Hitting the Online Bullseye Requires Brand Democracy

The people who use your brand are well qualified to help chart its fortune. They’ll tell you what they want and how they want it. The brand’s job then is to be responsive, like a friend or mate.

This emerging brand democratization is best represented by business models that require the active participation of con­sumers to drive, mold and design the product. Think of eBay, “American Idol” or nearly any social networking site.

Leveraging Social Capital

Social networks are adroit at helping par­ticipants leverage social capital, the assets that accrue to members of a community. But keep in mind that the original premise of such sites was to allow people to meet friends and friends of friends, reducing traditional barriers of time and effort. In other words, these sites are used to keep in touch with contacts made elsewhere rather than those initiated online.

Such brands as Digg.com or Flickr were engineered to morph dynamically precisely because of consumers interaction. Wikipedia is perhaps the best illustration of a democratic brand, with all the ups and downs that entails. The free encyclopedia takes its name from the notion of a portmanteau, a combination of words and meanings, a wiki, a communal Web site with some 75,000 active contributors working on 10 million articles in 250 languages.

Inviting Consumer Participation

Threadless.com presents a different case, a Web site making a commoditized physical product — t-­shirts — from designs submitted and selected by consumers. The site may be a harbinger of the movement away from passive consumerism. It has allowed the company to become what consumers want it to be and is growing beyond an online presence to establish retail settings, introduce children’s clothing, prints and posters.

A cursory review of Threadless.com shows a brand eager to engage: Grab our RSS feed, join our Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, make us your Flickr contact, be our MySpace friend. New tees and prints are unveiled every Monday, and the site claims to have awarded over one million dollars to the artists around the world who created hundreds of new designs it prints each year.

From a Download to an Upload Society

A study in Britain by the Marketing Society says that we are moving from a “download” society to an “upload” society in which “the belief is that this will have a fundamental impact on brands and traditional methods of brand building where management will cease to be relevant.”

While I’m dubious about management ceasing to be relevant, I agree with the demise of traditional brand building. One interviewee in the study says, “Brands in the future will have to engage more with the consumer and be open and confident enough to have that engagement.”

Indeed, the ability of a brand to offer some level of cus­tomization is one of the hallmarks of a brand democracy. Another indicator of giving over the reins to consumers, at least provisionally, as illustrated by the Wispa campaign on Facebook. This was not a marketing campaign targeting con­sumers, but one that targeted the manufacturer, Cad­bury Schweppes, which had discontinued making Wispa, a UK chocolate bar. Fourteen thousand Brits joined the “bring back Wispa” movement and the company relented by making 23 million bars to test the water.

Perhaps the leading example of consumer engagement in action is Google. “This brand was built intentionally, person by person, through the actions of millions of people in a person­alized setting and reinforced by those people talking to each other,” explains John Battelle, author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.^“

Now that is a brand democracy model. The goals of the company and the consumer are mightily aligned. It wants what we want and its financial health depends upon its ability to pay attention. One of the unpredictable benefits of this type of democracy is that, according to a 2008 Harris Poll, Google is viewed as the “most reputable company” in America.”

^{Kate Newlin is the president of Kate Newlin Consulting and author of “Passion Brands and Shopportunity.”}