Two words for One Word Equity - You Wot?

Maybe its because it was so soon after reading about J&J suing the Red Cross for use of a Red Cross, that this story about Saatchi's One Word Equity also made me splutter out my morning tea (tip of hat to Nic Brisbourne for mentioning it).

There must be something in the air at the moment that these PR/Ad types are sniffing

Anyway, Nic pointed to a piece Umair Haque at Bubblegen wrote on this - I quote:

Here's a mini case study of how to actively get commoditized: M&C Saatchi's One Word Equity. The big idea is to reduce a brand to a single word - to "own" a word, globally, permanently, always and everywhere.

There are a few drivers of this. The first is globalization, and the opportunity to market globally, reaping enormous efficiency gains. The second, and more important, is search. Single words, to put it bluntly, are tailor made for search-focused marketing.

Now, this is an example of a marketer literally handing market power over. From a strategic point of view, M&C is saying - search, you win; we will simplify our brands, neuter our creative output, and dilute the emotional and social value of the very brands we wanna build - all to fit into your new value chain.

That was my thought exactly - the question immediately in my mind was "do those people even get the basics of how broadband networked (aka new) media works?"

There is one word for this gambit - panacea. The real opportunity is in the opposite direction - in the days long gone by it was called customer satisfaction. This is the ability to create loyalty and identification by the many small interactions the person has with the brand - the Moments of Truth - and in an online, feedback-loop world the opportunity has never been better to do this.

In fact we would hypothesise that companies - Brand or no - that cannot do this in future are at the highest risk, no matter how many words in their Equity chest. This is because the online world talks to itself. Brand X claims "Reliability", blogger Y says their product sucks, game over. Today the "Voice of the Customer" is not something a company can choose to hear via its feedback forms, market research etc. That voice is being published on the 'Net, for all to listen to, as an alternate media about the company. The key is engagement. In that respect the J&J team are on the button, the PR group blogging about it no matter how tough the task.

Or, in Umairspeaque:

Put another way, the edgeconomy - the millions of markets, networks, and communities that are the edgeconomy - offer marketers the game-changing opportunity to bring brands to life, to build social and cultural institutions around them, to embed value creation into the very fabric of consumer behaviour itself.

What could be more powerful than that?

And necessary !

Postscript...something has been nagging at me since I wrote this post - and this is it: Big picture - advertising, marketing, branding et al is moving online, but online as a medium is much more like direct marketing than creative marketing in that it is has direct feedback loops and is discretely measurable. This play may make sense in the old school creative marketing world but is the opposite of what you would do in the online, constant feedback world.