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This post sprang out of a Twitter conversation that was started by Graham Brown. Graham felt that the term brand manager no longer had meaning in the modern marketing world. But what to replace it with?

This threw up a number of related questions that I decided to attempt and start to answer here.

So what is a brand? Even answering this simple question incorporated a number of different facets. It is not only about physical items and customer experience, but also about the perceived origins of the brand from Häagen-Dazs faux European name, to the precision engineering of German car-makers, Swiss watch manufacturers and the fine tailoring of Italian men’s suits.

The brand is also affected by context. Audi is a luxury car brand, but for many years in China it has been associated instead as the vehicle of choice for government officials rather than dynamic entrepreneurs or the rich and famous.

I remember going to a mobile phone exhibition a number of years ago and was shocked to see a Japanese lady decked out in a well-tailored suit of Burberry check. In Japan, Burberry was seen as a sophisticated luxury brand, however my perception from experience in the UK was the Burberry is passé through its association with football casuals and copycat ‘townies’.

It could even be the absence of something. A good example of this is the absence of modern farming chemicals in organic food has created an artificial perception of improved health benefits for these products.

So what parts of a brand does a brand manager manage? The design and delivery of their product or service and elements of the marketing mix, such as promotion, distribution and reputation management. But many of those items are in some ways out of the brand manager’s control. You can distribute a product but the way it is presented and sold is often outside your control, you can create advertising but the way stakeholders interact and interpret it is out of your control.

The are things that a brand can do:

• Coach - providing help and advice to get the most out of a service and celebrate success
• Pathfinder: a great example of pathfinding is Innocent Drinks and the way that they handled their involvement with McDonalds
• Curator - highlighting community knowledge and ensuring that it is organised and accessible to all. I was involved in working with colleagues in a former role doing this for HTC through a wiki for their smartphones
• Community leader - creating partner alliances (for instance Apple’s app store for the iPhone), investor in products to meet the community’s need, facilitate co-creation with consumers (MyStarbucksIdea) and crowdsourcing tasks with the community (TfL flickr pool)

This has an effect on strategy moving it from a traditional western command and control style business strategy to an emergent strategy based on company thinking, consumer dialogue and behaviour combined with the dynamics of the market.

So a brand manager no longer manages but influences ‘a brand wrangler’ who tries to steer the direction of the consumers, but can’t necessarily stop stampedes in different directions. It is often easier to steer the company than steer the brand. This was originally posted over at my personal blog.

Today sees the disappearance of The Times and The Sunday Times behind the dreaded paywall. An introductory offer of £1 per week for the first 30 days, and £2 per week after that is the only way you’ll get to see what both news sites have to offer. But how likely are we to fork out for content, and will we really miss anything if we don’t?

The staff at The Times seem very confident – at a recent PR Newswire Meet the Media event Tom Whitwell, Assistant Editor of The Times with responsibility for online, saw no reason why the paywall would turn people away from the site. Tom suggested that peoples’ attitudes towards paying for content have changed drastically in recent years; people no longer have qualms about paying £9.99 for The Times iPad app or spending a cheeky 59p on the latest version of Angry Birds for their iPhone. What will attract paying readers to the site, according to Tom, is its wealth of specialised content and the feeling of being part of a closer relationship between the reader and writer. I particularly liked his comparison of paying for content to watching live music – would you rather see your favourite band for free at Wembley, or pay a small price to see them in a smaller, intimate venue?

But not everyone agrees with Tom. The Guardian recently published the result of two surveys into reader attitudes towards print and digital media, The first, from Ipsos, saw a meagre 11% of online adults stating they would choose to access their news digitally and only 3% saying they would opt for a monthly online subscription. An overwhelming 77% said they had no interest whatsoever in paying for news content online. The second survey, compiled by YouGov, had similar results with 83% of respondents saying they would refuse to pay for online content.

Quite contrasting views I’m sure you’ll agree, and as The Times is the first non-specialist UK newspaper to head behind the paywall, we have no real comparison to show who is right. I feel that there will need to be something pretty spectacular on the site to encourage me to pay – what about you?

Today’s Financial Times has an article covering Mark Zuckenberg’s presentation at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. In it Zuckenberg talked about four countries that Facebook doesn’t have a lead in: Japan, South Korea, Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

The authors seem to think that Zuckenberg’s remarks about ‘Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries’ was aimed at conquering these markets. Facebook would need to be very careful to avoid the graveyard of previous efforts by companies like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in these territories.

All of these markets have established communities on products and services that are in many ways superior to Facebook. They have cultures and online behaviours that are markedly different than peers elsewhere, in the case of Korea there are technical standards and three out of the four countries have unique legislative environments.

As Google and Yahoo! have found to their costs, success in China may bring a backlash in their established western audiences.

The challenging geographic focus steered discussions away from other factors that maybe affecting Facebook’s slower growth:

• How have privacy concerns affected their business? How has it affected engagement levels and the user utility?
• How does the user experience suffer from negative network effects of too much noise? Try searching on a particular topic and wading through the morass of groups and pages now available
• Is Facebook now suffering from a lack of clarity of purpose as it has undergone service bloat?
• Are partners and collaborators concerned about being zucked?

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

So, on the day of the second televised leaders debates what are we to make of the new political landscape? Are we heading for a revolution in the way we see and perceive our political leaders or is it all just smoke and mirrors.

Certainly, there is a real danger that voters could be seen to be concentrating more on the televised debates than the policies of the main parties and we are seeing skewed polling figures as a result.

There is a danger that the polls are simply reflecting people’s reaction to the debates rather than their voting intention, a view reinforced by one poll’s immediate reaction from the debate showing the Lib Dems with a 51% share of the vote - more than enough to confirm Nick Clegg as Prime Minister with a healthy working majority.

These views are not necessarily based on the policies of the Lib Dem Party but how Nick Clegg is perceived by television viewers. The debates only provide time for the briefest of glimpses into the party’s policies - there is no time for any discussion on the the detail behind the policy headlines.

The subsequent reduction in the Lib Dem share of the vote in polls demonstrates that the televised debate certainly had a short term but significant effect in voters’ minds. The impact of the debate and the poll rise for the Lib Dems, even if short lived, has given a boost in momentum for the Lib Dems which may be hard for the other parties to counter.

So, has the televised debate reduced the election campaign to little more than a non-political beauty contest?

Not necessarily.

It will be up to David Cameron and Gordon Brown to react to the Clegg factor and I am sure that they will be working harder than ever to try to alter the perceptions and work on the lessons learned from the first debate to regain some lost ground.

This may give rise to personalised politics and possibly more negative campaigning, we shall see.

Either way, it is unlikely that the public will be taken in by magic tricks or sleight of hand.

Hung Parliament

We have also heard from the party leaders that “the people” will decide if there will be a hung Parliament or not.

I’m quite sure that if there was a candidate in every constituency under the name of “hung” or “hung Parliament” then they would have a better than even chance of being elected but let’s be clear, you cannot gerrymander or tactically vote for a hung parliament - it requires an unusual set of circumstances.

The people will certainly decide but they will not go into the polling booths thinking they can vote for a hung Parliament. If we end up with a hung Parliament it would be an associative outcome rather than causality.

When the Sex Pistols played their last concert at the famous Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco John Lydon’s final remark to the audience was “Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night“.

I was reminded of that phrase when I looked at data by the SASI Research Group (University of Sheffield) which shows how much debt western Europe actually has in comparison to the rest of the world. It is one of the most frightening images I have ever seen.  This was originally published on my personal blog.

Google UK Budget realtime update module, originally uploaded by renaissancechambara.

Google.co.uk searches for information on today’s budget featured a real-time scrolling box of the latest news and analysis appearing. Usually you may see this for tweets but rarely for news items.

The main points of the Budget as announced are as follows:

ECONOMY

• The economy is expected to grow between at 1 and 1.5% in 2010
• Growth forecast for 2011 revised to between 3% and 3.5%
• VAT, income tax or National Insurance to remain at present rates
• Borrowing will be £167bn this year - £11bn lower than the forecast of £178b
• Debt will be £100bn lower by 2013/14 than predicted at last year’s Budget
• One third of civil service jobs to be located away from London 

TAX:

• Stamp Duty threshold will be raised to £250,000 - nine out of ten first-time buyers will not be liable for Stamp Duty
• Stamp Duty on homes worth £1m increased to 5%
• The planned 3p increase in fuel duty will be phased - up by 1p in April, 1p in October and 1p in January 2011
• Alcohol duty will rise by 2% above inflation by 2013
• Duty on cider will go up by 10% above inflation from Sunday
• Duty on tobacco will increase by 1% above inflation immediately, then 2% in subsequent years
• Inheritance tax will be frozen for four years
• Tax agreements extended to three additional countries - Dominica, Grenada and Belize, to target tax evasion

PENSIONERS:

• The Government will consider scrapping the compulsory retirement age
• Pensioners’ higher winter fuel payment will continue next yea

BANKS:

• Everyone in the UK is to be guaranteed access to a bank account
• The Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds will lend £94bn to business - at least half to small and medium-sized firms.
• The Government will set up a Green Bank controlling £2bn of equity to focus on investing in greener, cleaner energy and transport

BUSINESS:

• Business rates will be cut for a year from October bringing a tax reduction for 500,000 small firms in England
• £2.5bn support for small business to boost skills and innovation
• Investment allowance for small firms doubled to £100,000
• £385m will be invested to maintain road network

FAMILIES:

• Families with one and two-year-olds will receive an extra £4 a week in child tax credits

More reaction to follow.

A casual glance at the media in the last few weeks confirms that the opinion polls are all over the place, politicians are at each other’s throats, accusations and counter accusations are getting more personal, party leaders and MPs of all parties are wearing an increasingly desperate, haunted look. All the signs and symptoms show that this election is going to be close.

Next week’s pre-Election budget is a crucial pre-election marker but not just for the government it is also crucial for the Tories. The Opposition reaction to the budget will go a long way to determine whether Cameron is up to the challenge of leading Britain through the recovery.

His track record is not good though. He got it wrong when he claimed that the fiscal stability programme introduced by the Government would fail and the economy would continue to deteriorate, he also alleged that the increased state borrowing would be taken badly by the electorate (to date there has been no real evidence of that) and he also misread the VAT cut stating that it was a gimmick that wouldn’t work and vehemently opposed it.

The Conservatives need to be looking at “real economics” in this Budget, not just opposition for opposition sake and not opportunistic opposition. Any alternative fiscal strategy has to go beyond the vague noises of superficial debt reduction, it has to encompass real meaningful strategies.

The many economic indicators the Conservatives will be examining in the context of the Budget should include the Conservative gold standards - the reduction of public spending as a percentage of GDP and maintaining it at a low level and bringing Government borrowing as percentage of GDP down and keeping it down. Although the present drop in public borrowing may benefit the Government in the short term.

Both parties are in danger of being seen as weak and lightweight in the details of how they would manage the fiscal recovery, Labour’s deficit reduction targets, although thought to be sufficient to stabilise the public finances, are alarmingly short in detail and don’t explain how the targets would be reached.

If the Conservatives can flesh out the details of their policy on fiscal recovery and hit the key indicators, then they can take more out of the Budget than the Government.

Will it be enough to win the General Election? Probably not. Will it be enough to maintain the Conservative’s poll lead?  If Cameron gets his response to the Budget right he can count on it.

With the first day of Mobile World Congress drawing to a close it seemed appropriate that I draw your attention to work that Marty McGough and his team have been doing about exploring the intent of mobile internet users. You can play with the data to explore it further here.  If you want to talk about the data or work in the mobile space feel free to contact us.

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks you will all be aware that the (wrong, in my opinion) winner of X Factor was crowned on Sunday. Geordie lad Joe McElderry beat Olly Murs with over 60% of the vote, securing a record contract and almost certainly a place on Dancing on Ice in a couple of years.

But, in a strange twist of events, it seems that poor old Joe may be deprived of the 15 minutes of fame pretty much guaranteed to all X Factor winners - the coveted Christmas Number 1 slot. A campaign which was started on Facebook encouraging people to buy Rage Against the Machine’s track ‘killing in the name of’ has seen the song start to outsell the X Factor winner by an estimated 10% , making it the favourite to be number one this weekend.

Simon Cowell has spoken out against the campaign, calling it ’stupid’ and it’s participants ’scrooges’. Poor Simon, as if becoming TV’s first billionaire wasn’t bad enough, he now has to face the prospect of one of his many, many acts not doing as well as he had hoped. I, for one, think it’s an excellent campaign, not just because I think Olly should have won, but because it is an excellent example of the power of social media and how it can mobilise society. Ok, so it might not be over something as important as global warming, but if people can hold a strong enough opinion about this and feel compelled to do something about it, then maybe this model can work for important campaigns in the future. As organiser Jon Morter said, ‘Even if we didn’t quite succeed it will still be a great achievement in bringing people together and actually trying to do something’. (NME.com)

What do you think? Can something as simple as a Facebook group re-write music history, and possibly change the way we campaign in future?