Control of the Brand Has Left the Building

Many of you may remember the days when “4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident”. Those were the golden years of brand marketing, but the world has changed. Does “brand management” even exist anymore? It is an argument worth considering.

In 20th century America, products were clearly differentiated and customers were trusting. People chose products because the manufacturer or retailer told them their products were better than, more special than, or different from their competitors’.

So who’s really in charge of a brand today? On the one hand, classic brand managers still set the tone and personality that is expressed in Marketing Communications. True brand managers still control the 4 ‘P’s: product, price, placement and promotion. The public face of a brand has to start somewhere and in many cases it still resides within brand management.

However, we believe the control of the brand now really resides with the consumer, and a new discipline of brand marketing has emerged: C2C. Consumer-to-consumer marketing, enabled by the more than 500 social media platforms on the web, has revolutionized the world of marketing and branding. And effectively managing C2C, an art and science in itself, can change the trajectory of a brand’s success.  We recommend adding C2C marketing objectives to your plans along with traditional B2B and B2C efforts.