brands: long tails, complex systems, stories, communities

Sean offers a link to this paper by Mohammed Iqbal. It's fascinating reading because it provides a grounding for a fancy that I've been toying with for a while now: brands as complex systems.

The Long Tail of Meaning

MI's paper talks about a power law distribution of brand propositions associated with a brand. You might even call these brand propositions (with their rational and emotional aspects, their blind cravings for meaning, their roots in lived experience) by another name: "stories". Trad advertising focuses on identifying what the big stories around a brand are. May be one, may be two, a handful at most. These stories can then be blast-broadcasted out via TV, print, even a viral widget for Facebook. However these stories are simply the biggest, loudest and most palatable associated with a brand. They aren't all the stories out there.

Narrative Ecosystems

One thing the long tail model doesn't make very clear is that entities you find in the distribution may not be isolated from each other. Just as a curve in sand may be the mark left by a snake, the long tail itself is the mark made on a distribution of entities (books, songs, brand propositions, dreams) by human choice. If you've ever worked with stories, you'll realise that they exist in an ecosystem - the long tale tail chatters to itself uncontrollably. There may be a single story that someone wants to communicate perfectly to their consumers, employees, citizens or subjects; but once it has been released into the wild it rarely stays unchanged. Instead it interacts with all the related stories that are being told. You don't own your brand. You never did but that comforting deceit is becoming harder and harder to maintain. You can't control the story ecosystem - you can influence it, engage with it, add to it but you can't control it.

Joining the Swarm: Communities

Trad advertising (TVCs, print) still works reasonably well for the head of the tail or the simple/complicated domains. It's not going way but as the rest of the tail and the complexity that forms it becomes more visible, we need other ways of dealing with it. Which is where those pesky community things come in. The stories/meaning/brand propositions become more diffuse and far more messy. You get the whole distribution around you, not the edited 30-second highlights. The leadership that's required here is a little different from yer standard issue.

The gift of the internet has been to surface human behaviour as much as it has been to change it. Can we handle that?