New Technology + Old Thinking = Shit Outcome

Prompted by a perceptive comment* from a friend, I’ve spent a bit of time looking into the idea of â??open sourceâ?? branding, as a possible route out of the current brand malaise we seem to find ourselves in. As much as it riles me to jump on prevailing bandwagons (if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor) I thought open source branding might be worth further exploration.

Perhaps an open source brand could see companies relinquishing rights to their trademarks and creative content – imagine how lost the brand guidelines would be in an environment where the organisation and the audience co-create the content – or maybe it could see organisations becoming more â??wiki-likeâ?? in their structure with the direction and activities being decided through user-led iterations.

â??Open Source Marketingâ?? has been talked about for a while now, at least in concept, by marketeers who are pushing ‘consumer centred’ marketing solutions. However, as with most advertising and design adoptions of prevailing social trends, it stops short of actually being dangerous (i.e. interesting or useful to us, the general public).

Marketeers say they want to ‘learn from’ the emergence of the blog, podcast, wiki, and open source culture, but this is really ad-land shorthand for cherry picking the bits which will help deliver corporate messages further into the increasingly difficult to reach cracks in society and the mediascape, without the ‘messy’ stuff which a genuine open source approach would bring. They’ll make ad’s available as quicktime downloads for us to play with and pass on, but until Disneyâ?¢ or Hondaâ?¢ relinquishes the â?¢ and looks to completely open up it’s resources and consider co-creation with it’s audiences, open source branding will remain a hollow promise.

There seems to be an emerging trend that as soon as we witness any interesting or engaging technology developments, (be that a means of communicating, creating, or being part of a community), industry starts trying to shoe-horn old methods of communication and advertising into that space. In the early days of the internet, and still to this day, we see the most primative methods of advertising operating in a space where everything has moved on, and the medium is completely unsuited to the types of message companies are trying to deliver. The rise of the internet was also heralded as the death of print, though we now realise this to be complete nonsense. No one wants to read a book off the screen – however what I do want from the internet is greater immediacy in the information I find and the ability to span threads in three dimensions as well as just forwards and back – a totally different type of knowledge and news, suited to (and making best use of) the technology delivering it.

To end on an optimistic note, (having looked through some other blogs today it seems the default tone of voice is often either ‘angry’ or ‘agitated’ – something I resolve to try and overcome here…), media companies are perhaps providing some of the best examples of the benefits of an open source approach to building brands, with open collaboration and creative input becoming the lifeblood of any news or media organisation which wants to remain relevant in the digital age.

The better brand-ers have long been aware that the brand is not what the organisation says it is, it is what ‘they**’ say it is. What we need to realise is that ‘they’ are more numerous and more powerful/influential than ever, and that ‘they’ have the means to not only interpret the brand, but to use it, re-mix it, distort it, reproduce it and distribute it in a way we’ve never seen before. Companies who embrace this will blossom in the digital future, while organisations who see this as a tug of war for control of their brand, or who relinquish control in a begrudging or piece-meal way, will find themselves increasingly impotent and isolated.

A general principle of the open source movement is that being controlling or parochial about what you know/have is counter productive, and while often if you give you will receive more in return, the idea and action of giving away is more important than the stuff you will get back. Organisations need to take this onboard, wholesale, without just picking the bits thay think will enable them to do ‘more effective’ advertising.

** ‘they’ are; the audience, the user, the customer, the consumer, the world.

* Thanks to â??Nic Wistreichâ?? for the suggestion.

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