The Empowered Consumer: Are We Losing Control of our Brands? No! Yes!

Moderator Marc Ruxin, Senior VP/ Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation for McCann Worldgroup opened up the session declaring this would be the “best conversastion about conversations.” My first thought was why the hell control-freaks Microsoft and Citi were on a panel ostensibly discussing the “empowered consumer” and the conversation we all must join (in transparent, authentic ways, of course). Seriously? Microsoft? On the whole, this was an interesting panel with some of the best funny/strange comments of the conference (minus of course the best quote of all from opening keynoter Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak who proclaimed resolutely “I believe in print!"). Below is a summary of topics the panel covered with only the choicest quotes from the panelists…

“The Marketer’s Landscape”
Ruxin began with presenting a nifty little flowchart showing the evolution of the marketing dialogue from “uni-directional” to “bi-directional” to today’s “mulit-directional” followed by a statement that the panel was here to de-mystify the idea that consumers have taken control of our brands.  Capodanno of Microsoft piped up offering his thoughts on the matter, “We have gone from a world of marketers talking to listening. I don’t think consumers have ‘shanghai’d’ our brands, but we have an opportunity to understand consumer feelings about our brands.” He then went on to talk about how consumers “engage” with their software (seriously? I don’t ‘engage’ with Word, its a utility) at which point I’m thinking-- ok, we’ve really got to kill that word.

“What do social networks offer for advertisers?”
Keith Rabois of SLIDE (thank goodness they had at least one representative of social media up there) noted “social networks are attention aggregators...at the end of the day there are opportunities with mixing engagements and fun entertainment.” He then went on to tout SLIDE’s (annoying) Facebook apps including SuperPoke and FunWall as opportunities for marketers (goody! so now not only your friends can spam your FunWall but now marketers too!). Chas Edwards of Federated Media has some interesting commentary on this subject stating that “consumers have suffered through stupid advertising long enough” and then went on to claim that Federated Media was more about connecting content with marketers rather than functioning as a blog network.

On the topic of advertisers embedding themselves into social networks, the overall consensus was that content is king-- that the best way to succeed in these environments is by creating compelling content to be shared virally by WOM.
“Ultimately brand marketers are publishers...thats the reality,” Ruxin stated.

At some point the conversation veered and the merits of the “vocal” (influencers) in the blogosphere as having any influence over a brand’s customer base were discussed with with the panel’s consensus that they don’t (ahem, what?). Somewhere in there Edwards piped up to remind everyone that “consumers have always controlled our brands” with Becker of Citi following with, “We like to control the dialogue.” Clearly.

Overall take-aways from the panel were that without admitting to a loss of control, even large companies like Microsoft and Citi are taking “the conversation” seriously, and even if they are not quite joining the dialogue yet, they are listening. “Listening in of itself can be a marketing strategy...[listening] is the most important thing for building credibility. It is a pre-cursor for participation.” As for consumers controlling brands? Depends on who you ask.