perhaps it’s time to upgrade to Branding 2.0—a new approach to branding for a digital, integrated age. .

The phrase “age of unprecedented technological change” is probably the most overused, and therefore precedented, phrase we could use to describe the current wave of innovation sweeping the globe. To cut a long, under-researched swathe through history, the current ‘age of unprecedented technological change’ probably compares to the Industrial Revolution, the introduction of the printing press, and the Roman Conquests. Each time there was a huge impact on society and civilization and a change in media that led to a radically changed approach to advertising and marketing—this age is no different.

There is now a whole generation of children growing up who never knew a time when it wasn’t possible to book tickets, plan holidays, find films, send emails, and research the entire repository of human knowledge within 2 minutes of firing up a PC. Just as my own 40-something generation grew up with the television and the telephone, the next generation will quickly adapt to Internet 2.0, 3.0, and beyond.

To know where the Internet is going, we have to understand the assumptions made by the generation who have grown up with it. These assumptions are a lot easier to tap into than you might expect, after all most of the target audience is viewable in videos, blogs, Facebooks, and a million-and-one other forms of “user-generated-content.”

So what can we learn from the new consumer’s assumptions? And what strategies should brands adopt to become Branding 2.0 compliant?

Assumption 1): I will become famous
The brands that don’t exist yet aren’t coming soon to a television near you. Bands like Arctic Monkey’s were famously launched on MySpace and, as the global agenda gathers speed, you can expect new brands to come from unexpected places building on a wave of common interest and shared enthusiasm. Whilst TV advertising has been quick to jump on the YouTube phenomena, the really successful new brands are still being conceived and adopted by evangelizing consumers. Television cannot match the passion, interaction ,size, scale, and diversity of the Internet audience.

During the Irish Potato Famine the mortality rate in county Mayo was around 30% but communication of the starving Irishmen’s plight was limited to questions in the House of Commons. Now that pictures can roll around the world in less time than it takes to prepare a news bulletin, we have global compassion and can now talk about a global attention span which is forever shrinking. Because of this shrinking global attention span, the young consumers of today are expecting their nanosecond of fame any time soon.

Branding 2.0 means giving your consumers a taste of fame. Whether it be a chance for their photo to appear on packaging as run by McDonalds, or a competition to devise a Dorito’s Super Bowl commercial. It’s no longer enough to develop just one message and pump it out as often as possible. The message needs multiple variations, high-tech and low-tech, serious and spoof, familiar and surreal, to capture the moment in as many ways as possible for the ravenous global attention span.

Assumption 2) The more I buy, the better it gets
We talk about surfing the Internet because the wave of global attention washes through whichever conduit offers least resistance. Brands like eBay, Google, MySpace and YouTube, stay out of the way of their consumers, offering them a repository of data and the opportunity to leverage that data to make themselves more useful.

Consumer-based shopping sites like Amazon.com have given consumers an understanding of the value of their choices. The compact between Amazon.com and its customers is that the more people buy items from Amazon.com, the better the aggregated purchase information and the better place to shop Amazon.com becomes. Just like a Chanel buyer enters into a pact with the brand by proudly displaying the logo, effectively paying to endorse the brand, brands need to let consumers share their passion, putting them clearly on the product and packaging.

A good example is M&M’s facility which allows their consumers to customize their candy. Simply go online, type the message you want printed, and order your favorite candy in your favorite color with your own name or anything else you want printed on it. The pop diva’s legendary back stage rider demanding a bowl of only blue M&M’s need no longer conjure up nightmares for their terrified PA.

Branding 2.0 means providing a way for your consumers to relate and share their pride. Buyer’s remorse—the fear that you may have spent too much on the wrong thing—needs to give way to buyer’s pride. The more this pride can be shared and fed, the better. Put the “bling” in your brand and let consumers flaunt it.

Assumption 3) The truth is out there
Just as the early Internet-literate users were free to obsess about X-File’s Mulder and Scully’s unresolved sexual tension, today’s consumers can obsess about a brand’s image and express doubts, question reality, test facts, and even show videos of the product not working or, as in the case of Somerfield Employees, upload videos of them using pallet lifters to ‘skateboard’ down a multi-story car park. It only takes one high-profile anonymous blog or video about how the company abuses its employees, consumers, or product and the brand is damaged.

Al Gore’s envirodocumentary An Inconvenient Truth is an apt title for the change in the distribution of knowledge since the Internet’s introduction. The democratization of information means that brands have a delicate balancing act to manage whilst bridging the gap between aspiration and reality.

Branding 2.0 means that companies have to understand that a brand’s emotional impact is a product of its history, quality, reputation, impressions, and associations. The sum total is a geometric progression rather than an arithmetic one; if you accidentally dial one of your brand values to zero the others lose all value. Just look at Arthur Anderson who put ethical behavior low down on their list of priorities. Because of the Enron scandal, employees and customers suddenly lost faith in Arthur Anderson was and the brand consequently became worthless.

The hard fact is that brands now have to own their narrative or be owned by it. That means no ducking out of difficult consumer conversations because silence is tantamount to ignorance. If you can’t face the issue then your brand is seen as paralyzed by fear. Take Bernard Matthews during the recent bird flu storm, for example. There was no hiding place for Bernard as the forums buzzing with shared concern weren't buying into a corporate “styling” out of the truth.

Assumption 4) Always available, always now
The Internet is the ultimate service business platform. There's no '”talk to the hand” option for today's brands. If customer service can't be reached on the phone, there's the website, a text, a blog, a forum available. There's no longer an acceptable excuse to keep a consumer waiting for a response. The busy signal has made way for voicemail and voicemail has made way for press 1 for this, 2 for that, and 3 for the other – or look at our website.

This “always on” culture has been extended to consumer expectations about products too. Forcing consumers to wait is only feasible if it is done on purpose to create brand noise and heighten consumer expectation.

The recently announced launch of Guinness flavored Marmite, for example, is an alliance straight out of the branding 2.0 textbook. A new innovation with strictly limited distribution that creates newsworthy buzz and consumer expectation. Customers who line up around the block to get hold of a jar are just as important as any sales promotion.

H&M has been achieving the same result by cleverly licensing exclusive fashion designers and restricting the amount of product available. So whilst it may seem strange to talk about limited supply in a section about permanent availability, it’s the exception that proves the rule. Nobody is going to admire your brand for being inefficient or slow to take an opportunity unless it’s done on purpose.

Branding 2.0 means creating and managing a continually evolving, customized product or service that addresses clients’ needs responsively and efficiently through a wide range of joined-up mediums.

Assumption 5) The future is archived
If you store every conversation you will ever have and every picture you will ever take, you will need a disc that can handle a terabyte of data. The cost of a disc capable of holding a terabyte is currently around £480 (US $970.404).

Fast-forward 30 years. Fond memories of your loved ones no longer gather dust on the mantelpiece and your television screen has a searchable family tree complete with video and a password controlled archive. Want to know the teenage memories of your late uncle? Tap into his email archive and see his annotated photo album in real time. There are already websites for condolences, and how many more of these are being built even now?

As Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs pointed out, we’ve reached the point where there is more knowledge available in archives than there is in real people’s heads, and the next generation will have grown up with this fact. Provided you know the right question, anything is findable.

Information, even the newest information, is no longer enough. Brands need to provoke questions and provide a forum for finding new answers. This means relinquishing control of the answer and owning the conversation. Forums, blogs, and social networking websites are the medium of choice for an empowered audience aware that everything they say is being recorded for posterity.

A brand launching today needs to provoke necessary conversation and own the social issue. Dove’s use of real people is a great example of a brand taking hold of the agenda to suggest its own reason for being. Bisto’s launch of a campaign based around “our night” and getting families to pledge to eat together puts the brand at the heart of the debate about family’s no longer sitting down to dinner—it’s also a great way to sell more gravy.

Branding 2.0 means managing conversations not answering questions.

Assumption 6) There is another one born every minute
The owners of YouTube launched their brand when they couldn’t find anywhere to share a video of a dinner party. The owners of Hot or Not launched theirs because they couldn’t decide if one of the girls they’d seen was really a perfect 10. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, the Internet was around 5 million terabytes of data in 2005. To make a conservative estimate, there are around 1.7 million new Internet brands being launched every year. By the law of averages, some of these are going to be the next big winners of the Internet lottery, achieving global status and multimillion price tags and, in the process, changing society.

To keep pace with these overnight successes, established brands need to adopt a twin and contradictory approach. On the one hand, brands need to ensure that their history is clearly documented and that the past cannot be challenged or undermined. However, at the same time brands need to search for opportunities to be disruptive, challenging the status quo and continually looking for new opportunities to surprise. This powerful combination of history and disruption explains the success of luxury fashion brands like Louis Vuitton—combining the dramatic flair of fashionable innovation with deep routed quality standards and values. The best example of this is the Louis Vuitton Ipod holder that costs around 5 times as much as the technology it is supposed to be protecting.

Branding 2.0 means searching for new opportunities, while acting as a guardian of the past.

In Conclusion
When they were filming the original Bewitched it would have taken all the computer hardware on the planet to computer generate the lovely Samantha’s nose twitch. Today, it could be done with a basic PC and around £300 (US $606.119) worth of software. Technology doesn’t necessarily change society, however. Society changes society and the introduction of new technology changes how we communicate and what we expect by way of service.

Branding 2.0 means understanding that consumers’ expectations and needs have moved on. The absence of a website that addresses a customer’s needs is no longer acceptable for a 21st century brand.

In addition to a website, Branding 2.0 teaches companies to:

1. Make your consumers famous
2. Let consumers show pride in buying from you
3. Tell the truth and own your narrative
4. Offer a customized approach with maximum service at each level
5. Provide a forum for conversation about your brand
6. Protect the past and watch for opportunities to disrupt the present

Adam Bass is the founder of Golden Goose, a brand licensing consultancy that has worked with some of the UK’s most established brands to set up and develop brand licensing strategies. With a career that encompasses work in advertising, online marketing and publishing, Adam established Golden Goose in anticipation of the growing trend in corporate brand licensing.

(Source: Interbrand)