The Future of Branding is Nonfiction

Author and futurist Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview with Fast Company, argues that brands needs to strip away the carefully crafted stories and mythologies and simply tell the truth. The value of the brand, Rushkoff argues, is engaging consumers in an open and frank way. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“[But] it’s not about creating a mythology around the way a product was created, so it’s no longer “these were cookies made by elves in a hollow tree.” That’s not the value of the brand. The value of the brand is where did this actually come from? What’s in this cookie? Who made it? Are Malaysian children losing their fingers in the cookie press or is this being made by happy cookie culture people?...

“Every company has a social media strategy whether they know it or not. You can have your dedicated social media person chasing down consumer complaints, but your real social media strategy is how are the people who work at your company and the people who buy from your company and people who supply to your company, how are they talking about you in social media? The way to make them talk about you [favorably] is by walking the walk of the thing that you do. And that’s so hard for so many of these companies because they’ve become so abstracted. They’ve become so distanced from the core competence of their industry.”

In reply to a question about what marketing companies will look like in the future, Rushkoff spoke of a shift from creative communication to more PR-type communication.

“It will be companies that figure out how to communicate the non-fiction story of a company, so it’s going to look a lot more like a communications company than a creative branding agency. It’s going to look a little bit more like PR, in some sense. It’s going to be people who go and figure out what does your company do and how do we let the world know about that?”

Comments

[Dumitru]

Very true. Just have a look in the beginning of PR. I think the methods of E. Bernays are still alive. I'm for the real brand's value not for the stories.