1. More Than Marketing: How Brands Are Built In The Digital Age.
The first rule of Ages is: you can’t be an Age until you’re over. We don’t talk about
the ‘Wheel Age’ or the ‘Fire Age’ because we’re still driving and still lighting fires,
at least in rural gastropubs in winter. It’s OK to talk about the Stone Age because
most of us now find it inconvenient to cut up our meat with pieces of flint. So it’s
a bit early to pass judgement on the Digital Age, since in evolutionary terms it’s
only just begun, and it’s changing all the time. If it’s anything like the Stone Age,
you’ll have to come back in 3.4 million years. But obviously people have busy
schedules, so here goes.
We should start by thinking about the fundamental role of brands. If that’s
changed, then everything’s changed. And it’s not impossible that it has, because
the digital world has changed some things that are even more fundamental than
how we choose brands: sex, for one. As The Times stated last November under
the headline ‘Less sex please, we’re too busy on the web’, ‘the recession and an
obsession with technology is (sic) affecting attitudes in the bedroom.’ If our
primal urges have been subdued then surely there must have been changes to
the way we buy toothpaste?
The role of brands is a book topic in itself, but let’s hazard a rough definition.
Brands exist to simplify choice by guaranteeing a repeated experience that helps
people make progress towards explicit and implicit goals. You could say the first
part of that definition owes more to the nineteenth century and the second to
21st century neuroscience1, but in fact they are connected. In the 19th century,
brands like Sunlight soap emerged as they helped people to identify a reliable
product instantly. However, even in their early lives they already carried
imagery that hinted at the brand’s ability to fulfil implicit, psychological goals as
well as the explicit ones that pertained to the functionality of the category. Early
Sunlight packaging depicted wild flowers and young maids engaged in rural
pursuits, suggesting a world uncorrupted by human activity, complementing and
building on the product’s purity guarantee. During the First World War this
linkage became even more visible with advertising depicting the British soldier
as the ‘cleanest fighter in the world’, not just physically clean, the explicit goal,
but also morally spotless and uncorrupted, a powerful but generally more
implicit goal that transcended the soap category.

2. The Digital Age has had a deep impact on how brand choices are made. It’s
easiest to identify the ways digital has transformed the ways in which brands
meet people’s explicit goals: the information needed to make an informed choice
is now accessible in an instant. However, it also has a significant role to play in
helping people achieve more implicit, psychological goals. And it is the brands
that understand how best to use technology to meet both these goals that are set
to succeed.
The Digital Age has clearly changed the way in which we use brands to meet
explicit goals. Before the Internet, we had to build up brand knowledge over
time, so that when we eventually entered the purchase cycle we were armed
with the various pieces of information we needed to make the right brand choice,
both to satisfy explicit needs and to deliver against subtler, implicit goals. Now,
every conceivable piece of information about a complex decision can be gleaned
easily and quickly. We still want to know the same things, including what other
people might think about our future purchase, but the casual conversations
about brands that might have taken place over months of languid evenings in the
pub can now take place instantly online. The concept of social media isn’t really
new; it’s just called Pinterest or Instagram instead of the Dog & Duck or the
Women’s Institute.
We don’t yet know the full effects of this shift. But it’s fairly safe to assume that it
has implications for the role of marketing activities that are designed to reach
people outside the purchase cycle, since we have less of a need for building up a
body of rational, explicit information about a particular buying decision. If this is
the case, it frees up those activities to be more engaging, more fun, more creative
and more intelligent in their linkage of brands with implicit psychological goals,
such as being a good mother or a sexual conquistador.
However, there is also a risk that people become less engaged with marketing
activities altogether. This would not be entirely surprising given the increasing
competition for their attention. This trend existed since before the Digital Age,
but it seems particularly acute now with gaming, social media, and excellent
entertainment content all available instantly and on multiple devices.
Understandably, most people would increasingly rather have fun with all that
stuff than painstakingly build up information to help them with future buying
decisions.
If that sounds a bit concerning from a marketing-services-industry perspective,
it’s happily balanced by the revolution that’s taken place in the purchase process
as a result of digital technology. You could say it’s not even simply a purchase
process any more – it’s virtually a sampling process that might ultimately lead to
purchase. And many aspects of this sampling are actually fun, gamified, social
experiences in themselves.
Brands are bending over backwards to help you envisage, see and feel how a
particular purchase might fit into your lifestyle before you buy. They are

3. showing you what it’s like to be part of their brand world through the
experiences they offer online, before you’re even required to transfer any hard
earned cash. Burberry has been a pioneer in this, using technology to invite
potential customers into their world in a way that has not only been digitally
progressive, but has also shifted the expected behaviour of luxury brands from
one of snobbish exclusivity to rewarding inclusiveness. Their live streaming of
catwalk shows, online product customisation tools, as well as stores packed full
of interactive technology, are now as much part of the Burberry brand
experience as wearing one of their iconic trench coats.
Notably, if you happened to go to a conference on the latest digital happenings a
few years ago, the most exciting developments would have been in
communication. Now they’re often in brand experience, from Disney’s Magic
Band to Durex’s Fundawear. You could say we’ve moved from ‘Inventing Desire’2
to embodying it.
One of the big questions is the extent to which this conscious, sampling-type
experience can replicate the classic elements of brand building, such as meaning
and distinctiveness. Thanks to neuroscience, we know more and more about
how big a part the implicit self plays in buying decisions. During a particular
purchase decision we may flow easily through a number of direct brand
interactions, whether an e-commerce site, a Twitter conversation or a piece of
wearable tech. Each one of these moments of interaction, even if apparently
transactional in nature, is highly personal and positions a particular brand in our
implicit brain. The cumulative effect of multiple, positive moments of interaction,
even in a short time, can potentially create a deeper connection to a brand than a
broadcast message ever could, particularly if brands make clever use of the
insight they gather from each one of these interactions. Data-driven intimacy
may not sound sexy but it’s certainly personal.
Internet-only brands like Google, Facebook and Netflix intuitively understand
this. They have data collection inbuilt into their very product and know how to
deliver better brand experiences through the insight they glean from this data.
Netflix has received much praise for its algorithm that drives highly personalised
recommendations and continues to take learnings from customer interactions
with their interface to drive a better user experience, as shown by their recent
real-time processing innovation. Other digitally innovative brands like Nike also
get it. When I’m wearing a device on my body that knows my daily habits inside
out, I don’t just feel connected to Nike: I am connected to Nike. This is evident in
recent research3 which shows that three brands having the strongest emotional
bonds with consumers are Google, Facebook, and Nike – two of them pure digital
brands and the other a digital pioneer.
But data-driven intimacy is easily abused. Brands know a lot more about people,
and some, like Amazon, have been great pioneers in using data to drive sales
through the “if you bought this, you may also like to take a look at this...”
technique. Still, the immediate response of many brand owners is to say, great,
we can send them lots of rather crass sales messages at apparently relevant
moments, with the result that much data-driven, personal marketing still falls

4. way short of its potential as a consumer experience. (‘I see you’re looking for
tennis rackets. How about a cheap deal on a brand you’d never use? And we have
balls too. And lovely shoes, size 6. Need some of those? Have you thought about
badminton? That’s another nice sport; it’s a bit like tennis for smaller gardens.
Are you regretting you told us you liked tennis?) It can’t be long before there’s a
huge ‘Retargeting drives me nuts’ community on Facebook. As Marco Rimini of
Mindshare has observed, ‘it’s ironic that people are using technology to send
people more and more crude sales messages at exactly the same time as science
is proving that buying decisions are largely implicit and subtle.’ There is a
temptation to target based on superficial understanding (e.g. behavioural data
about purchase frequency etc.) rather than properly interpreting and connecting
multiple data sets to try to understand people’s underlying needs and desires.
In this scenario, it’s the brands that figure out how to create genuinely rewarding
experiences and interactions and combine them with personal data that are
going to rise above the rest. But that’s not all. They need to do so in a way that
feels tonally believable, that builds a customer’s belief that the brand will not
only deliver on their explicit goals, but also their more implicit ones. This is why
the geeks still need to talk to the copywriters, who need to talk to the planners,
who need to talk to the data analysts. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg needs Sheryl
Sandberg.
Doing this well poses a monumental organisational challenge that is only just
being fully realised, because these experiences are not just delivered by
campaigns and require a whole new set of skills and combinations of people to
succeed. They extend far beyond the remit of the traditional ‘marketing’
department and involve activities as far ranging as user experience, prototyping,
customer service models, distribution strategies and NPD. Companies need to
assemble a different-looking set of people (in all senses of the word - your typical
genius coder isn’t going to be wearing a suit), principles and tools around their
brands that can help the brand to deliver a seamless experience for the
customer.
So perhaps the time has come for Chief Marketing Officers to be superseded by
an even more powerful figure, a Chief Brand Officer. Since in a Digital Age,
brands are more than ever built by all aspects of a company’s activities, this
demi-god will have authority over how the brand is built THROUGHOUT the
company, not just in the activities that typically fall under marketing (and often
exclude such essential elements as customer service or public relations.) The
CEO will still be responsible for key business decisions - acquisitions, borrowing,
capital expenditure etc. – but the CBO will be the second-most-powerful person
in the company, responsible for building the brand through all the streams of
activity that can be connected instantaneously by the Digital Age Consumer.
They’ll be masters of everything from user experience to NPD to the design of the
reception area in Head Office, and they’ll constantly be finding new ways to
enable their brands to radiate desire in every interaction. To do all this, they’ll
need boundless energy and great human qualities, because they won’t be able to
understand a tenth of the specialist skills needed to pull all this off. It’s still too

5. early to know who the Chief Brand Officers of the future are. But it sounds like a
fun job.
1. As summarised in Phil Barden’s ‘Decoded’ for example.
2. The title of a book on the agency Chiat/Day.
3. Source: Millward Brown.