The document discusses the need for brands of the future to evolve around a new mental model given the social revolutions caused by digital technologies and social media. It notes that brands are still rooted in assumptions of the past and resist fundamental change. The future will see brands shift from being centrally controlled to community owned, managing communities instead of just being managed, and existing seamlessly in both physical and virtual spaces. Brands will need to create more meaningful experiences with fewer resources.

1. Brands of the Future
New Delhi, 3rd April 2012

2. At one level, we all know this particular story

3. Ceding control
Acting, not speaking
Engagement
Communities
Listening
Purpose
Crowdsourcing Advocates
Collaborative
Belief

4. For all the thrall with which we behold change, we
tend to underestimate its sweeping power

5. The digital world and social media are not media
evolutions, but social revolutions

6. The world of brands is deeply rooted in the
assumptions of an earlier time, and resists attempts
at fundamental change

7. The brands of the future will need to be evolved
around a new mental model, not just of themselves,
but the world they live in

8. A deeper exploration
The familiar made unfamiliar, then made familiar
again
A look at some key drivers of change

9. The change in the dominant media form

10. Why is media so central?
Technologies that immortalise the mind and its
output – make thoughts alive and imperishable
Allow for storage, transmission, multiplication of
ideas

11. “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and
then our tools shape us”- McLuhan

12. When dominant media change, they help
change everything else
• Oral= Emotion, Participation, Unity
• Print= Memory, Separation, Logic
• TV= Transience, Desire, Currency
• Digital= ?

13. The digital mode
Individual minds connected & multiplied- now
Democratic
Collaborative
Connected
Simultaneous
(Secondary Orality- Walter Ong)

14. The Increasing Focus on the Mind
The internet as playground of the mind
The body made recreational, almost vestigial
A complementary virtual world with its own codes
The new source of wealth/value creation

15. Shift in balance of power
New imaginations, new vocabularies
Cultural flows

16. The Fault line
De-centralising pull of media/technology v/s
centralising grip of power structures
-corporations, governments, brands

17. The Brand Disconnect
Imagined as a centrally controlled transmission
The ability to make people listen and act
Consumers as interlopers

18. Brands of the Future?

19. Rivers, not lakes

20. Community owned v/s company owned

21. Being managed by the brand v/s Managing a brand

22. Brand dissolution v/s brand building

23. Creating a meaning surplus- more idea per square
inch of thing

24. Sustainability = Meaning-rich /resource-poor brands

25. Simultaneous, seamless existence in physical and
virtual spaces

26. Brand as truth that cannot hide v/s mask that cannot
be penetrated

27. The brand of tomorrow needs the organisation of
tomorrow
The organisation of tomorrow needs a new mental
model of business

28. Re-integration of the market with society

29. “ we are primitives of an unknown culture”
Gary Snyder

30. Thank You