How does online brand equity affect the way society is going?

Grant Leboff:  We’ve said, at Sticky Marketing, that now everybody has a channel. And I wrote a blog post a little while ago which was basically; everybody is a marketer today whether they like it or not, because the point of the blog was that everything you now do online is adding or taking away your brand equity.

David Taylor:  Absolutely

Grant Leboff:  In other words, we’ve all become brands because, before I met you, I Googled you and had to look at what you have done, what you’ve been involved with. I’m sure you did the same.

So we’re building this brand equity – which football teams you support, what you tweet about, what you blog about – and I think it’s too simplistic. People talk about kids posting pictures of themselves online when they’re drunk or whatever. OK, we know that happens, but that’s too simplistic. I think it’s more subtle. The tweets you choose, the people you start to follow… I can see in your twitter feed. All that builds or takes away from brand equity and I wonder, have you any thoughts on the implication of that for the way society’s going?

David Taylor:  Very much so, it’s a very good point you make. I think the key thing is the long tail of marketing now involves individuals. So if you’re writing something as a 13 year old or a 14 year old, there is a long tail to that and there are implications. And so, for me, actually interesting, you talked about teenagers posting themselves drunk etc., now you have to be careful what you do. It’s like big brother has arrived, but Big Brother isn’t ‘the state’ or ‘the man’ or what ever they called it in the 60s, the Big Brother is this amorphous online presence, and so you do have to be very, very careful about what you do and the implications are quite serious and quite deep seated as a society.

What do we communicate? How do we communicate? What are we thinking about what we’re communicating? Now I’m a trained journalist, I also – for my sins – worked at the London Underground. I was the Northern Line press officer and I know that every time I spoke to a journalist, everything I said could end up in print somewhere, so I’m very careful, very, very careful about what I’m posting.

But in terms of the brand equity, another interesting thing which my co-author Michelle Carvel has a theory, is that CEO’s will be chosen on the basis of how visible they are. So if you are Virgin, and you’ve got Richard Branson, Richard Branson is a very visible CEO. He’s out there, he’s got his thoughts, he’s telling you what he thinks, he’s not just a big amorphous corporation. So he is giving you his thoughts and you may well get to the stage whatever corporation you are, it is expected that you want to get the ideas.

So what’s the brand equity of the individual people within that brand? So I think the implications are pretty vast in terms of, there are some negative aspects to it in terms of citizens themselves, how do they communicate with the outside world, and what are they posting, and when are they posting? But at the same time it’s how individuals, certainly in terms of business, we can be building brand equity for ourselves online.

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