Only one kind of branding matters, and that’s the customer experience.
I love ad agencies and individual marketers that preach the ultimate importance of visual and personal branding, respectively. They’re wasting their time.
You can manufacture as much messaging as you want, but if your brand promise doesn’t meet the customer experience then your efforts will fail. Fast.
At last week’s Cause Marketing Forum, The Great Breast Cancer Debate panel at the 2012 Cause Marketing Forum featured Margo Lucero of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Susan G. Komen for the Cure seen a 20% decrease in corporate sponsorships over the past year, but blames the economy rather than the very public fiasco it experienced when it pulled funding from Planned Parenthood.
Lucero’s statement met an audible gasp from the Cause Marketing Forum audience.
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The first chapter of Welcome to the Fifth Estate discusses social media empowered people that act independently of traditional media, government and corporate structures. Last Saturday night on WOR Radio’s The Business of Giving show I had the pleasure of discussing this tension with host Denver Frederick. From Syrian bloggers fighting the Assad regime to the anti-Komen Planned Parenthood social media fury in the United States, people continue to fight power structures with social media.
Average citizens feel a need to circumvent established media as well as traditional government and corporate structures with online tools. Their information needs are unfulfilled and voices are not being heard. So people activate themselves online to demand change and action, or to form new innovative ways of resolving their problems.
Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs
Marketing in the Round: Multichannel Approaches in the Post-Social Media Era
Welcome to the Fifth Estate: How to Create and Sustain a Winning Social Media Strategy
Geoff Livingston on Google+
