Lurking just beneath all the latest brilliant thinking about branding is the not-so new world of Internet search, and the hint of its utility beyond SEO and the other lead generation tactics most companies have embraced.
In my new book, Branding Only Works on Cattle, I contemplate this strange thought: there's no there there in search. No place to put your brand as a static thing that marketing experts have designed. Search doesn't operate in the language of colors and buzzwords, and it doesn't force consumers to think the things your branding has thrown at them.
It doesn't exist unless someone dips into it, almost like a quantum physics moment: consumers conjure it into being by stepping through one of a limitless number of doors, at a limitless number of different moments in time. Web search then aggregates, from all of the potential information available online, to create search results.
It's a snapshot of a moment.
Internet search has forever changed the way consumers behave. It shifts authority from the information-giver to the answer-seeker, and exposes every conceivable aspect of brand to scrutiny. Even in its early adolescence - it was only 10 years ago that Google's founders were still in grad school-- it daily puts many millions of people in contact with information they never would have otherwise found.
From locating the nearest bakery, to finding how-to instructions for building bombs, it has enabled people to find much of what they look for, and sometimes find something else, or more. However imperfect, web search is the lubrication that makes connecting possible for businesses all over the world, not to mention governments, special interest groups, and porn collectors.
The good news is that no longer does your business have to wait for all of that brand awareness to trickle down to the masses. Search allows interested folks to percolate up via their own inquisitiveness, and literally ask you to tell them something. This is what experts call behavioral marketing, and it references the specific technique of placing a clickable term (or ad) in front of a consumer who has the highest probability (based on past behavior clicking on things) to click on it. It has inherent value, because there's usually a reliable, statistical model to correlate X number of clicks with Y number of sales transactions.
The bad news is that this has nothing to do with branding. In fact, Internet search is the anti-brand.
We now know that newly-empowered consumers are less gullible and loyal, and more finicky than we'd ever imagined. User-controlled consumption of information (and subsequent behavior) has revealed that many of those supposed brand relationships on which corporations relied were really nothing more than habits, often times unconscious. People paid more for things because they didn't know better. They behaved certain ways because of routine. Branding didn't cause this phenomena as much as cover-up many of its true drivers.
So, while most branding is still based on something that can be said or declared, in a magazine ad, bantered back-and-forth in an online forum, framed in an inane Internet video - or as the deliverable from a link in web search - people have changed their behavior.
Corporate marketing is still focused on optimizing search terms to promote the stuff of branding, consumers are already past that step: I'd suggest that people don't search with questions about brands as much as generic terms about things or activities. They're not looking for answers from brands, but rather answers about products and services.
Search algorithms provide the connections and associations that corporations assumed, once upon a time, could be made by branding. Web search undos these connections, and treats brands as words, just like in the Middle Ages...marks with no implicit meanings beyond those which an anonymous public of Internet users, and secret equations, choose to give to them.
What's connecting people to products and services is not a direct relationship with corporate marketing, but rather the independent, user-prompted behavior of search. And who needs the shorthand of brands if the information, whether disparate or aggregated, is both available and constantly updated 24/7 online?
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