Brand building and the business of Indentity Politics

As businesses we want people talking about our brand. We want retweets, we want comments, we want our communications shared. We want our message to have greater and greater reach. We all love the kind of engagement and interaction that reassures us that our clients have taken our brand to heart.

In itself this is nothing new. Marketers have always understood that if our brand voice is not heard, our brand story forgotten or ignored, or if our brand values becomes irrelavant or obsolete, then our brand and our business whithers and declines. It has always been thus.

However, it is important to understand that today in business to consumer marketing, we are communicating to a target market who has its own publicty published identities.

Our customers on facebook and twitter are daily engaged in creating a public persona, and what's more, they are (consciously or unconsciously) managing that identity and image across different audiences - family members, intimates, work colleagues, old schoool friends, relatives, teachers and mentors, aquaintances, collaborators - and the friends and contacts of all the above.

Liking or sharing cotent that in any way diminishes the currency and status of their voice - their story and identity, is something that customers are becoming increasingly more and more weary of. So if content is uninspired, out of touch, disengenuous or spammy people are reluctant to endorse it by sharing or engaging with it.

As we ask to be included and embraced in our client's online social spaces, we have to start adding value to our client's personal brand.

I'll be looking at ways we can do this in next week's post. Catch up with you next Thursday.