It's probably a bit of a provocative question, but one that many young marketers have been asking themselves - and are still asking themselves - with the rise of the Web and the social Web: why create powerful brands - except in the luxury sector, and even then - when they're all just a click away on the Web and when a simple comment on a community site can be enough to boost your sales... or cause them to collapse!
This is the problem of trusted third parties: on TripAdvisor, the opinion of a few Internet users can destroy the millions invested by a hotelier in advertising; and collaborative consumption is exacerbating the trend: there's no need for a brand on Airbnb, since I can find out very quickly both the product I need (all I have to do is enter an address) and its quality (via travellers' opinions).
And yet, if we really could do without brands, why are new entrants such as Airbnb and BlaBlaCar now advertising massively in the mass media? Because they need to impose their brand as a trusted third party: as a customer, I can trust Airbnb, so ipso factoI can trust the individual opinions posted on this site.
Every brand has a greater or lesser element of the imagination, and trust is part of that. It's this element of the imagination that means we don't turn away from a brand we like as quickly when it's caught out in fraud or lies as we should: otherwise, Volkswagen wouldn't have any buyers left today - or at least, it would have lost many more.
Certain brands are born with a capital of trust linked to their modernity; but this capital can age and erode, sometimes irreparably. The operators of the collaborative economy, who are riding the wave of "use rather than possession", should beware: at the start of the millennium, the start-ups of the New Economy flaunted their dynamism with "oo" names that now sound a bit old-fashioned: Orange has erased its Wanadoo and Yahoo... is dying a slow death!
A brand is (also) a receptacle for the imagination, and this imagination plays a major role in consumer preference; it is a capital that needs to be maintained, something that those whose success has gone to their heads too quickly tend to forget.
By François Laurent, Blogger : MarketingIsDead.net
