WARC notes that “Procter & Gamble, the FMCG giant, is combining consumer insights and its global reach to pursue ‘purpose-driven branding’ around the world.”

After reading Rachel Botsman’s book regarding collaborative consumption, I wrote this back in November 2010:

“And, when it comes to external change, the world Botsman paints suggests some extreme levels of change in product innovation (crowdsourced), branding (from status to purpose and me to we), product usage (shared) and product lifecycle (longer). It’s no exageration to say that the future she paints would turn marketing and marketing research upside down.

If she’s right, brands will become much more about shared purpose and passion. And, they will be built or destroyed by a corporation’s reputation. But, this reputation element will no longer be ethereal. As I’ve noted before and as Botsman states in her book, by the end of the decade we are likely to have a kind of online reputational currency for both people and corporations (she calls these “reputation bank accounts”).”

I now think it is clearer than ever that brands as we know them will evolve much more toward a shared purpose model, for several reasons:

1. Social media and crowdsourcing will, over time, habituate consumers to thinking more about “we” rather than “me” when it comes to brands and products.

2. As the top-down, broadcast-driven brand model collapses marketers and consumers will join together more closely to jointly define brands and products.

3. Marketing in the developing world will take on a greater development focus by attaching a brand’s purpose to the social aspirations of the target country. In this instance, I think education-literacy, clean water, and equal rights for women are strong candidates for purpose connection.

And, ultimately, it wouldn’t suprise me if brand migrates entirely to purpose and reputation.

These are:

Asking Epoch
Observational Epoch
Co-Creative Epoch
Anticipatory Epoch

At present, MR is trying to move out of the Asking Epoch and into the Observational Epoch.

But, its the co-creative evolutionary stage I want to focus on today.

Recently a number of “crowdsourcing” firms have created an industry group – Crowdsortium.

I actually believe that this is a fairly big deal.

The creation of a trade group, sharing of best practices, and development of shared language are all signs of a maturing industry.

Although crowdsourcing threatens the traditional market research paradigm, I view this kind of collaboration as (a) inevitable as society uses technological platforms to create more inclusive systems, (b) desirable within a Western framework of individual liberty and self-expression, and (c) incredibly threatening to large hierarchical systems. As a pro-market libertarian it is difficult to be a neutral observer of this phenomenon. I have a very clear bias in favor of distributed, evolutionary systems, agreeing with Virginia Postrel on what drives the future.

What is interesting about Crowdsortium and the idea behind it is what a game changer it can be beyond market research.

As Kevin Lonnie points out, there are very significant challenges to crowdsourcing within large organizations. Big organizations want stasis, not mass change. This is one of the reasons that they quit evolving and are replaced by stronger competitors.

Still, I remain optimistic. Market research can harness crowdsourcing and help provide better products and services as a result. Businesses can adapt to a much more open-ended relationship with the customer. After all, weren’t we all taught in High School economics that “the customer is king?”

Quarterly brand trackers are commonplace and a key (dependable) source of revenue for the larger MR suppliers.

Annual corporate reputation studies are also fielded for most large corporations and are focused on a much wider array of universes than the brand tracker.

Different metrics and different audiences separate these two research programs. For now.

But, what happens when the following trends collide?

1. Frictionless data acquisition on any company or product.
2. Complete transparency driven by niche blogging, employee websites, wikileaks, etc.
3. Aggregated corporate reputation rating schemes. Think eBay seller ratings and ratemyprofessors.com

If and when this happens we can anticipate the merger of brand and corporate reputation with the possibility that corporate reputation swallows up brand research.

Why?

Because the amount of chatter and user generated content created externally about the corporation and its products, mission and behavior will be much, much larger than the mindshare purchased via advertising.

I have recently read two books that address this issue in passing. Consider the thinking of these authors:

Richard Watson, Future Files:
“By the year 2020 people, products and organizations will have reliability ratings. These will grade honesty, integrity and transparency and will be created by and available to everyone…Reputations will therefore be actively managed and, in some cases, even traded or stolen.” (page 34)

Rachel Botsman, What’s Mine is Yours:
“People will have ‘reputation bank accounts’ alongside their normal banks accounts, and a reputation rating will literally measure contributions made to various collaborative communities.” (page 224)

If you follow this thinking to its conclusion, then reputation management will likely eclipse brand management within the decade. This will be a bigger, more holistic job, than brand management, because it will interface with HR, operations, marketing, etc.

On one hand, this could be very good for market research. It could give MR a much stronger seat at the table.

On the other, all the needed tracking data could be open and available to all. This would mean that MR would need to aggregate and track the data, as opposed to collecting it.

Insights functions should strongly consider the implications of this shift.

As one might expect, the speech was heavily future and trends focused. So much of what he discussed (especially America’s hyperfocus on the future and “future tense”) was reminiscent of David Brooks’ book “On Paradise Drive.”

Although the audience was treated to a number of wonderfully funny nuggets, like “social notworking” (time wasted at work refreshing our social media presence), Tchong outlined several useful “ubertrends”:

1. Our digital lifestyle (merger of humans with their technology)
2. Time compression
3. Technology-created control freaks (eg expecting immediate responses to email)

From this presentation, there were several interesting learnings.

The first is that this emerging peer to peer world where information is abundant will create a highly transparent society and market. Bad customer service will haunt companies much more in the future.

The second is that while these are ubertrends, there are always countertrends in reaction. For example, there is significant time compression today, but profitable opportunities in slower experiences, products and services (eg yoga).

The next is augmented reality. One early example of this phenomenon is layar. Now imagine this technology enhancing our context of more than just physical locations. Imagine this technology giving us additional context about people, the salesperson on the shop floor, a product in our hands (using RFID) etc. This will take transparency to the next level.

Finally, a great question to ask in the course of this discussion of the future and change is what doesn’t change. For example, rituals are culture conservers. How can marketers embed their product within timeless (or emerging rituals)? How can marketers create new rituals that resist change and support their product? Sometimes we can lose sight of things that don’t change when we focus on trends too closely.

It was all strategic foresight.

Tom, with his focus on the trends driving our futures, represents one aspect of where I believe market research is headed.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to talk with Tom before his presentation and as luck would have it he is heavily involved in strategic foresight and the Institute for the Future.

One discipline or methodology that Tom utilizes is tracking macroforces by meta analysis of books. Some of the more interesting trends he sees from the meta analysis are a reappraisal of capitalism along ecological and social justice lines, the rise of creativity as a key force (see Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind”), and a better understanding of the consumer (via behavioral economics and positive psychology).

One of Tom’s more provocative questions was what business rules are or will replace Michael Porter’s famed five forces. I think we’re already seeing an opposing paradigm emerge along mesh business lines utilizing ad hoc collaboration, open networks, shared purpose and community engagement based on transparent reputation. On this last point Tom presented what Coca-Cola is doing with community and environmental groups to reduce waste (energy and water) and shrink environmental footprint while increasing profits.

Tom closed with something many of us have been mulling for a while now.

What will a brand be in the future?

My contention is that brands will change dramatically from “me” to “we”, from status to purpose, and from consumption to particpation. Tom argues along the same lines – that the emergent brand is based on “societal construction.” It’s the “should brand.”

“Our newest search initiative surrounds Sency for Cities. This real time location search feature allows you to discover what people are saying and where people are going inside of 13 major US cities and London.”

Having just played around on the site, I would have to say that it is fascinating, but has a ways to go.

However, there are some interesting social and research implications.

Socially, this kind of tool gets us one step closer to smart swarms or smart mobs. For example, I can see this being very helpful in an election where many groups are working to get out the vote at the same time and in the same place. On a less serious note, this tool could be very helpful for partygoers on a Saturday night. Forget the planning, just drive with your friends to the place with the most buzz. But, on a disturbing note, this kind of tool could, theoretically be used by authoritarian regimes for crowd control and surveillance.

For researchers this could be an exceptional ethnographic tool. First, it could allow the researcher to follow what individuals in a particular city are saying about a particular product or topic. The use here within a test market could be very helpful. Additionally, as this tool advances, ethnographers could simply go to the locations where people are discussing their topic (digitally) and interview them on the street, in a bar, etc. This could be a boon to trendspotting practices.

So, for example, Rubinson writes that:

“The ‘mental marketplace’ changes the rules of competition; your brand must vie for attention against functionally unrelated brands including celebrities and games like Farmville. For example, Whole Foods vies in the mental marketplace of “wellness” with Dannon, Kashi, Subway even WebMD.”

I am not aware of really good work in this area (it may already exist), but I can anticipate a service that tracks monthly mindshare in these mental marketplaces. This could be done by aggregating several thousand individuals in a representative online panel and asking them to enter their free associations with brands and companies (and possibly individuals and institutions) in a certain set of market spaces. The data could be coded and quantified and mapped using text analytics to show the strongest connections of one player to another.

For example, panelists could be asked to consider what companies, brands, personalities and institutions they associate with “health”, or “style” or “tropical vacations.”

This turns brand tracking on its head as research participants wouldn’t be rating brands, but they would be telling us what brands (“brands” in a wider sense) are filling specific “mental marketplaces” and how much that “brand” is filling this space.

This could be a boon for the creation of unlikely marketing partnerships among business that are related only by their location in the same mindshare space.

Taking Rubinson’s thinking a step further, a tool that reveals the players in a “mental marketplace” could lead to radically new joint marketing efforts and a dynamic feedback loop that only intensifies the non-hierarchical, “two way world” that Rubinson describes.

MROC Variant 1 is what we think of as a traditional MROC built exclusively (usually by Communispace, Passenger, etc.) for a client with the members coming exclusively from the client’s current customer base (raving fans typically).

MROC Variant 2 is (will be) MROCs built around particular affinity groups and consumer types and accessed like an omnibus product by many different marketers. In this case the MROC or panel company will “rent” access to the group to many buyers.

MROC Variant 3 is (will be) like lockerz or expotv .

It will be a much larger type of MROC which we might label as something else entirely – possibly a OECLS (Open Ended Customer Listening Service) or a “megapanel.”

Several things will distinguish variant 3:

1. Size. These online communities could be huge.
2. Ownership. They may not be owned by traditional MR players.
3. Multiple Interests. They are likely to include members with many different interests.
4. Fun. They will be more fun than a traditional MROC and will force Variant 1 to build in games and other attractions.

Where does Variant 3 end up? One possible future is a global “cool” community operating by member invitation only that enables trendspotters to identify the most bleeding edge trends in fashion, entertainment and consumption in real time. Members would post videos of their newest purchases and offer dreamscapes on what they want to do with friends or family in the summer. Who knows, they might even discover the catchy tunes of LatinoArabia music.

But, it is usually done by a small team or gifted seer with a “finger on the pulse” (like Cayce Pollard in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition), but one company is turning that paradigm on its head by apparently creating a large trendspotting network.

For more on this, click here.

Its the distributed “cool hunter” phyle.