Stetoscope

When I was working in advertising I spend my days working on messages to convince brand consumers to buy some more products or services. Then my framework was : a brand is talking to consumers that are isolated from each others. By the way that was true since people did not communicate that much together (or about private and personnal issues) and communication (the action to put in common) was the monopoly of big medias : newspapers and TV channels. That was very convenient to build mass markets, one brand is talking without any answer possibility (just the right to not buy). And classical Marketing was all about “how to sell product to the higher possible price ?”

With social media, it is all different ! People are no more consumers, they are members of communities. What does that mean? It means that everyone shares his own time (and money) to contribute to one or many communities. Thus communities are now in competition to get the time (and the money) of their contributors, their members. As to marketing : it is no more “how to sell more products or services to the highest price?” it is about “how to make community members contribute more and more?”.

So what is an ideal brand today ? A brand whose community members interact together in order to reinforce contribution of each continuously. According to this model, Facebook is certainly one of the greatest brand of the fresh 21st century. Marketing goal is now to find the game that community members would like to play and that will multiply the interactions between them…