The Brand Building Challenge

In today’s era of social media, brand building has become a perplexing challenge. This is not how things were expected to turn out. A decade ago most companies were heralding the arrival of a new golden digital age of branding. They hired creative agencies and armies of technologists to insert brands throughout the digital universe. Viral, buzz, memes, stickiness, and form-factor became the lingua franca of branding. But despite all the hype, such efforts have had very less returns.

As the crux of their digital strategy, companies made huge bets on what is often called branded content. The thinking went like this: Social media would allow your company to overfly traditional media and forge relationships directly with customers. If you told them great stories and connected with them in real time, your brand would become a hub for a community of consumers. To a great extent, most brands seem to continue thinking along these erroneous lines! Businesses have invested billions pursuing this vision. Yet few brands have generated meaningful consumer interest online. In fact, social media seems to have made brands less significant. What has gone wrong?

To understand this conundrum, we need to recall that brands succeed when they break through in culture. And branding is a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance. Digital technologies have not only created potent new social networks but also dramatically altered how culture works. Digital crowds now serve as very effective and prolific innovators of culture—a phenomenon now called crowd-culture. Crowd-culture changes the rules of branding—which techniques work and which do not. If we understand crowd-culture, then, we can figure out why branded-content strategies have fallen flat—and what alternative branding methods are empowered by social media.

We at Eyecatchers partner you in creating a brand identity for your business: from Brand-name Research to Trademarking, from effective and elegant Brand Design Solutions to creating a Brand Personality, for companies of all sizes, from start-ups to start-overs.