With rapidly increasing urbanization, the forces of modernity are well & truly sweeping across large parts of the world - including India. As the social fabric gets stretched in the tug-of-war between tradition and change, new socio-cultural configurations are emerging. Some of these echo the processes undergone by highly-industrialized nations at the time of their modernization, others are unique to our time & place. The author, a branding consultant-cum-academic, analyses current trends and proposes a new and substantially higher-value role that brands can play in the coming years.
In 1965, the Rolling Stones published a song that graphically expressed the mood of the times:
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no…
…
When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
The song was called "Satisfaction," and it proved an all-time classic. Cut to forty years later. Rafique Mohammad Nasir, a school student from Kuala Lumpur, writes in his essay titled "Urbanization and Social Deterioration"1:
The main social effect of urbanization is the loss of community spirit within the society, specifically in the urban areas.
He concludes his essay with these wise words:
…I am afraid the situation in our urban areas will become worse, and our future generations will become weak, spoiled and without identity.
As waves of modernity and urbanization sweep over more and more parts of the globe, each society appears fated to undergo very similar crises of identity and its root cause - loss of community.
Loss of community was noticed in the highly-industrialized nations first, as is evident from the Rolling Stones number, which is by no means the only reference to this phenomenon in western popular culture. Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, even the Beatles wrote and sang about urban angst and anomie.
Robert Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard, in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community"2 says studies in the US, Scandinavia and Japan show that socially-disconnected people are two to five times more likely to die (earlier) than individuals who have close ties with family, friends and the community. In a talk, Putnam even is
reported3 to have said, "(Nowadays) most of us watch 'Friends' instead of having them."
A 1977 study of a small town called Roseto, carried out by I. Kawachi, B. P. Kennedy and K.
Lochner4 found that:
The town… had been something of a medical mystery since the 1950s, when it was first noticed that death rates (here) were substantially lower than that of neighboring communities, yet there were no significant differences in diet or other lifestyle factors. What was noticed were the close-knit relations among residents in the community. In other words, Roseto had high social capital.
As time progressed and Roseto's younger inhabitants became more concerned with material wealth than with community relations, social capital declined. Mortality rates in Roseto, particularly the incidence of heart attack, quickly caught up to the level of neighboring communities.
While we may pride ourselves on having a closer-knit society than those in the west, the ground reality is fast changing, especially in our cities. If we look closely, suicides, heart attacks, old age hospices (and destitute elderly people), youth substance abuse, petty crime, communal tensions & clashes are all on the rise - classic symptoms of a society seriously being eroded of its capital.
As traditional social networks fade into irrelevance with no clear or comparable substitutes, could brands possibly step into the vacuum and become new loci for community formation?
Before you dismiss this as an audacious proposition, consider these three anecdotes.
ONE. In many homes that I visit, I find the TV almost invariably on, almost all through the day, even if no one's watching. When I ask the householders about this, many of them say the same thing: "It's like having someone around the house." I am reminded of just a generation ago, when in every house, restaurant and shop, you would invariably find the radio blaring away, non-stop. I myself grew up with the radio constantly on (fortunately, no one accused it of corrupting young kids' minds!) - from the time we awoke until the time we fell asleep. It does appear that television has snatched away radio's place in the house, and has ensconced itself as the preferred companion about the house. I know of a family that actually keeps the TV on to keep their dog company while they go out.
Here are some responses from a study of single parents in England, in 1994, under a section actually titled 'TV as
Company'5 that anticipate my own findings by a decade:
Because it's nice to sit and look at somebody else. It's company more than anything.
It's just on. It's just a noise and it's a visual thing. It's like it's as if someone else's there. It's seeing other people. It takes the quietness off the room. I don't feel ... you know. If I was just in on my own and there was nothing, it feels more isolated.
Because if were playing and the room's quiet, it seems dead kind of thing. Do you see what I mean? Quiet and boring ... I can't stay in a place where it's quiet, quiet. The television has to be on.
TWO. Whenever I travel, I try and fly one particular airline. Where possible, I try to stay with one particular hotel chain. Of course, thanks to mobile roaming, I am constantly with one particular telephone network wherever I go. And finally, when I tire of experimenting with the local cuisine, I return to one particular restaurant chain to eat my meals.
It's not that I always follow this routine in all its details. I don't (yet) "hang out" at my favourite mall chain - but I confess I do sometimes hang out at my favourite bookstore chain. This illustrates my sense of comfort, familiarity and trust for certain brands that I know I can always return to, when I'm not in an experimental or exploratory state of mind. I also know this does not apply to me alone.
THREE (I hope you're still with me). I've been investigating in a very modest way the impact of McDonald's recent "I'm loving it" TV campaign. Interestingly, I found that while these ads appealed to non-customers, they appealed much more to those who were already McDonald customers. In fact, most of them said the ads gave them a sense of pride and belonging in being McDonald's customers. Now this was interesting indeed, so I began looking for other ads that evoked similar responses. To my surprise, there were none - at least from those currently on air.
The composite picture that I'm hoping to paint for you is of a new kind of community formation that is already taking place, although not always intentionally. At its core, or very close to the core, lies the brand. The formula proposes replacing existing notions with emergent ones:
MEDIA = COMPANIONS and no longer Channels (or even "Message")
BRAND = BELONGING and no longer Positioning
COMMUNICATION = CONTACT and no longer Seduction
In an increasingly fragmented and lonesome world, the challenge of finding and belonging to a community will magnify manifold. As everyday life as well as identity increasingly becomes intertwined with consumption and brands, it is inevitable that brands should spawn communities - and communities should form around brands. If you know any user of Macintosh computers - or the Linux operating system - you already know a new-age community member. As families fragment from joint to nuclear and nuclear to single-parent or just single, individuals will seek and find community in such kinship groupings, of which brands could emerge as a leading factor - in particular those brands that are truly "lifestyle" brands.
In the second anecdote above, I experience a kinship with other people who also use the same brands as I do. Sometimes, I notice another person who flies the same airline as I do and then checks into the same hotel as I do - and we exchange a knowing smile that signifies kinship - we both belong to the same imaginary "club", and what else is a club but a community?
And yet, what I'm referring to is beyond the "relationship marketing" model, actually the subject of a
study6:
…we find customers who are located at the very high ends of… ideal (relationship marketing) behaviors, and who do not seem to have arrived at this position due to tools described in RM literature. Moreover, not only the behaviors of these customers are located at high continuum ends. These customers also seem to exhibit strong and favorable attitudes towards the suppliers of their choice - so strong that they sometimes may be referred to as compulsive consumers. The Manchester United supporter who almost obsessively attends every match this soccer team plays, the Harley-Davidson owner who wears the supplier's logo as a tattoo, and who hardly considers another brand when a new bike is to be purchased, the Macintosh user who regards this brand as an expressive extension of the self and declines any offer from a PC manufacturer, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show visitor who watches - and "participates in" - this movie for the 200th time are examples of customers who are likely to be driven by something other than the tools described in RM literature.
Interestingly, all the instances cited in the anecdote above involve services, pointing to their generic proximity to brands - they are both intangible, multi-faceted and experiential. It isn't surprising, then, that it is service brands that have taken the lead in evolving their brands into communities - the hospitality and aviation sectors have great examples of "reward programmes" and other forms of proactive contact & (customer) community building. Mobile telephony companies have stumbled upon this discovery, but are confusing rewarding their customer with spamming her/him with unsolicited offers - a surefire route to self-destruction.
If brands are "complexes of belonging", they are accompanied by the evolution of media devices as "companions" - virtual communities. We've seen this in the case of radio and TV, but this is also evident in the mobile phone and internet computer. These devices are our windows to (and not into) community, our cure to the malady of loneliness - both, real and existential. Microsoft's operating system may have been reduced to a mere generic, but the name "Windows" remains one of the greatest of all time.
The potential impact of media devices on our very consciousness is described vividly by Anthony
Townsend7 thus:
…the cellular telephone, merely the first wave of an imminent invasion of portable digital communications tools to come, will undoubtedly lead to fundamental transformations in individuals' perceptions of self and the world, and consequently the way they collectively construct that world.
He further adds:
…the mobile phone's connectivity is completely subsumed into the body… People seem to become dependent upon the connectivity that the mobile telephone represents. Many who have re-structured their lives and personal habits around the device find it… nearly inconceivable to go back.
As lifestyles get more transient and mobility increases, physical location and contact will become less and less critical to our sense of community. In traditional communities, these were crucial - you could argue they were the very loci for community formation. Today, and even more in the future, our community will be dispersed and asynchronous, and media devices will become our channels into community. Paraphrasing McLuhan, they will be the community.
It is a matter of time before more media devices evolve in response to our unfulfilled need for - or the opportunity for - meaningful
"touchpoints"8, which provide the correlation between the brand and the media device.
The SMS is a case in point. Introduced as a worthless by-product of voice communication, this has become one of the most potent social networking tools of our time, addressing our (unarticulated) need for a non-intrusive and impersonal yet reliable and private verbal messaging system.
Let us examine the new role and location of these "touchpoints".
As the market matures beyond the "gold rush" initial free-for-all phase, brands will have to divert resources from acquiring new customers to retaining existing customers. While this is easy to see in terms of post-sale service and contact programmes (some have been conceptualized as business models and contribute to the bottom line), it is a matter of time before this will apply to advertising and other forms of marketing communications as well. The McDonald's campaign achieves it via serendipity; future ad campaigns will be designed expressly with the objective of customer retention.
This is how K. Ramakrishnan of ET's Strategic Marketing research team, describes the scope of focussing on customer
retention9:
Customer retention is not given the attention due to it, by most firms. It has been found that customer retention has more impact on profits than market share, economies of scale and other variables that are considered to provide competitive advantage to a firm. In fact, it has been found that companies, which reduced customer defections by 5 per cent, could boost profits from 25 per cent to 85 per cent.
And here is what Nick Wreden says in his book "Fusion Branding"10:
Advertising in the mass economy was about "awareness." Advertising today must be about adoption - getting customers to incorporate the offering into their businesses or lives. An adoption strategy uses relevancy, content and timing to move prospects through a four-stage process that starts with "tryers" and ends with advocates. Increasingly, advertising must move away from an overwhelming emphasis on acquisition and place more emphasis on retention to strengthen customer equity.
What is more, retention-oriented marketing communications could also simultaneously work as a brand's new customer attraction strategy - make existing customers feel special, give them a sense of belonging and community, and use this image of a rewarding & meaningful community to attract new customers into its folds.
The role of every brand "touchpoint", then, will be precisely that - to "touch" the customer (and not as much the non-customer prospect) in ways that give delight and intensify loyalty. And it is here that new media devices will be innovated - at the intersect of commercial communication and community touchpoint.
What I'm proposing is not in the distant future - all the elements that can catapult brands into vital, thriving, new-age community hubs are in place. It only requires an imaginative & enterprising mind to arrange the jigsaw pieces into an integrated, synergistic and win-win operation - and the future will most certainly be here.
Doubtlessly, it is a sign of maturing markets and evolved competition when brands begin to prize and prioritize their existing customer base over attracting & converting new ones. But for this, they will have to adopt a service attitude, and strive to figure as high on the customers' sense of identity and belongingness as they can. While the concept of positioning correlates with the faculty of memory and recall, we now need to upgrade to a concept of belonging, which correlates with the faculty of identity and community.
The internet has seen an explosion of 'brand communities', the subject of research of Albert Muñiz, assistant professor of marketing at DePaul University. In an article titled "Brand
Community"11, Muñiz and co-author Thomas O'Guinn describe a 'brand community' as:
…a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand.
The authors also write:
These brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility.
Reviewer Brad Cook12 tries to answer the question "So how does a company acquire, nurture and grow its own brand community?" thus:
The best bet seems to be in monitoring public discourse -- especially in such obvious places as Internet chat groups -- and watching for the early stages of brand community growth. Then the company can step in and offer resources while being careful not to censor community activities and discussions. A hands-off approach, coupled with consistent communication, seems to be the best way to create this unique but fragile form of communal spirit.
Andrew Zolli writes in American Demographic13: "Brands aren't simply in the culture, they are the culture." It is in every marketer's interest to be highly sensitive to this phenomenon, interrogate it thoroughly, and assume responsibility for her/his actions, because actions taken out of naïveté or ignorance could seriously debilitate the very future of branding, as we know it today.
To summarise, I have argued that urbanization and modernity are opening up new spaces for community formation, and brands could aspire to benefit from this phenomenon. This means a shift in focus from attracting prospects to fulfilling existing customers, who could make a highly effective platform to attract prospects. However, I caution that blending commercial considerations into community processes requires extreme maturity and responsibility, and must be managed sensitively and transparently.
1. http://composition.cla.umn.edu/student_web/essays/urbanization.html
2. Robert D. Putnam, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," Simon & Schuster, 2000.
3. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=63189
4. Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy, and Kimberly Lochner, "Long Live Community: Social Capital as Public Health," The American Prospect no. 35 (November-December 1997): 56-59.
5. Leslie Haddon & Roger Silverstone, "Lone Parents and their Information and Communication Technologies", University of Sussex SPRU Centre for ICT Report Series No. XX, November 1994.
6. Magnus Söderlund (1999), "Beyond Relationship Marketing Tools: An Examination of Determinants of Strong Consumer-Commercial Object Relationships", paper presented at the 15th Nordic Conference on Business Studies, Helsinki, Finland. [http://www.hhs.se/NR/rdonlyres/2D52ABA9-3A72-489E-8EDC-BFF4FBC7B1D3/477/Beyondrm.pdf]
7. A. M. Townsend (2000), "Life in the Real-Time City: Mobile Telephones and Urban Metabolism" Journal of Urban Technology, 7(2): 85-104.
8. The concept of brand "touchpoints" is part of the current thinking that a brand is a meaningful experience, conveyed to the prospect through in various forms, engaging all the senses, and at several locations. A "touchpoint", then, is a single point of contact where the prospect experiences the brand.
9. K. Ramakrishnan, "Customer Retention: the key to Business Performance", ET Strategic Marketing, November-December 2002.
10. Nick Werden, "Fusion Branding," Accountability Press, 2002.
11. Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. and Thomas C. O'Guinn, "Brand Community," Journal of Consumer Research, March 2001.
12. http://www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=159
13. Andrew Zolli, "Rip. Mix. Brand." American Demographics, November 2004: 44-45.
Arvind Lodaya, 2005
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