There are many definitions of the marketing term “brand.”  There are brand managers.  We speak of the brand experience.

Companies craft and shape their brand image.

Loads of lucre is spent to preserve, protect and defend brands.

The definition I most like?  An

Enduring

Buyers believe that value will remain consistent.  Coca-cola conjures a shapely bottle, bright red cans.  Mouths salivate in anticipation of that unique taste.

Promise

I lace up my Nike shoes and suddenly I can “Just do it.”
of

Value.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM.”  “Volvo.  For Life.”

We just know these things about these mega-brands.  But we should be asking, and answering, these questions about our own brands.

If that’s what a brand is – then how can a brand be elastic?  Why should a brand be elastic?

Because this notion of a “brand” was established when the world was r_ouⁿd.

And as we know from Tom Friedman, the world is now flat.

Technological advances have not just leveled the competitive playing field.  They have redefined the cultural and commercial structures of the global economy.  The “flat world” has created both enormous threats to well-established businesses (think of the phenomenon of outsourcing to India in the 90’s), and laid the groundwork for the emergence and rapid growth of a whole new generation of businesses, business models, and – yes, brands (dare I mention Goog… nah).

And what it means to be and to manage a brand must change as well.

I suggest that along with these great technological advances and planet-flattening changes, there has been a fundamental change in the power balance between buyers and sellers.

There was a time when brands could control what information buyers had about their products.  Those days are over.

There was a time when the owners of newspapers and magazines, billboards, television and radio stations, owned the only communication vehicles consumers could consult for information about products and services.  Vendors financed those businesses through advertising, and thus had great influence over what information reached subscribers, viewers, or listeners.  Those days are over, too.

Brands, or vendors, have lost control over what information buyers have access to, and how they get it.

Thanks a lot, Vice President Gore!  Your internet has taken our flat world, and turned it upside down!

Thanks to Ron Miller for the link to the performance by Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, yesterday.

The video clip is so evocative I had to stop work on another project to reflect.

We are at a genuinely interesting point of transition in the United States, and therefore in the world.  My genuine hope, and I use that word advisedly these days, is that Obama-imbued optimism will prove a tonic for our pandemic hypertension.  We need a “collective yoga class” in this country.  Perhaps the debut of our 44th President will have us all breathing deep into the far recesses of our lungs, stretching further and making more supple our cable-taught hamstrings.

Perhaps thus relaxed, even temporarily, we can once again envision a future characterized by economic growth, by the belief that we can coexist with earth, air and water while generating less fire, by a vibrant, tolerant, and free culture we can be proud to pass on to our children, and theirs.

If you haven’t heard this piece — I encourage you to do so.  Commentary continues below.

I am no Pete Seeger expert, but I have enjoyed his music since my childhood, thanks to my Mom.  I have seen great biographical programs, particularly the PBS show, “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.”  He was among a group of artists and intellectuals who were grotesquely treated at another point of transition in this country — the debut of the Cold War.  He survived and ultimately thrived, on his own terms.

I could not help thinking I was seeing Pete Seeger perform live for the last time.  He is aging.  Gracefully, but aging.  His voice and timing are not what they once were.  But there he stood, before the Reflecting Pool, part of a political event which must have had him full to bursting with pride.  My throat tightened and the tears did in fact well up.

Toward the end of the clip, the producers “pot up” Springsteen’s mic, and his distinctive, almost twangy, harmony strengthens in the piece.  As you may know, Springsteen produced a CD / album and a fairly extensive tour behind his recordings of Pete Seeger greats: “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.”  His admiration for Seeger is well documented.

Think about that metaphoric transition: from Seeger the American Communist Party member, the political protestant, who lived a modest material existence but dedicated his life to human rights causes and a world of man living in harmony with nature and the earth; to Springsteen, sprung from working class roots near the cosmetically uninspring Jersey Shore, seering advocate of labor in industrial America, critic of immigration and domestic issues like privacy protection in an environment of wire-tapping and other surveillance, multi-millionaire leader of the E Street Band which regularly tops the music industry in concert tour receipts.

 I find the difference in “cultural authenticity index” between the two poignant.  Today we think of U2’s Bono and Springsteen as media beacons with enlightened political consciousness.  Their presence at certain types of political events has become predictable.  Whatever your view of Seeger, Springsteen, Obama — there can be no doubt that among them (at least judging to the date of this writing), Seeger is the only among them who truly lived “an examined life.”  He is a man whose vision for humanity can be seen in all aspects of his life.  His political and social views; his choices about lifestyle and consumption; his application of his God-given artistic talent to his dream for mankind.

I am a huge fan of “The Boss,” and while I found U2’s concert a let-down, I would not deny them a spot in the pantheon of modern rock bands.  But neither is up to the standard for authenticity set by Seeger.  Not even close.  And believe me, my judgment is not based on the merits of their political views, as many who know me can attest.  It is based on the depth and breadth of their conviction; of the completeness with which they pursue life in all its aspects.

The question becomes, who among us is?

Thanks to industry colleague and friend Lance Shaw for this post to his Facebook profile: “Gartner cancels 2 upcoming ‘flagship’ conferences.”

I wrote back at the time of the Gartner Symposium in Orlando – their surviving ‘flagship’ conference — pleading with their junior anal-ysts in particular to take a couple of affect lessons and consider how their basic and stereotypical interaction model just might need to change in the face of economic hard times.

As a perennial vendor representative, and often small and upstart vendor representative at that, I have been on the receiving end of “helpful advice” for years.  So I admit it: guilty as charged of schadenfreude!

But on a more serious note… this is yet another reminder of what is required of leaders in these trying times — humility, honesty, and refreshed and recalibrated vision.

Originally uploaded by TimDD

Interesing bit of positioning / sales work today from John Chambers, Cisco CEO, at the Gartner show today during his “brainshare,” or “mindmeld” or whatever it was called. Oh — just checked the program, it’s called a “mastermind” session.

He mentioned “telepresence,” which used to be called video conferencing, about 20 times. Clearly this is one of the key new revenue drivers for Cisco in the next three to five years.

In itself, not so interesting — CEO uses big stage in front of probably 9,000 to indicate what he wants them to buy.

Interesting to me, though, because of the name. I have been evangelizing a new model for marketing management, based not on the principals of “awareness – consideration – preference,” but on the concepts of “presence, authority, reputation.” The notion that these aspects are in a dynamic balance in the web 2.0 world (yikes i just typed web 2.0! Acch!) — and define the brand in this new world.

The role that video (live and otherwise) will play as part of your “presence” strategy and plan cannot be questioned, and I applaud him for the choice of term.

Here’s the paper I originally wrote about presence, authority, reputation: “Marketing Unbound.”

According to American Heritage Dictionary, tautology means:

Needless repetition of the same sense in different words; redundancy

Strictly speaking, definitions for tautology refer to silly logical propositions which are always true, such as "tomorrow, either the world will end or it will not end."  But a more interesting example of tautology is to describe something as "adequate enough."  "Enough" is merely the writer’s imprecision distracting and confusing the reader.  If not simply accelerating his or her judgment of the writer.

In the narrow slice of the commercial world in which I work from day to day, we talk a great deal about the business transition toward "service oriented architecture" (SOA) in order to drive "business agility."  The concepts of SOA essentially outline a major disruption in the trajectory of software and business applications: away from proprietary, monolithic, and rigidly inflexible systems toward modular, standards-based components of business logic that can be recombined in any way you desire to reflect rapidly changing business requirements.

This transition, or disruption as I have labeled it above, recapitulates other technological transitions and is therefore no longer the subject of debate as to "whether" we will execute it, but of "when."  There are dozens of readily accessible analogs to the SOA vision: standardization of transportation infrastructure; of utility infrastructure; of social / political infrastructures.  Rigid and inflexible structures always give way to systems which are more resilient, as long as they retain properties of performance, integrity, and robustness while becoming more agile.

For decades, we have speculated about the importance of service in the creation of value for customers.  How is it possible that Starbuck’s or Peet’s can extrace five dollars for a cup of coffee?  It sure isn’t the commodity coffee bean for which there is a well-defined global market.  "It’s the experience."

But often one hears a vendor offering to partner strategically with a customer to help them become a "service-oriented business."  One is hearing tautology from that vendor.