All about everyonea blog about engagement

The Quiet Revolution: Part Two

Leaving off from Part One of these two posts, I was talking about ROI (yawn, I know). But to continue with that fascinating subject, when brands talk about ROI, they are invariably still referring to commodity sales (no shit?). But the increase in peoples connections, through digital media, has had a profound and, perhaps, slightly anti-commercial effect within capitalist cultural systems. What has emerged hasn’t just been a straight transfer of the high street shopping experience, whereby people walk into stores and pay money for products. A subversion of the the linearity of the offline experience has inflected the business of selling things. Certainly, the initial question for brands and advertisers moving onto the web has been: How do we transfer what we are doing over here to over there? And for some, ok, most, enough success has been proven by replicating offline methodologies. But there’s no getting around the fact that brands, however hard they might try to retain the linearity of the high street, are now faced with a much less controllable environment.

With a greater stake in our own method of consumption, or at least with a much more closely listened to voice, we now have the ability to become more active in how we engage with brands. This opens up questions about value and currency that brands have previously only toyed with the edges of. There are new currencies to be explored for brands when it comes to engaging with people. Participation, time, advocacy, reaction, feedback, personality, collaboration, exchange, advocacy, criticism, experience, knowledge, creativity, ideas, escape, identity, support, labour, effort, education, the new and the old. As consumers we exist within financial constraints, but as people we exist beyond those constraints. We yearn for social contact, for positive or challenging experiences. Brands can help provide these experiences, but they need to connect at a human level and not at a commodity sales level, if they truly want to connect with people.

In the following post I will look at some emergent forms of digital, social engagement, the role of creativity, narrative and collaboration, and try to work out what role brands can or should have in these types of engagement.

Tags: advertising, ar, brands, communication, community, engagement, ideas