Brand Distance: It Ain’t What It Used to Be
Posted on 24. Mar, 2011 by The Relationship Era in Blog, Blog, Principles & Ideas, Trends
Driving home from a spring break ski trip last week, I saw something that I’ve never seen. Not quite shocking, but a bit surprising. See images to the right and below.
A (on the right) is fairly typical. B (below) or “bee” is not. Yes, it’s a truckload of mostly contained honeybees. I say mostly contained because hundreds (probably thousands) of them were clinging to the outside of the netting and fighting a losing battle with the wind.
For me, it was interesting and only a little disturbing—mainly when I thought about the truck stopping for gas. My kids were a little more freaked out.
Distance changes a lot. Like the difference between traditional media and the cross-platform, trans-media world we live and work in today. When TV was the primary exposure to the brand, you pretty much saw the brand from a carefully constructed distance and interacted with it only when you used the product or service. A more socially connected media world though doesn’t just amplify the experience—it makes the relationship much more intimate, giving most people a better look at how the sausage (or honey) is made.
Fascinating and exciting or creepy and scary, the windshield brand view that consumers have today is quite a bit different than the broadcast perspective we grew up with. Social teams can create and propagate a calm, cool and together image, but people are going to rub up against the more natural, unproduced version eventually.
So, will consumers be interested in what your brand is doing, or freaked out?
