Elastic Brands

I’m glad I’m not responsible for a big brand.

I lie.  I would love to manage a massive “enduring promise of value” like Coca-Cola.  But the challenge those big brands face is huge and growing — and it is coming from itty-bitty brands.

May I explain?

The disruption to the nice, rigidly structured media world which the web and social media have forced means alot for big brands.  It means that their control over the publishers, represented by their multi-billion dollar budgets, is diminishing.  Why?  Because the barriers to entry, the height of the bar, the cost to gain access to buyers — have been eliminated, lowered, trivialized, respectively.

Publishers used to control access to buyers, and big brands owned the publishers.  Little bitty brands can now become their own publishers — using tools that are free and by gaining access to buyers via channels that are also (essentially) free.

Coca-Cola used to be the dominant soft drink product on store shelves in general.  Now, Coca-Cola distributors have to carry dozens of products “on the truck” in order to keep the overall sell-through volume stable or growing.  The market has been fragmented by dozens of smaller, niche products (energy drinks, water, fruit juices, teas) which have effectively ‘dis-integrated’ the once monolithic soft drinks segment.

The second place I’m glad I don’t live is in the high-end web marketing design agency world.  Just like at the macro-level described above, I believe those guys are going to be disintermediated as well.  Free open source tools (like those used to power this site), crowd-sourcing, and an ever-sophisticated generation of technically savvy young people will put more and more and more pressure on the $100,000 logo design project, the $500,000 web site redesign, and the like.  More people will simply have more access to more tools to do excellent work on their own.  Yes there will be brands that need to (and have the requisite profits to) always pay the highest price to have the Chanel or the Prada or the Coca-Cola of marketing sites and  identity systems.

I just think that buyers will begin to see smaller and less significant differences between those massive investments and the results achieved by the more agile, more savvy, smaller brands.

What do you think?

Extra credit question: What was Coca-Cola’s long term financial gain from the Coca-Cola Classic marketing debacle?

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• Profit Edges Up at Coke, but Sales Stall in North America (nytimes.com)
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• A World of Cokes (simplygreen.co.za)

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