Do brand names attract more, sell more, mean more? Much has been written about the Decline of Brands in the Web 2.0 new web order —-the “NeoWeb”, as I like to call it. They say it’s now all about quality and price and the consumer is fickle and disloyal. I disagree.
I think brands are not in decline and never have been. It is a generally accepted sociological, or is it psychological, principle that human beings tend to form groups. We are not, by nature, isolationists. We are all gang members, of one sort or another. And the brands we use or wear are the gang “colors”. MySpace is a gang, digg, Fark, Facebook, you name it. Realtor.com is a real estate professional’s gang— Real Estate’s Angels, if you like.
But Craig Newmark is the Marlon Brando, the Wild One, of internet gangs, with his craigslist.org. Craigslisters are loyal devotees of the brand, despite less than stellar search, presentation, re-postings, bait and switch ads, and other apparent deficiencies when compared to the slicker, googlish, mashable bird’s-eye viewable gangs like Zillow.com. It doesn’t matter if Zillow has Barton & Frink cache and catchy zillisms. It might as well be Funk & Wagnall’s as far as Craig’s gang is concerned. They will never become Zillowists. Now that’s brand love. That’s something to ascend to.
The so-called fickleness of consumers is more a desire to leave one gang to join a better one for them, one where they are more accepted, where their opinion counts, where they’re heard and appreciated. Brands that no longer meet the needs of its members will weaken and die off. The partiicular brand may decline but not BRAND. Brand is forever. Brand is love.
How are you building your brand? Are your blogging efforts creating readership loyalty to YOUR brand?
