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A brand exists for a number of reasons, but perhaps the most important of these is to develop a psychological relationship between a person and a product. Every brand does this. From the beginning of branding straight up to the not-too-distant past, the way that brands worked was to build consumer confidence through repetition: by providing stylistic consistency, brands reassured customers that the products under their umbrella were similarly consistent in quality (and therefore trustworthy), and thus eventually became symbols for contracts regularly fulfilled. By employing advertising to regularly alert potential customers to the various products and services a brand represented, brands became part of the wallpaper of American life in the form of billboards and television and magazine advertisements. It was a pretty good strategy for quite a long time, but then along came the Internet.

"A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it…" — Andy Warhol

The problem with the Internet for this branding model is that there’s no particularly good way to enforce visual standardization on potential customers. Search engines, of course, are their own brands, with their own visual guidelines, a context in which old-fashioned brands are at somewhat of a loss for how to psychologically insinuate themselves into potential customers’ headspace. The early attempts to brand on the web uniformly involved the old-world strategy of building a website that was visually standardized and relying on Search Engine Optimization to drive customers to the site. Of course, immediately, brands realized that there was just no reason for customers to want to stay at their sites for any length of time (and thus remain immersed in the branded experience), so they responded by attempting to become sorts of community portals. They provided games, videos, and chat services, all in the name of compelling customers to stay inside their zone of visual control. However, just by looking at the development of that strategic chain, we can clearly see from its inelegance that this (portal/SEO) paradigm is all nothing more than a stop-gap, a first tentative step while we figure out how branding should work on the Internet.

Coca Cola’s Online Volleyball Game: Is this starting to feel like a stretch to you?

As social media has emerged, people have started to note that it dramatically changes the landscape of possibility for the branding enterprise. However, in order to understand the depth of this revolution, we have to overcome a branding prejudice that the last fifty years of practice (or more) have rather deeply engrained in all of our heads. Here’s what it is: Somewhere along the line, the means (visual standardization) got confused with the end (attracting new customers by building a trust relationship). So, when people reject social media as a branding tool, it is because they’re habituated to thinking about branding as if it was simply visual control.

But, of course, visual control is and always was a means to generate interest in products. Facebook (e.g.) is another means to generate interest in products. Instead of relying on the stickiness sort of visual jingle, a brand can now become sticky by virtue of the fact that it’s closely tied to desirable social aspects of potential consumers’ Internet use. Social networking replaces the psychological trick of visual control with a much more direct and persistent association of a brand with a trusted source (a Facebook friend). This is a radically different way to understand branding, but one that’s significantly better adapted to the particular character of the Internet medium.