Michael Clarke at Green Tea Ice Cream takes the The Customer Owns Your Brand post and runs way downfield with it. Great post. Read the whole thing. Clarke:
"The argument (roughly that customers own your brand, that on a
socially networked planet, you cannot control their understanding of
what your brand is and that you have no choice but to engage in a
direct, multiple-levelled conversation with those pesky individuals you
expect to GIVE YOU MONEY!) isn’t new but his expression of it is
direct, devastatingly illustrated and distils the nuggets of wisdom you
might normally find spread thinly across several books-worth of popular
online marketing platitudes (you know the kind of book I mean) into a
single gnarly post.Again, this isn’t new – most famously, Intel applied this very strategy back in the mid-nineties during the Pentium floating point debacle. Andy Grove spun it out into one of those books
which illustrates how a) a PR disaster was turned around by a (then)
unusual act of honesty on the part of a chip manufacturer and b) how
the whole mess pushed Intel into the business of being a consumer brand
– a service company. Grove calls those moments in a company’s life
strategic inflexion points (see short portrait at Thinking Managers)
(guilty confession – it’s one of the more over-used phrases in my
vocabulary). Still, Intel was arguably in a position to have toughed it
out if they wanted to. Now, that isn’t an option. Here are three recent
demonstrations."
Go there to see the excellent examples he gives from Sony, Digg and Flickr.
OK – I’m utterly blown away! Thanks for the props and have a great weekend.