The Good Brand

5. Increasingly complex brands will require new organizational structures.

In most organizations, corporate brand management is the purview of the chief marketing officer. That's a dangerously narrow view of a brand's universe, says Bob Lurie, CEO of M2C, the marketing strategy division of Monitor Group. "Companies get a license to operate from society," he says. "If you think about your brand as something that [only] your customers care about, you'll get whacked upside the head." Today's brands operate in a global environment and touch many constituencies, lots of whom will never buy the product. They may range from environmental groups and regulatory agencies to unions, activists, and the media.

"Constituents are much more aggressive than in the past," Lurie says. "More people are policing social goods, and technology enables them to share information quickly and easily." While the Sierra Club and a local union may not usually have much in common, they now have the ability to snap into tight focus and connection the instant they discover shared goals. The problem, Lurie says, is that the task of managing these various groups tends to be spread throughout the organization: The legal department has one piece, the government-affairs folks another, and the marketing department yet another. That unintegrated approach can be dangerous when trouble happens. Instead, Lurie suggests, companies should decide who gets responsibility for the brand's reputation by determining which function is most important. In some industries, such as oil and gas, it may be the government-affairs department. In packaged goods, it might be marketing. The company should then map its relevant constituencies as a social network, figuring out whose interests are likely to be aligned with whose and then reach out to them. It's a big job, says Lurie, but it's an investment that will more than pay for itself in a crisis. "The more you're out in front, the less likely it is that they'll torch you when something goes wrong," he says.

6. Brands will create social and cultural values.

In 2000, Naomi Klein, antiglobalism activist and author of No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Picador), predicted that consumers would rise up against corporations whose brands had infiltrated their homes, their schools, and their public spaces. Whoops. While antibrand activism has waned since the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, people's affection for brands seems to have grown. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, recently launched a site called Lovemarks.com, where people can write mash notes about their favorite brands. At last count, there were more than 1,800 postings, expressing admiration for everything from OshKosh overalls to Zeiss camera lenses.

That kind of passion has prompted a shift from brands as mere product identifiers to brands as personal identifiers -- a development that threatens to confound the notion of a corporation as a brand's sole proprietor. "Companies have treated their brands as intellectual property that needs to be controlled, managed, and leveraged, not cultural property to be shared, remixed, and reconstrued," says design strategist Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+ Partners, a New York trend-analysis and foresight firm. Zolli notes that brands increasingly make a cultural and political statement about their adherents. In Karachi, the act of drinking a Coke instead of Mecca-Cola is now an ideological gesture. So, too, are consumers making statements about themselves when they choose to shop at Whole Foods versus Safeway, drive a Toyota Prius instead of a Ford Expedition, or purchase an Apple computer instead of a PC.

Smart companies are reaching out to their customers, encouraging participation in their brands -- allowing fan sites and Meetup groups -- even if that means letting go of the strings of control a bit. Lucasfilm, for example, didn't call in the lawyers when fans began creating their own Star Wars videos. Indeed, it posted sounds (like Darth Vader breathing) and other digital material on its Web site for fans to play with. "People are going to do things with brands because of these personal identity issues that brand managers need to tolerate and not try to shut down," Zolli says.