Posted by John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld on October 7, 2007 9:20 PM
Harvard Business SchoolHarvard Business School professor John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld are co-authors of the working paper Digital Interactivity: Unanticipated Consequences for Markets, Marketing, and Consumers.
How do you build a brand on the Web? It’s vastly more difficult than it ever was in the age of mass media. Television loved brands. On the Web, users aren’t as easy to impress. Marketers are interlopers on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, the social media sites where people go in the millions day and night to share video, to network, to exchange reviews and to express themselves. In social media, marketers are more likely to be met with counterargument, parody, invective, and reproach than the numbed acquiescence they are accustomed to receiving from prime-time TV audiences.
But some brands are cracking the code of social media and discovering how to thrive in the disenchanted environment of Web 2.0. Consider Unilever’s Dove, which has added $1.2 billion to its brand value over the past three years, according to Landor Associates, and won the double Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007.
The principle made plain by Dove’s success is that in social networks brands must seek to provoke conversation not to dominate it. The locus of control in the marketplace shifts from marketer to consumer, and success is built on a model of co-created meaning. In Web 2.0, marketers accept that it is enough to rouse, to stimulate, to stir.
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