Will This "Mediarite" Cause a Brand Extinction?
Belk on Brand Amplifire™ and Second-Generation Brand Asset Management
It’s not necessarily the strongest or the smartest that survive. It’s the most adaptable—and in the past five years, the marketing, selling, and brand-building world has undergone cataclysmic change. How marketers respond to this media meteorite will determine if they, like the primitive mammals of 67 million years ago, will emerge to rule.
Google™, the rise of social media, exponentially expanding networks, and vast numbers of people creating communications for the first time represent the 10km mediarite that parted the waters of the Gulf of Media. User-generated content leading to millions of downloads through myriad channels puts everyone, from boardroom to showroom to garage, on a close-to-equal footing in the attention-getting bazaar. Here’s the issue: In the corporate world, thousands of DIYers creating marketing communications and sales messages can fracture a brand or accelerate it.
Now, marketers need to harness the talents of everyone in the organization to make their brand relevant, responsive, consistent, competitive, and ubiquitous. This requires systems that put brand strategies, communications guidelines, assets, and tools in the hands of everyone who is creating communications.
Back in the pre-impact days (say, five years ago), brand asset management required the laborious upkeep of a central server with restricted access. Arcane terminology and incompatible file formats further complicated things. The centralized aspect of the main box also restricted access, hindered the addition of new assets, real-time responsiveness, flexibility, and cultural sensitivity for brands increasingly going global. Organizations were slow-footed, counting on size and strength for protection.
And that’s when T-Rex looked up for the last time.
Google’s impact has forever changed the course of branding evolution.
Next-generation brand asset management is leading the evolutionary, even revolutionary, charge. Siegel+Gale’s proprietary Brand Amplifire™ brand asset management system is a huge breakthrough in brand consistency. Perhaps its greatest strength is its intuitive accessibility for users of every experience level. With search functionality powered by Google, it is as easy to use as Google.
Amplifire’s Google-inspired “One Box” search aid is so user-friendly that even the most tentative or generically phrased query yields fast results across an instructive spectrum of possible “right answers.” One Box exploits this “teachable moment” to show the teammate the context for the item requested. Gone are the confusing names and dot-suffixes for files, templates, and tools as well as the long-standing issues of file and system incompatibility.
While helping your people understand your brand, Amplifire itself is learning about you. This means that as it’s aggregating information and making you smarter as an organization, Amplifire is also learning about the frequency of certain brand asset needs along with the “local idiom” of your culture. Like Google, it learns to deliver the results that are most often used, first. Equally helpful, Amplifire makes all your branding assets available anywhere your people need them. It’s a new day of control, quality, and unparalleled access for your marketing team and myriad other communicators, no matter how far-flung.
Much more than a database of all your branding elements, Amplifire is also a powerful, dedicated search tool to help anyone communicating on your behalf find the branding elements they need while learning about your brand strategies. White papers, press releases, newspaper reports, opinion pieces, team photos, biographies…all go into the Amplifire system. Amplifire allows everyone in the organization to add to the database. The expanding base of knowledge is just one of the ways Amplifire makes your entire organization smarter.
And, while Amplifire’s adapting to you and your organization, your organization can adapt to Amplifire. Your marketing team can ensure that only the latest, approved elements come up as recommendations.
Above all, second-generation brand asset management is really about brand management widening the circle to incorporate the talents of people who can meaningfully contribute to advancing the brand. Your people can bring their range of talents to bear on exploiting the latest marketing opportunity, rather than merely surviving it, when they are given correctly aligned branding tools in a timely manner.
Second-generation brand asset management represents great potential. And with Amplifire, Siegel+Gale is already accomplishing great things for our clients around the world.
Too bad about those brontosaurs. Make a lot of burgers, though.