Today, I watched a funny and thought stirring talk by an old ad man Rory Sutherland. His point of view on the power of advertising to change perception might have made me sick if not for its wit and persuasiveness. Check it out
It would seem to me that the consumer usage of the web makes Rory Sutherland’s belief about changing perception very viable and sustainable. It is more viable, because in many cases the brand is the website experience, so changing the perception of the website can quickly change the brand experience. When the website is the product itself, changing the perception of it may not require the amount of time and money that it once did offline. I imagine how much easier it would be for the king to convince Prussians to trade in their gold jewelry for cast iron, if he had a website to promote the idea and finalize the transaction in a quick and pleasurable way. This is also the case when creating a perception that a task takes less time than it actually does (such as the train trip example Sutherland provides). This sounds a lot like the effort to make “the trip” in ecommerce from navigating a website through choosing a product to buying it. Certainly organizations can make that web experience more pleasurable and usable and therefore perceived as shorter. This is a viable effort in changing perception to create value that many online stores have been engaged in for years. It is sustainable, because new ways for customers to interact with a brand online make it increasingly more possible to guide and react to a dialogue about a brand. Social networking tools make it possible to find out what customers want and give it to them and then find out how that went. It allows for constant optimization of the brand experience, so long as the organization is committed to listening and guiding the conversation and thus the perception of value. This also requires cleverness, as organizations must find ways to encourage the everyday trivial interactions with the brand and the online conversation about it. Using tools that encourage “share with a friend” type interactions, can lead to the establishment of just the type of badge value situations that Sutherland speaks of. Amazon strikes me as a good example of the long-term sustainability of the belief in perception creating the value. Amazon hasn’t changed its brand soul much over the years, but it has outlived many of its would be competitors. This is partly because they recognized the value of the conversation. They embraced the customer review and user generated content in ecommerce and committed to it. Now, the Amazon brand is perceived as a trusted experience, partly because so much of their content and point of sale content is user generated. The perception is that Amazon is a network of people who express their honest experiences with products. They also reinforce this idea by allowing third party “mom and pops” to sell on their website. Many CEO’s would have shied away from this as it could “hurt the brand,” but Amazon saw it as integral to their brand essence. So although Amazon’s prices and product offering may not be unique, they are perceived as having better value because of their commitment to this perception.
