In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand \u201cownership\u201d through control\u2026.but that\u2019s no longer the case.\u00a0 The increasing integration of social media into our consumers\u2019 lives has shifted brand ownership away from marketers and into the hands of the consumer.<\/p>\n
We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our<\/em><\/strong> marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers<\/em><\/strong> use to share and influence opinion about our brand.\u00a0\u00a0 Our consumers now have \u201cthe channel of me<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong> Consumers\u2019 opinions now create the \u201creality\u201d of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.<\/p>\n There are two main ways we can react to this change:\u00a0 we can fight it or accept it.<\/strong> I highly recommend accepting it.\u00a0 If we fight to retain control of our brands, we are likely to hold on so tight that we suffocate the flexibility and outward-looking awareness our brand needs for survival.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if we can accept the change and step into our consumers\u2019 \u201cchannel of me,\u201d we can gather valuable direction for the success of our brand.\u00a0 They can (and will!) tell us how they expect our products to work, and what they expect from our brand.\u00a0 When we let go of the notion that we<\/em> own our brand, we have an incredible opportunity to fashion the brand that our consumers want.<\/p>\n If we consider consumers to have ownership of our brand, how would the questions change when we host them in our online branded communities?\u00a0 \u00a0We would ask consumers about \u201ctheir\u201d brand, not ours, and then we would hear their answers as insightful directives for the future of our brand<\/strong>.<\/p>\n When we listen to our consumers as though they were brand owners, we give them the same respect we give our own brand marketers.\u00a0 And in this social media world, authentic respect is one of the greatest customer experiences we can provide.<\/strong><\/p>\n Brand ownership has shifted, but if you are willing to tune into your consumers\u2019 \u201cchannel of me,\u201d you can make this the best news yet for the relevance of your brand.\u00a0 It\u2019s time to change the channel! <\/strong><\/p>\n Ted Rubin<\/strong><\/p>\n Ted Rubin<\/a> Ted has a deep online background beginning in 1997 with Seth Godin, as CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics, & recently as Chief Social Marketing Officer, Open Sky. Originally posted at SheSpeaks<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the past, marketing owned the brand, using a tightly controlled set of messages piped through carefully selected channels to ensure brand \u201cownership\u201d through control\u2026.but that\u2019s no longer the case.\u00a0 The increasing integration of social media into our consumers\u2019 lives has shifted brand ownership away from marketers and into the hands of the consumer. We … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,7],"tags":[1119,33,1120,548,32,1027,958,30,1029,3],"class_list":["post-2752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-tedrubin","tag-brand-ownership","tag-change","tag-consumer-influence","tag-innovation","tag-marketing","tag-online-communities","tag-shespeaks","tag-social-media","tag-social-media-marketing","tag-ted-rubin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2752"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2755,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2752\/revisions\/2755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}