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Future of brands

February 2001

Cyberspace will include many personal areas. In shopping, our agents could dynamically configure our own spaces to our personal taste. Products from one supplier may be shown next to competing products. Making a choice will be a much more informed activity, with the agent doing the shopping around and negotiation to ensure that we have the best possible deals right in front of our eyes. Traditional shops will have very little say in what we see. Our personal cyberspace can have Heinz, Sainsbury, M&S and Tesco beans all side by side, as well as the Yahoo deal of the week. The architecture of our personal cyberspace is personal, so are the tools and techniques, the presentation, styles, fonts and images. Trademarks and logos may be just stripped off, with pictures of the actual goods instead displayed in a personalised setting by our favourite graphics agent. Even the physical goods illustrated are probably personalised in the low cost mass customisation culture of tomorrow.

How will shops protect their brand images in such a world? Doubtless, some big brands will have the size needed to guarantee that people will want them in their personal worlds even without the choice to customise their image. Their trademarks will survive longest. Others will have to quickly fall in line or see their market share disappear as people just ignore them and use other shops which allow customers to decide. New ways of establishing brands will come into existence in the struggle for survival, and the simple logo or trademark might be reduced in importance.

Of course, for shopping and similar activities, much or even most of the work will be done by agents. These will wander round, looking for the best deals, negotiating and sorting out shortlists, before bringing back the appropriate details to be visualised and presented to the user in his personal world. Agents themselves are not particularly impressed by brands unless specifically told to prefer some brands to others by the user. The agent might know to prefer Sony to Panasonic even if the other terms are the same, but would care nothing about their trademarks or site styles. Sites that offer agent friendliness, information and negotiation happily will be at least considered in a search. Others that insist that people personally visit their sites and look at their produce in a controlled setting will see their revenue fall sharply.

In this agent-dominated world, brands will be quickly disassociated with visual trademarks, since people will rarely see them. How does an agent search for the Nike swoosh or for music by the artist formally known as…? The abstract qualities of a brand (reliability, quality, associated lifestyle etc) will survive. If the brand is perceived by users to be sufficiently better than its competitors in some way, or if people are still exposed via other media to advertising about the brand, it will still have a place in the network market. That is, so long as people care enough to assign a value to it or tell their agents to prefer it.

However, it is not all bad news for brands per se. As agents search the convenient universe for suitable products in the right price range etc, people will be faced with more choice, as competing products are increasingly forced to offer exactly the same deals. Bewildering choice has been the source of brand expansion in today’s world, and we will see many people making final decisions based on trust of particular brands just the same as today. Nevertheless, it will initially be a more dynamic marketplace with brands rising and falling on the basis of trusted recommendation spreading quickly across the net. What might be seen as best and sell like hot cakes today, might be found lacking by a trusted reviewer tomorrow and another brand will take the lead. Agents might well be instructed to check reviews automatically as part of a search. As this method of shopping becomes established, this checking of reviewers will eventually kill off many or most traditional brands and establish a totally new branding methodology in their place. The role of guarantor will emerge strongly.

Instead of relying on BT or Sony, or any other existing brand, what will happen is that the reviewers will become increasingly important, and they will be the new brands, essentially guarantors of quality. An example will illustrate what will happen. Sainsbury home brand products are made by a wide variety of manufacturers, but carry the Sainsbury label as a guarantee of reasonable quality at less than top of the market price. People trust the label and buy many of their own brand products in preference to well-established traditional brands. Although Sainsbury and Tesco would probably never agree to try the experiment, each of their own brands would probably sell quite well in the other’s stores.

In cyberspace, exactly this will happen. Traditional brands will suffer in the face of classifications by trusted review companies. People will decide how far up market they want to buy, or they will seek out products to fit a particular lifestyle, and there will be companies which define which products fit those categories of quality, price, lifestyle or whatever. These review companies will be the AA Hotel Guides and Which Magazines of the internet, but will have much greater significance. They will be the new brands, horizontal across a wide range of products, totally independent of either shops or manufacturers. Which has now finally jumped onto the net and it will be interesting to see whether they adapt to the new environment or whether a more net-literate company captures their place.

This branding will not just apply to industrial age products, but to information too. Sites will guarantee the quality of the information available from their links, and these might be the Yahoos of the future. More probably, Yahoo and the other directories and search engines will start doing this themselves. It was suggested years ago that BT should be such a guarantor, capitalising on our customers’ trust. We could of course still do this and also extend it to provide classifications on our shopping services, instead of the primitive shopping malls with traditional shops. The first boats have left, but there is still time to buy a ticket.