Communities and brands

Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore are about to release a book – Communities Dominate Brands - which touches on a lot of distraction themes – most notably the effect of digital on communications and thus on business, and the new power of communities. Also, it’s being published by FutureText who are shortly to publish my book, Distraction, and I know Tomi and Alan too and have spent a lot of time discussing this stuff with them. This is part of their introduction….

Communities Dominate Brands addresses its topic from a marketing (including advertising and branding) perspective and maintains a rigorous focus on business and profit dimensions of the issues involved.  The book discusses such recent phenomena as blogging, virtual environments, mobile phone based swarming and massively multiplayer games. The book introduces a new generation of consumers called Generation-C (for Community). The book also discusses such new concepts as the Connected Age, Reachability, the Four C's, Alpha Users, and introduces Communities as an unavoidable new element into the traditional communication model. Combining the digital trends, modern management theories, and emerging new customer behaviour, Communities Dominate Brands arrives to its conclusion, that traditional marketing methods are increasingly ineffective and even becoming counterproductive. The power of the brands and the abuses by marketing have created a vacuum for a counterbalance, and digitally connected communities, the blogosphere, gamers, and especially the always-on connectedness of those on mobile phone networks, are emerging as the counterforce to redress the balance. The power of smart mobs and digitally enlightened communities will react rapidly to marketing excesses as the natural force balancing the power of the brands. The way a business can and must interact with the powerful new communities is through engagement marketing, by enticing the communities to interact with the brands. Communities Dominate Brands covers the major changes taking place in business and industry worldwide from leading digitally connected societies such as Finland, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, UK and the USA. The authors discuss the business relevance of such community related technologies and phenomena such as blogging, CANs, iPod, MMOGs, MVNOs, PVRs, Ringing Tones, SMS text messaging, swarming, VOD. This is the definitive business book on the impact of new technologies, not explaining how technology works, but showing what businesses need to do to make money in the new digitally converging environment.

There’s an extract from their book here. Tomi and Alan are not the only people thinking about the effect on marketing of digital and mobile in particular. I’ve been talking to the ad agency BBDO and their below the line counterpart Proximity about this recently. Our conversation turned to the very real difficulty new brands will have in gaining anything like global traction in the near future. Could it already be too late for physical products to become dominant brands? More on this once I've mulled it over a bit.....

Comments

[Tomi Ahonen]

Hi Mark

Thanks for the posting. Yes, we look at the impacts of digitally connected communities to all of business, but with a strong focus on the mass media, advertising and branding areas. So we spend a good amount of the book on TV, newsprint, and of course new media. There is plenty of other industries though, from automobiles to aerospace ha-ha, so its not only a branding/advertising book. Let us know what you think of it. And can't wait for your book to be released.

Dominate !

Tomi Ahonen

[Adriana]

Great stuff.

I am just wondering why there is not link to their blog in your blogpost...

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/

[Mark]

Thanks Adriana - simply because I did not know it was up! I also realise I must get round to doing a list of links to other blogs....over Easter!

[pb]

Communities Change Brands talks about wireless networks in a fascinating way which envisages near-future utopian ideals, but the look of it.

Here is an award winning near-future utopia which takes the wireless revolution to one potential blossoming. The story's called Goddesses, by Linda Nagata. Set in Southern India and the Midwest simultaneously it shows a community of friends strive to improve the world using wireless, and sometimes even win a little ground...

http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/nagata/nagata1.html