THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN?

Bob Dylan > John Grant

Reading John Grant's latest book - The Brand Innovation Manifesto a few months back, I found it full of brilliant thinking and great ideas for building brands, but just a bit intimidating. "How to Build Brands, Redefine Markets & Defy Conventions" sounds great. But how do you translate that into the generally dysfunctional, category myopic, "image is everything" brand culture that tends to be the norm in Mexico?

Well a few weeks on and I have now read BIM a few more times and before leaping into John's Tarot cards, molecules and new brand theory it seems there is some hard patient work to be done on the first chapter of BIM: "Challenges to the old model of branding," which are:

• Brand Image > > > Brand Innovation
  
• Messages > > > > > > Involvement
• Static > > > > > > > > Dynamic
• Promising > > > > > > Delivering
• Look and feel > > > > Experience
• Fantasy > > > > > > > Authenticity
• Advertising> > > > > > Culture
• Audience > > > > > > Community
• Consistency > > > > > Coherence
• Image > > > > > > > > Currency
• Passive > > > > > > > Interactive

Quite a few brands I have been looking at in the last few weeks appear to have made a start (probably unknowingly) on new brand thinking. Their briefs talk about being "more interactive," "generating involvement" and how they want to "deliver an authentic experience."
But these only appear in the brand introduction, brand background or business objectives, not in the brand strategy part of the brief. Then they revert to "message" and "image" and all the old model thinking.

". . . . will soon shake your windows and rattle your doors
for the times they are a changin" Bob Dylan

Hmmmm. Looks like it's time to get out there and shake some windows and rattle some doors.