60-Minute Brand Strategist: The Essential Brand Book for Marketing Professionals

Chapter 02

Branding in a Postmodern Culture

Branding in the Age of Brand Transformation

Brands are transforming themselves. Beyond mere ads and products, they are finding new ways to get inside your home and be a part of your life as branded content, branded entertainment, branded utilities, and branded space. L’Equipe, the Parisian-based daily sports newspaper, invented the Tour de France for one simple reason: to sell more newspapers, using branded content with a pinch of engagement.

But customers are transforming brands, too. New cultural modes of performance are emerging from new network-based social behaviors and conversations. With more than 50 million people able to share ideas, opinions, and experiences in a single online space—and generate billions of web page impressions every month—these behaviors and conversations are creating a seismic shift in the traditional balance of power that once existed between customers and companies.

As content is increasingly delivered via personalized and self-scheduled social webs, viewers—not broadcasters—will decide when, how, why, and what is consumed. And they will dictate who they share that consumption with.

The question is, what role should brand play in this age of transformation?

Transformation Is a Process, a Performance

To make the story of a brand complete and meaningful, it requires that all of the actors—customers and companies ...