iMedia Brand Summit - Kneel Before Consumer!
Last week, I attended Rick Parkhill’s iMedia Brand Summit on behalf of ContextWeb in Bonita Springs, Florida.
Attendees included a solid group of agency leaders from shops such as Carat Fusion, Avenue A Razorfish, Organic, OMD Digital and many others. On the brand side, a broad range of key decisionmakers attended from companies such as Verizon, Proctor & Gamble, Masterfoods and The Coca Cola Company.
Discussions appropriately centered on this new age of consumer control and how a brand should cope with it. After Time Magazine punted on making a hard call in a soft news year, and AdAge disappointingly followed suit, it was no shock to see the consumer front and center for this year’s brand backslapping bonanza.
The panels discussed consumer inputs from open ended things like show us your “Wanna Get Away?” routines from Southwest Airlines to Dove’s makeover Oscar tie-in. Topics given additional time were corporate blogs and how not to screw them up and the “new” teen consumer.
I took some issue with the last topic - apparently today’s teenagers are consumed with talking with their friends, wanting to be cool, and expressing themselves. Oh…..I get it. Sounds completely different from my recollection of my teen years. Ok ok - I understand that technology makes a difference in the way teens interact and that marketers can exploit these new behavior patterns to feed them cooler ironic t-shirts but pardon me if I’m a little tired of hearing of how everything has changed.
The prevailing wisdom is correct - consumer input and participation in a brand is a good and growing thing. But - it’s not a substitute for good brand management and messaging. We should leave that to the professionals.
-- John Ruvolo
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