After Image

Mind Altering Marketing

By John Grant

After Image refers to what comes after the brand imagery of traditional marketing. Brand imagery relates to mass communications, advertising through television and is increasingly less appropriate for today's marketing environment, let alone tomorrow's. John Grant has moved on some way from the ideas and hypotheses in his first book The New Marketing Manifesto and looks at the key elements impacting on brands today from different perspectives. He then shows how these trends, forces, whatever you call them, can be harnessed to achieve effective brand and communications development. 

This is not the first business book to say there is a marketing revolution underway. However, John Grant recognises this underlying change as coming from many directions. New and fast-evolving communications channels are one area but one of many. All of these forces for change are impacting on brands, exposing traditional brands rooted in the past and providing substantial opportunities for new brands that are focused on the current and future environment. 

These new forces for change can be distilled from clearly visible consumer behaviour signals as well as social research and neuroscience. The consequence is that an on-message brand will be able to tap directly into consumer needs and requirements instead of projecting just how the marketer wants the brand to be viewed by the consumer. This does reflect that it is the consumer that owns the brand.

At the heart of the new marketing is the consumer pursuit of knowledge, not necessarily in the form of formal learning but through the provision of opportunities to employ the brain. This is at its most evident through the success of television programmes such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire. However, the recent fall in viewers for this show proves the point further. Knowledge is a short term commodity and the knowledge provider has to evolve faster than the consumer's desire to learn. The outtake from this is that a brand has to enable consumers to learn by playing to their desire for knowledge. This is not merely beyond brand image but it goes beyond information!

This leads to a whole new model of branding. Brands are no longer a set of image attributes applied to your product to differentiate it from the competition but an experience and statement that defines the product and its role in consumers' lives.

The role of communications comes under intense scrutiny in the book. New brands use newer and evolving communications channels. The way in which they use communications indeed form part of the brand offer. Furthermore, they are often the channel that helps the consumer integrate with the brand. Media means offering an experience and that is a core brand element. The newer media channels enable the immersion in the brand that is required. Traditional mass communications media do not offer brands, and more importantly consumers, this option. They tend to be one way only and so are unsuited to the new brand environment. This has massive implications for traditional marketers and their traditional agencies. Reality media, as John Grant notes, are the media that sharpen the brand's perception in the consumer's mind. The media helps to add genuine meaning to the brand. They could be about enabling ongoing dialogue, placing the consumer at the centre of a brand community, providing empathy through brand stories or even reinforcing corporate reputation in the post-No Logo world.

Throughout the book John Grant makes extensive and essential reference to examples of how this is working in practice. He also applies to the thinking to a hypothetical brand, the launch of a financial services company called Mother. The final section of the book takes the practical application further by analysing the future mobile platform. 3G mobile services are the ideal test-bed for new marketing thinking as they have the potential to start with a blank sheet and build the offer from a consumer perspective. One of the reasons for the lack of take-off of WAP services could be the fact that they were developed from a traditional marketing perspective but used evolving and early new marketing channels. 3G, if it works, has the potential to start fresh with new thinking. John Grant provides some useful thoughts on these developments.

Review by Martin Payne