Why should we ever engage ourselves in brands ?

On May 12th, 2009 Henriette Weber wrote:

Im just back from next09 in Hamburg and Disruptive Media in Stockholm (you can find my talk here). It has been a hectic but really learningful week, filled with great people, great talks and new insights. This morning I watched one of my favorite speeches in a long time again: Brian Solis on "putting the public back in PR" - the reason I guess I find this talk at the top of my conference experience is because Brian is so right in my opinion.  It leaves me to touch on something that I mentioned in my own talk at disruptive media - why should we ever engage ourself in a brand ? I mean:

1. a brand is not a person
2. brands are normally really boring
3. they normally don't do anything in this world if they can't measure it or can't make money on it.

aka. they're not human.

So why should we engage ourselves in brands ? Well first of all because of the utility and convinience they provide. but I think that Umair Haque (or Jeff Jarvis ? don't remember) said it very well at next09. "the only reason we engage ourselves in brands is because they make us better". The experience of the brand is  giving us some sort of value that we didn't have before. The experience of the brand get's us closer to our own personal truth (whatever that is)...

The great thing is that with social tools - it is so much more fun to create this involvement in the brandexperience - it's not really easier, it still has to be a brilliant creative mind that comes up with the call-to-action for the involvement. The hardest thing is to find that magic something in your brand that people loves - and it might not be the thing you think it is - what are people  saying about you - and where?

Now the thing that people are already saying - might be what you need to start out with =) - now go ahead and engage some people

[branding, disruptive media, human, return on involvement, social, user experience, value, social marketing] [651 comments]