Yesterday I had a bit too much coffee while catching up on my feeds. The result was a conversation starting in the middle. Confusing to some, as I got more than one ping from people going, huh?
Here's the deal in a nutshell. In an attempt to cut through the noise and complexity of being heard today, Saatchi believes that reducing a brand to one word that they metaphorically OWN is the way to go.
"global ownership of one word globally - define the one word that you want to own in the public mind"
To make matters worse and what really sent me over the edge was that their website is a slow moving, static pretty flash movie with a confusing UI. Once it loads I suggest clicking on hear. (it took me a while to realize I needed to click on words to navigate).
Umair said it most eloquently - so I will quote the longer point:
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?
Of course, to embrace this worldview, you've first gotta drop yesterday's assumptions - like, for example, the one that a firm can ever really "own" a word and what it signifies.
In fact, with a little deeper insight, M&C might see that they're using a bucket to fight the tide - attempting to "own" words, as the cost of attention skyrockets, is going to yield seriously diminishing (and then negative) returns.
More simply: as consumer hyperfragment, and market power continues to shift to them, guess who already "owns" words - which are really just shared representations of value?
You guessed it - markets, networks, and communities, and the prosumers that make them."
The sentiment of trying to simplify makes sense - it is the idea that a Brand is developed from the inside out (oops) outside in that makes me queesy.
I have this image in my head of putting all old-thinking agencies on a couch and hypnotizing them -
"Just let go, let go, it will all be ok"
