Surfarama

A very interesting post over at Bubblegeneration discussing the challenge of the burgeoning 'edgeconomies' and the impact on brand marketing. I guess a simpler way to discribe this is to think about the fragmentation of pretty much any market your care to talk about...the flattening of the world, the near limitless choice for just about everything, and personal portability are all creating a thousand niches, or edge economies.

Marketers are at the cusp of strategic reinvention.

That means they can either rise to the challenges of - and seize the opportunities of - the edgeconomy. Or they can get commoditized by those challenges.

Here's a mini case study of how to actively get commoditized: M&C Saatchi's One Word Equity. The big idea is to reduce a brand to a single word - to "own" a word, globally, permanently, always and everywhere.

There are a few drivers of this. The first is globalization, and the opportunity to market globally, reaping enormous efficiency gains. The second, and more important, is search. Single words, to put it bluntly, are tailor made for search-focused marketing.

[read the rest at Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab]

For me the interesting part is how this all intersects with search. I’ve mentioned before that search is not really about brand, and this is another way of thinking about the same idea…

More simply: as consumer hyperfragment, and market power continues to shift to them, guess who already "owns" words - which are really just shared representations of value?

You guessed it - markets, networks, and communities, and the prosumers that make them.

For example, it doesn't matter how much the RIAA pays to own the words "fair use" - because markets, networks, and communities are too busy living - and redefining - it.

Exactly! When it comes to search the really important thing is to be plugged into what and how your customers think and talk about your products and the way they use them. Trying to ‘own’ a single word for your brand, however relevant or popular it might be, is a really narrow way to think about the way your product is positioned in the mind of consumers, and in the search engine results pages.