Consumer engagement is not brand ownership

19 November 2009 | By Andrew Harrison

“You don’t own your brand, the consumer does!” Is it just me, or is there anybody else out there who has seen, read or heard that recently and who then thinks “bollocks”? If it’s true, then I am Aleksandr the meerkat. If I had £1 for each time some well-meaning brand consultant, media planner or naive marketer has said to me in the past six months the fatuous statement above, I’d have earned more revenue than Twitter (although, admittedly, £1 alone would be sufficient to achieve that rather modest goal).

Not only it is nonsense - confusing the message (your brand) with the medium (which used to be called 30-second spot television advertising but is now increasingly called 140-character social networking) - but it’s also dangerous nonsense because now is the time for brand champions.

It’s nonsense because it’s not true. Literally, of course, businesses, brand owners and shareholders own brands. Consumers consume. This is an important distinction. Drug companies own patents for medicines and their respective brand identities; doctors prescribe and patients consume. For all the liberating trend towards self-help and self-diagnosis, no patient would suggest they own the Tamiflu vaccine or Nurofen.

Patients rely on pharmaceutical professionals to own drug patents, invent medicines and help them get better. Equally, no one ever suggested a decade or so ago that “viewers” owned Fairy Liquid or Andrex because the marketing of those brands used a lot of telly or “readers” owned financial services products that advertised in the national press. So why is there the mantra today that “the consumer owns your brand” just because there’s a lot of social networking out there?

It’s because marketing folk are confusing what the brand stands for (the message) and how it communicates in the modern media landscape (the medium). Of course, the two are closely linked - and the best marketing campaigns weave these two separate strands together - but they are very different things.

This is all dangerous nonsense because it’s never been more important for brand managers to stand up and be counted, to demonstrate return on investment and to fight for scarce marketing funds around the boardroom table. As we begin the gradual climb out of recession, businesses will be looking for brand champions. That requires the mindset and mentality of an owner - fiercely parochial and partial about your brand. Businesses will need an evangelist for its brands, advocating on behalf of the consumer but not giving up responsibility for the brand and handing it over to the consumer. By contrast, if you are mistaken enough to cede ownership of your brand to the consumer, don’t expect the finance director to cede you much ownership of a marketing budget or Tesco to cede you much of their shelf space.

This is not to say, of course, that the consumer isn’t important. As David Ogilvy famously wrote (in those sexist Admen days in the Sixties)/ “The consumer isn’t stupid. She’s your wife”. The consumer is your customer - to be loved, listened to, cherished and served with the best possible product or service you can deliver. But that doesn’t make him or her an owner - any more than a cinema goer owns the movie or a child eating a Happy Meal owns the McDonald’s brand.

It’s also not to say that the medium in which you communicate isn’t important either. Marketers today have a wonderful choice of channels to showcase their wares; the chatroom and Twitter feed are as important as the market stall and pub table to previous generations of salesmen and marketers. Email and video-on-demand are the phone call and soap opera of the Seventies. It’s clear you need to understand them and use them because that’s where your consumer is.

But equally, they are still media channels and it’s dangerous to confuse the platform on which you advertise with what and how you advertise. That remains the day job of all brand managers.

So, don’t confuse ownership of your brand with consumer engagement with certain media channels. You formulate the product, you design the packaging, you agree the brand name, you sell-in the distribution, you set the pricing and you decide the marketing campaign. Lazy marketers can let consumers with crayons colour in the next pack design but these are one-night stands not a long-term change in the relationship between brand owner and brand user. Let your consumer enjoy your brand message in the chatroom or the pub, but make sure he or she buys your product time and again in the real world.

Ownership drives responsibility. Brand management means managing not abdicating.