and as well as to the range of product offerings that may fall under it.

Fostering the brand 

However, with each successive year, noise levels on the media that these brands use to communicate are only growing. And with the growing noise levels, audience immunity to the constant bombardment also grows proportionately. Thus, ever growing amounts of ad spends are required to get through to growing audience immunity. There is no turning back for advertisers in terms of expenditure on advertising. As time passes, they have to battle not only consumer immunity but also clutter across media.

As a result of the above, more and more money is poured into fostering these brands, all in a bid to keep them relatable, relevant, consistent and top-of-mind. Ad spends; both across conventional as well as non-conventional media by most major brands in the world today have only been increasing. Global ad spends have grown at an average of 6% YOY between 2005 & 2007. Asia Pacific is seeing the highest growth rates with an aggregate of about 7.5%. China clocked a whopping 20% YOY ad spend growth rate. (*Source: marketingcharts.com – Carat study on global ad spends.)

The larger you are, the harder you fall
This inexorable tweaking and ‘meaning assignment’, in time, makes these brands much, much larger than life. Think any of the top brands in the world today, be it Coke, Pepsi, Nike or any other from this ilk. While the fact that their brands are such ‘magnets of meaning’ may be cause to celebrate for the companies that own them, this largeness is also cause for concern. This is because, in a crisis, these are the very brands that fall the hardest. The larger you are, the more dramatic the backlash. For instance, when the pesticide controversy broke in India, Coke & Pepsi, easily among the largest advertisers in India, both clocked a drop in sales to the tune of 14% - 16%.*

In another instance, Delhi Public School (DPS) came into sharp focus when a pornographic multimedia clip featuring two of its own students started doing the rounds. While it is an inviolable fact that sexual experimentation among teenagers is growing across the country, DPS caught more than its share of brickbats and aspersions cast on its environment & teaching ethic just because a large section of the public enjoyed seeing the mighty fall in so sordid a way.

(*Source: India Resource Center)

You don’t judge your own...
The relationship that companies have with their customer goes much beyond that between a supplier and a consumer. In an age of much noise and choice, they have to come out of this comfort zone by reaching out to find a relevant space in their customer’s lives. It is the degree to which a brand sustains this relevance with the target group, which will define the brand’s future.

Tenuous or strictly transactional relationships with the customer while nurturing the brand to a size that blocks out the sun, makes it a prime target for anti-corporate activism, anytime even a single chink is found in the amour. Thus, brand custodians need to devise methods where the consumer does not feel so removed from the brand, so as to be able to detach easily and attack the brand in times of crises. Essentially, one doesn’t judge their own. The closer the consumer feels to the brand, the lesser he will be able to judge it.

Consumer Cohesion: An introduction
We feel that there exists a certain misconception about consumer antipathy, which is that it surfaces only in the face of bad publicity. Consumer antipathy can exist because of an isolated bad experience, bad association or simply misguided liberalist activism against the ugly corporate logo. There have been numerous instances in which people love to hate certain brands just because they almost exemplify the ugly, greedy American, e.g. McDonald’s. The bigger the brands are, the more they seem to unwittingly foster a belligerent lobby (unorganized, for the most part) that would love to see them go down.

Given that brand building efforts are leading to the formation of strong sentiments toward the brand, with no real platform to express the resultant opinions / emotions a consumer may have, consumers today are going to other fora to express and discuss. With media proliferation, the Internet is spearheading this movement of self-expression, notwithstanding the other social communities such as family, friends, work etc., across which these opinions may be shared. French academic Bernard Cova, in a paper that appeared in the European Journal of Marketing in 2001, argued that modern consumers have become less interested in the objects of consumption than in the social links and identities associated with those objects. The growth of social network sites as a medium to connect to the world, the boom in blogging as a mode of self-expression, growth in special interest hobby groups and classes amongst adults, are all cases in point to prove, that the consumer today justifies his reason for being based on the social groups he / she is a part of.

Marketers currently track these sentiments through in-depth market researches, and even compulsive blog-scanning, which, no doubt, is becoming exceedingly expensive and tedious, over time. If, on the other hand, marketers were to integrate these consumers, in a way that is in line with the brand message, wouldn’t it be far easier to track, monitor and hence draw from the resultant interaction that the groups of homogeneous consumers engage in, on the brand’s very own ‘premises’? Essentially, these social cliques would form anyway, regardless of the brand encouraging it or not. But by making the first move and bringing together the customer, the brand would be pre-empting the formation of these communities, and enable formation of these communities, such that the brand has full access and perhaps even some control over its opinions. The benefits, of course, are abundant.

Consumer Cohesion: A Brand Blueprint
In order to facilitate a less protracted relationship between the brand and the customer, so as to limit or ideally eliminate the negative sentiment entirely, we have the following roadmap.

I)Pre-empt the inevitable formation of some kind of communities and the opinions that invariably go with it It is very common for consumers to compare their experiences for every product from masalas to their Bose sound systems, and in doing so, to feel a sense of community. While it is a basic need to share and relate, what also contributes to this behaviour is the emotional need of wanting to express themselves through these affiliations.

This need to affiliate is what drives users to join 198 online ‘communities’ while writing little to nothing on their actual profiles on social network websites such as Orkut. The mode of expression has shifted from the self-proclaiming words, to the more nonchalant depiction of one’s interests and inclinations through these communities.

We feel that a brand should pre-empt the formation of these de-facto communities by inviting consumers to relate, share & interact on the brand’s very own ‘premises’. The brand should make the first move in inviting its users to a forum where they can have this kind of interaction. This enables the brand to bring the consumers closer to its fold and maybe even engage with it actively.

II)Product and service improvement through customer feedback Engaging with your customer at any forum and / or observing interaction among various users of your brand can yield powerful and compelling insights relating to product or service quality. In essence, it acts like an inadvertent focus group discussion of sorts, which is the best kind as it is much likelier to yield truthful and relevant insights as opposed to those derived from discussions conducted in the presence of market researchers. III) Pre-empt positive word of mouth Once a marketer has preempted the community formation and invited the audience/consumers to congregate on its own brand’s territory, this experience has to be based on the core consumer insight that the brand operates on. The result of this exercise is that instead of leaving it purely to the markets for the customer to use and then appreciate your product, the marketer preempts this experience and enhances it by adding a pleasant and strong sensory memory to the customer’s overall experience with the product.

IV)Pre-empt negative word-of-mouth Now we come to a point where we are gearing the brand for crisis, if one were to ever arise. The best case scenario in the face of a crisis, after the brand owner has gone through the steps of Consumer Cohesion mentioned above, is that the brand faces widespread negative sentiment among the general public for some error, but the ‘community’ of consumers it has helped foster and which now thrives independently as an active social group, is still on its side. This community still believes in the brand. What emerges is an organized, coherent, single-voiced shout in support of the brand in opposition to the negative, fragmented cacophony that is bashing it.

The worst case scenario will be that this ‘community’ too loses confidence in the brand and joins the denigrating crowds opposing the brand. However, because this ‘community’, though seeded by the brand itself, has now evolved into a spontaneous, self-sustaining social group, they are still likely to speak in a single voice and single line of reason, albeit against the brand.

This gives the brand owner the latitude of addressing rebuttals, explanations and/or counter-arguments simply on the basis of the stance this community takes, as they are highly likely to be the single loudest voice in the debate on the brand’s opposing side (i.e. if the brand owners do their groundwork right). This scenario, needless to say, is infinitely less painful than having to rebut and defend against fragmented and incoherent mob negativity. Clearly, the clincher in any such case will lie with the brand’s corporate communication, advertising and public relations team to get the message across in a strategic, secure and convincing manner.

Essentially, what happens is, because of Consumer Cohesion, even in times of crisis when the brand’s own community has turned against itself, at least the opponent is a large, discernible target with cogent accusations. This enables the brand to prepare an equally crisp and relevant defense, rather than just having to shield itself from brickbats from an unreasoning public anger.

Road Exemplification of Customer Cohesion
Carefree Sanitary Napkins, bases its concept on how it helps women attain the independence to live life on their own terms by taking care of all problems they might have during their period. In this case, the community experience has to re-emphasize the very same sentiment. In fact, it needs to take it from being a latent belief to being experienced by each and every sense of the customer. For e.g. Carefree can host its community event at, say, an amusement park with all the thrilling or adventurous rides named after the various nuances of ‘freedom’. While on a ride, the customer associates the rush of flying through the air on curving rail tracks with ‘freedom’ and ultimately, Carefree. Thus, it engages each and every sense of the customer making it an association that will be difficult to dislodge from memory.

Once a brand can successfully do this, that is, reinforce the feeling of well-being and control (in this case), the brand automatically places itself in the ‘friend-philosopher-guide’ role vis-à-vis the customer. This way, the brand shows without a shadow of doubt that it indeed helps them experience freedom and the customer forms an inextricable bond between Carefree and freedom.

This brand induced ‘call to congregate’ may be held by Carefree for a few more times, till there reaches a point where the customers congregate on their own, and these meetings become an important part of their social calendar.

To exemplify the crisis situation, we are using a situation which actually did occur about 30 years ago where women using Tampons suffered Toxic Shock Syndrome, commonly known as TSS, which in extreme cases even resulted in death. (This problem is clearly dated and unlikely to occur given the innovations since, not to mention that the product in discussion here is a sanitary napkin. However, this is just for the purpose of exemplifying.)

Carefree finds itself in a position where TSS has been confirmed in several cases where the cause has been traced back to the use of Carefree Sanitary napkins. In such a scenario, two things could happen.

Scenario 1: The Carefree consumer community still believes in the brand and vociferously voices this very opinion. Moreover, given its sheer size (ideally), as well as its legitimized existence as an official community of Carefree users, this group is likely to get a fair amount of airtime and hence possibly even drown out and further stem, the negative publicity the brand is currently experiencing.

Scenario 2: Say, even the Carefree consumer community has lost confidence in the brand, perhaps due to a member or a loved one being among the victims. In such cases, this community is likely to take an adverse stand against the brand and criticize in a single voice given that they are a cohesive group. This makes them the single largest (and perhaps the most media savvy) adversary that the brand faces. As a result, instead of monitoring and countering fragmented and cacophonous negative sentiment, the brand, by way of damage control, can choose to rebut and address only this large majority of its consumers. In essence, it provides a firefighting brand a large discernible target which is infinitely easier to counter over a million tiny attackers.

Conclusion
Expensive brands need to be insured against market and public opinion vagaries if they are to stay in business past the inevitable crises they are bound to face sometime in their lifecycles. Consumer Cohesion is an approach to doing just that and ensuring that the brand’s groundwork and defense are in prime shape to face marketing warfare.

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Both Gauri & Sabera are pursuing an MBA, with a specialization in Marketing Communications, at the Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, India.

Gauri graduated in Liberal Arts from New Delhi. She has authored and presented research papers on branding and marketing at conferences in India. Gauri can be contacted at Địa chỉ email này đang được bảo vệ khỏi chương trình thư rác, bạn cần bật Javascript để xem nó .

Prior to her MBA, Sabera worked for two years with Foote, Cone & Belding in Mumbai, India, as a media planner and buyer for Media cell, Lodestar Universal. She holds a Bachelors degree in Commerce and a post graduate degree in Advertising & Marketing from Mumbai. Sabera can be contacted on Địa chỉ email này đang được bảo vệ khỏi chương trình thư rác, bạn cần bật Javascript để xem nó .

(Source: Interbrand)