I was recently interviewed by Stephen Byrne of Diffusion regarding brands and the impact of Social Media on them.

I started thinking about the famous quote from ad agency founder David Ogilvy’s definition of a brand:

“The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, price, its history, its reputation and the way its advertised“ 

If we dissect each of these elements we can see the influence of Social Media within all these attributes.

Name – right this minute Vegimite is crowdsourcing for a new name for its new range

Packaging- last year Pepsi sent key influencers their newly launched can design

Price - music has been known to be sold online for the value that ‘consumers think its worth’

History -  consumers can mashup historical marketing collatoral – to help create the future for the brand

Reputation- every minute consumers are commenting on brands and services from simple product review sites to more complicated UCG including Dave the musician  with his song about United Airlines damaging  his guitar

Advertising -only an advertising man would isolate advertising as a brand attribute.  I dont  think it is an attribute.  It is a distribution vehicle to promote the other attributes of the product even so there are a myriad of examples of Social Media particularly UGC forms of advertising. Recently the US Govt held a competition for the public to create best Public Service Announcement regarding Swine Flu behaviour guidelines.