Should brands be afraid of 2.0?!

The below BLAB is features today in Technology Sunday, a supplement of the Sunday Times

If the online space were an offline physical environment, say a massive open market, it would consist of at least 62.4 million stands and 93.6 million other booked spaces awaiting their owners to fill up the stand with stuff ready to be sold, shared or exchanged. Some 1.2 billion prospective customers would be able to visit the market 24 hours a day whilst four billion other customers would be allowed to take the millions of stands with them wherever they are.

With all these numbers you would expect huge queues and confusion but in truth the market allows each visitor to go directly to the stand he or she is looking for, skipping any possible queues and speaking directly to the stand owner. Some stands have even invested in multi-lingual staff who can communicate in any language, even Maltese at times. Others have even bought additional space just next to their stand. Here customers speak about their purchases and recommend champion products and services they themselves have tried out.

For frequent customers stand owners offer a more personal service by only showing what they think are the most relevant products. They base their assumptions on the customers’ past purchases and interests.

Some companies have come up with easy to use directories which search for specific stands or products and guide new customers around.

Clearly the web space is a very big virtual world with web pages being added everyday and online users being able to access it from any imaginable device. There are on average at least 52,000 customers on each stand and this is good news for brands because now they have a much bigger audience with which they can relate in a flexible and personal manner.

However this is not the full story and some brands may need to revisit their positioning online. Back to the open market analogy, customers are visiting the stands much less often than before because now they are allowed to set up their own stand, equally attractive and probably more entertaining and personal than the other stands. Instead of visiting the other stands they invest more time in customizing their little space and hang out with their friends in their own social network.

This is very bad news for brands. I pity brands because offline they compete with other brands for a mindshare, but online, brands compete with us, their current and prospective customers. Susan Boyle’s Facebook page has over 1.7 million fans exceeding by far fan pages of established giant brands such as H&M.

All these shifts in the online space led some brands to consider socializing with us. Some brands have joined Facebook or Twitter and have their own profile or fan page. Other brands have tried to get some space on our personal profiles by launching branded wallpapers and viral applications. In some cases, established brands have been successful in acting as a channel, enabling us to meet and discuss their products on their own branded space. Some brands have actually managed to do this successfully thanks to their well planned strategies and brand appeal. The buzz generated over the iPhone has garnered Apple the top place on a list of the Top 100 Social Brands. Suddenly it seems the story ends and we (brands and customers alike) lived happily ever after.

However some giant brands have spent huge amounts of money in bombarding our humble online spaces and failed. At the end of the day, why should we be-friend a marketing guy hopelessly trying to make the numbers at the end of the month?!

Chris Anderson, an online marketing expert, highlighted two reasons why we tend to be willing to be-friend a brand, blog about it and become brand ambassadors. None of these are financial.

The first reason is time-related. Useful or entertaining applications allow us to make better use of our time. When a brand comes up with an addictive application we are willing to spend some (or a lot of) time with that brand.

Customers are keen on being the centre of attention as much as brands would like to be. Brands who manage to put the spot light on the customers are guaranteed to make friends with these same customers and never be alone again! Similarly to hanging out with the in-crowd or wearing branded clothes, some brands add value to our reputation and it’s worth carrying them around, even when browsing online.

There you have it; money is not the be all and end all, especially during the recession. The good news for brands is that in 2.0 mode they have a choice. They could add value to our time and reputation in return for some attention or alternatively be stubborn and hold on to their confined online space. In the latter there is a high probability they will be left alone with ample time to think of how small they were when they started off, simply because online they are.