You win a Brand War by winning Hearts & Minds and you win those Hearts & Minds by stimulating “Comment & Conversation”.
Everyone at the front, and at the back; yes, we’re all smiling in agreement.
The original “One-to-Many” advertising model naturally assumed “The One” to be The Brand, and what it had to say for itself.
“One-to-Many” still holds as a conversation and influence path, only The One is now The Vocal Consumer.
You could argue that ours is a Post-Naïve World (or at least a world that likes to believe it's not naïve). “Straight Advertising” is received and digested like propaganda, knowingly, where the deal going-in is that there’s virtually nothing and no one left to trust, where you must always interrogate the source, and where every interest is vested. Institutions, banks, world leaders, it’s all ill-gotten where the Lie-Truth border has so blurred that it’s fine to fib and call it “spin”.
A Bleak Picture maybe, but it’s surely one picture of The World Today, and one that means to the question of, “Who’s there left to buy into?”, the answer has reflexively become… "anyone just like me”. Read: ordinary, nice, normal, everyday people with no ulterior motive or hidden agenda.
A Nielsen Global Consumer Survey, back in 2009, found the following:
"Opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally. 90% of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know; 70% trust consumer opinions posted online.”
For me, the above finding holds two components: the Blindingly Obvious... and the Actually Quite Remarkable!
People trust the opinions of people they know. I get that. They’d be some kind of sociopath if they didn’t, but “70% trust consumer opinions posted online”! As in, 70% of people trust the opinions of Complete Strangers. Complete Strangers who could very easily be Complete Idiots, as well as being completely sociopathic for all anyone knows.
Who ludicrously suggested we live in a Post-Naive World?! In reality, welcome to The New Naivety where you no longer have to earn trust, you just need to be any Ordinary Joe with a keenness to comment through a keyboard.
SP.
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