new approach at P&G that has doubled the stock price and increased earnings 17% since Lafley took over five years ago. “P&G used to develop products in its labs and market them based on the products best technical feature. These days, employees spend hours with women, watching them do laundry, clean the floor, apply makeup and diaper their children. They look for nuisances that a new product might solve. Then, they return to the labs determined to address the feature women care about the most,” the reporter wrote. Other successful companies also demand that employees live with customers. At Cisco, for example, top executives must be in customer offices at least 50% of the time.

• Listen to the Internet: Your brand is being shaped less by advertising than by the thousands and even millions of discussions occurring in blogs and newsgroups and emails and chatrooms and other peer-to-peer communications.  An emerging class of tools and services allow you to both track and analyze these communications. But finding out what customers and prospects are saying about your brand is easy. The hard part is listening to them.

    So what companies are using these tips to wikify their brands? Stay tuned till a future blog for some case histories.

Comments

[Alvin Narsey]

Hey Nick,
nice blog...u cover some great points.
you have been bloglined!
alvin

[Bruce DeBoer]

I'm left with a few questions after reading this post.

- you make marketing sound as though it's completely reactionary. Yes, we build on customer perceptions but should we forget that we can still influence behavior? After all, isn't that the point? How does Wikification include vision and innovation?

- Internet conversatons offer a segment of the population. The segment are those who like to use it. There is still a very large segment in every catagory that doesn't "chat". Are we willing to build a brand based on Wiki segments? It's like dating only Match.com singles and assuming that the Match.com population is a consistant cross section of available singles. That simply isn't true.