Last month, we looked at how the concept of product brand had been killed by the Internetworked stakeholders of the Internetworked Century.
This month, let’s begin with 18-year-old Ayesha, our imaginary friend studying design in one of the two design hubs of India, Pune.
Ayesha never reads a newspaper and rarely watches TV. She lives on the Web.
Last evening, her friend, Kiera, shared the Nike+ running app for her iPhone: Ayesha had not heard about it. She downloaded it to keep track of her jogs around Bund Garden.
This morning, while Googling for dining places, she discovered (referred to as Online Behavioural Ad aimed at her) a local restaurant that provided home-style food at nominal rates and decided to try it: Ayesha had not heard about it before.
Tomorrow, her three friends are holding a version of Silent Noise party: they have discovered how to connect wireless headphones to YouTube, and they plan to go through sessions of Coke Studio Pakistan.
Well, Ayesha has heard of Coke, but she is confused by the brand in India (like I am), but she likes its association with fusion music because she likes fusion music.
So what happened?
What happened to the Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action or Cognitive-Affective-Behavioural models of brand communication?
Ayesha is choosing brands she wasn’t aware of; using products she wasn’t aware of (even though she was aware of brand Nike); changing her attitude to a brand because it is sponsoring an event in a neighbouring country...
Moral of the story?
At the best of times, marketing is an inexact science, marketing communication even so...now we have a situation where no new model is available as a guide to holistic communication.
Google and Co will keep inventing stuff for online advertising, and Rossiter & Percy and Barbara Stern will invent new theories of communication, but it is the advertising agency planners who need to invent the next model.
(As we discovered in chlorophyll, brand models by academicians Aaker and Kapferer don’t seem to work in practice, and certainly not in India.)
There is a ‘Account Planning Group India’ on Linked in...are they listening?
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