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Allen Adamson talks technology

Tuesday night, marketing consultant Allen Adamson spoke to a group of students in Brandeis University’s Golding Auditorium on the topic of online marketing. Director for the New York office of the brand design and consulting firm Landor, Adamson is currently touring New England in support of his most recent book, BrandDigital, a guide to building and sustaining a commercial brand in the digital age.

Aided by PowerPoint and video clips, Adamson described for the audience the current marketing landscape. Though the digital sector has not yet become the dominant one, it has become increasingly important. He described the current situation, in which economic conditions necessitate heavy budget cuts, forcing suffering marketing departments to develop new, more efficient ways of developing and pushing products.

Fortunately, the internet has provided a venue in which there have been very efficient returns on marketing investments. The internet, Adamson told the audience, has allowed for the development of a forum in which customers communicate their complaints and compliments on a given product in massive numbers. “One of the things digital allows you to do is be a fly on the wall,” he said, describing the new consumer culture. Adamson called this phenomenon a “back yard fence mentality,” in which products are marketed by word of mouth alone, almost free from any outside influence. “The internet,” Adamson added, “is a huge digital fence.”

Adamson went on to describe the various effects the internet has had throughout the marketing and branding industry. Though the internet is a powerful new tool, it can also sink a product as fast as it promotes it. Whereas once companies performed surveys on their products as little as once a year, the current environment, one in which word of a defective product can spread ever faster, calls for round-the-clock vigilance to ensure that no complaints go unnoticed and treated. In the digital age, he continued, it’s more important for companies to listen and learn from customers. The public are now the ones who can make or break you. Realizing this, corporations have begun to explore the vast possibilities of social networking tools modeled after phenomenon like Youtube and Facebook.

One story described in the lecture detailed the online exploits of Ameriprise, an offshoot of American Express. Realizing the value of a forum in which their customers could voice their opinions, Ameriprise set up a site in which customers were encouraged to share their dreams for the future from a financial perspective. The result was two-told. Not only did the company develop its own forum for customer opinion, they created a community.

However, some companies Adamson described did not share the same foresight and suffered as a result. He offered the audience the example of the Kryptonite bike lock, a product promoted as completely secure and with a $50 price tag. Shortly after the product launch, a video surfaced on the internet of a man opening the lock by inserting the end of a pen into the keyhole. The product was a bust. “Nothing spreads faster than when you make a promise and don’t keep it,” Adamson warned. He also gave the example of Cablevision, the self-proclaimed champions of customer service, embarrassed when an internet video surfaced of one of their repair men taking a nap on the couch of a customer.

Adamson also warned that even great products are vulnerable to decline if they don’t keep pace with the technology. To illustrate the point Adamson told the story of Shreddies, a stable cereal in Canada, which was declining but was revived by viral video campaigns. The company that owned Shreddies spread on the internet videos of test subjects sampling between the original Shreddies, and the “new” Diamon Shreddies, the same square shaped cereal simply rotated into a diamond shape on the box. There was no actual change being made to the product, but customers were nonetheless thinking about the cereal in a new way.

The lecture also touched on the new need for corporations to market themselves as well. Thanks to the wide range of information available on the internet, customers can now track all of a corporation’s products and activities. Not only must products stand for something, but so now must corporations. Adamson described the recent fuss made over the company Unilever, which makes and promotes Dove soap products, and the related “True Beauty” campaign, as well as Axe products, a line often derided as being sexist.

The lecture concluded as Adamson reminded the audience that the basic principles of branding and marketing remain the same, but with the digital market comes a need for a more complete customer experience, one where “who you are becomes much more important.” A product still needs to distinguish itself. “You still need to stand for something different,” he said.