The New Mindshare:
Rise of the Customer-Created Brand

The classic definition of Mindshare refers to the favorable awareness of a company’s product or service achieved through advertising and promotion. When people recall examples of a type of product or service, they think of a limited number of brands. Any brand on the list can be considered to have mindshare. For example, a person contemplating the purchase of a new car has several hundred models from which to choose. However, those seriously considered will likely be limited to – at most – six or eight. Of these, those with which one is most familiar can be said to enjoy the greatest mindshare.

The term “Mindshare” first gained traction when mass-market advertising ruled and market share was the Holy Grail. Awareness, deftly shaped by the wizards of Madison Avenue, was the magic elixir that marketers believed would convert a growing army of consumers into compliant, eager buyers. And they were right. Brands from Pepsodent toothpaste to Avis Rent-A-Car; Alka Seltzer tablets to Remington shavers, rocketed to prominence on the strength of the ubiquitous 60-second television spot and its mass-media cousins.

The world has moved on. 60-second TV spots have given way to thirties and fifteens. And traditional mass-market strategies, while still an important part of many marketing campaigns, are fast ceding ground to approaches better aligned with the new branding realities. Today, mindshare must be understood in terms of a fundamentally altered branding equation – one driven by an explosion of choice, new information-rich communications channels and radically empowered customers.

In this new context, mindshare is a holistic phenomenon, arising from the totality of direct and indirect experiences a customer, employee or investor has with the brand. In a very real sense, mindshare is the brand.

The point is this: Companies can plan the party and send the invitations. But at the end of the day, brand stakeholders, not companies, build brands. Similarly, mindshare isn’t simply the product of great advertising or clever promotion, but of a far broader and more complex process – one negotiated and controlled largely by the brand stakeholder.

Brands, therefore, exist in the mind of each stakeholder and reflect an accumulation of brand messaging to which the person has been exposed arbitrated by the actual brand experiences that he or she has had. The combined strength of these positive brand associations, relative to that of other brands in the same category, can be understood as mindshare.

Mindshare and Memory
Mindshare is about learning – committing new information to memory. So knowing a bit about how memory and learning work can prove helpful to those looking to earn space in the customer’s consciousness.

Psychologists and educators tell us that we learn something new only by relating it to past experience. This need to connect the new to the old is what educational researcher Daniel Hull calls contextual learning. We simply cannot, Hull asserts, absorb information without context, the mental short cut that allows us to assign meaning to the new or unfamiliar.(1)

This concept is at the root of brand affinity – the idea that brands gain power through alignment with the pre-existing experiences, beliefs and values of brand stakeholders. Or, put another way, brands draw those with a pre-existing emotional stake in the core brand promise.

Contextual learning is also why slice-of-life advertising has always scored high in memorability and sales. As marketing strategist Jack Trout notes in his book The New Positioning, slice-of-life ads work because they supply the past experience (context) that enables a person to more quickly and easily connect with new information.(2)

Learning Models
Psychologists and educators describe two ways of learning, cognitive (passive) and experiential (active). Cognitive processes are associated with learning by thinking. In contrast, experiential learning is learning by doing. People learn best through concrete experience – non-abstract learning-by-doing activity in which outcomes can be readily evaluated and quickly integrated with past experience.

The work of educational theorist David Kolb and others makes it clear that concrete experience is a primary driver of learning and behavior change.(3) Participatory experiences demand a response – we’re driven to repeat, avoid or alter them. No matter which option we choose, further action is required.

Again, the implications for building Mindshare, and turning it into sales, are apparent – Advertising and other brand outreach that depends primarily on cognitive learning is effective only to the degree that its promises resonate with past experiences and are consistent with downstream, learn-by-doing brand encounters.

Learning and Communication
All customer touchpoints can be arranged along a line anchored by pure cognitive learning at one end and pure experiential learning at the other. This exercise illuminates the fact that both learning models apply in various degrees to all touchpoints, and helps underscore the need for tactical diversity and integration. It can also be instructive in selecting, prioritizing, and aligning touchpoints, and in understanding what role various communication channels can be expected to play in developing brand mindshare. (Fig. 1)

Traditional print and broadcast advertising remains a viable part of the brand communications mix. In many cases, it is still the most cost-efficient way to reach a broad base of prospective buyers.

The tried-and-true 30-second TV spot, for instance, continues to be a dominant force for products with short, repetitive buying cycles (fast food, beer, cosmetics and similar consumables) as well as for heavily branded durables, particularly cars and light trucks. In business-to-business segments, trade print advertising, while spotty in recent years, has shown similar staying power.

However, it is far more difficult to establish mindshare solely through traditional advertising than in the past. Companies planning to do so would do well to rethink their strategies. The mass media are being slowly replaced by new communications channels better suited to reaching and addressing more narrowly drawn brand constituencies.

There are a number of factors at work here, including changing customer attitudes toward advertising, emergence of new communications channels, disruptive technologies (TiVO, pop-up blockers, et al.), and an unprecedented proliferation of brand choices.

The idea that Mindshare goes to those who can shout the loudest and longest, is dead. In its place is a more refined perspective that may well include traditional advertising, but only as part of a comprehensive multi-layer set of brand encounters enabled by the brand owner.

More Information, Less Communication
Information overload is an even starker reality today than when the phrase was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. And its effects on traditional advertising have been profound. A growing flood of product and service offerings is part of a relentless communications onslaught that makes it harder than ever to get and keep customers’ attention. The evidence is indisputable:

• More information has been produced in the last four decades than in all of previous recorded human history.
• Total available information doubles every three years.
• Well over 1000 books are published every day – and that’s just in English-  speaking countries.
• The worldwide web now contains about 475 terabytes of information, nearly 50 times that of all the books in the Library of Congress.
• The average American receives between 3,000 and 10,000 advertising impressions per day.

And how does all this line up with the capacity of the human brain? There’s little encouragement on this front. While there appears no practical limit to the amount of information the brain can store, scientists at Vanderbilt University have identified a number of information processing bottlenecks that severely limit what we can perceive and hold in our minds.

The brain, it turns out, is highly selective in what it takes in, processes and passes from short-term to long-term memory. Some research suggests that people retain a mere 20% of what they learned just a day earlier. No wonder new brands, or brands without established mindshare, often find the going so tough. If an ad isn’t acted on or otherwise reinforced within 24 hours, its original impact is all but lost.

Then there’s the little matter of customer attitudes toward advertising.

A 2004 Yankelovich Partners poll for the American Association of Advertising Agencies found that a majority of Americans are increasingly annoyed by the tidal wave of advertising to which they are exposed. Earlier studies show that negative attitudes toward advertising are rising and that consumers resent what they see as intrusive attempts by advertisers to gain their attention.

And B-to-B Marketers aren’t immune to this backlash. There’s no evidence whatever that this sense of overload and frustration suddenly evaporates when people take off their consumer hats and head to work as customers of business products and services.

Balancing this perspective is additional work by researchers such as Robert Ducoffe, who point out that consumers encounter the great majority of advertising messages when they are not shopping for the product or service being advertised. Thus, they view the bulk of advertising as irrelevant and bothersome. However, advertising that supports a pending or completed purchase is not necessarily tarred with the same brush.(4)

Advertising also has an image problem. A recent Gallup poll showed that consumers ranked advertising practitioners near the bottom on honesty and ethics, barely ahead of car salesman.

Not Dead Yet
So, is traditional advertising dead? Hardly. Consumers and B-to-B buyers alike say that they continue to rely on advertising as a primary source of product information. In a recent survey, nearly 20% of respondents cited television ads as an important influence in their decision to buy a new car. Evidence on the B-to-B side is equally strong: Trade print advertising continues to be cited as a major source of information for business products and services by decision makers across a wide range of industry segments.

The take-away from these seemingly conflicting trends? First, advertising in its traditional forms still has a place – sometimes a very important place – in the brand communications mix. Second, only the strong will survive. Advertising that cannot rise above the clutter will fail.

Of course, one can’t simply plan the menu, then wait for the guests to show up. In virtually all cases, some form of organized communication is a pre-requisite to gaining brand mindshare. Planning and effectively deploying the right communications tactics at the right time remains a high-value marketing task.

But what exactly constitutes the “right” tactics? The answer, of course, depends on numerous factors that can, and do, vary with each brand and each brand constituency.
Further, a given tactic is typically more effective and/or more cost-efficient at some stages of the buying cycle than others. (Fig. 2)

The first step is to recognize that traditional advertising cannot create a brand, but only introduce and reinforce it. New mindshare established at this level, with short-term memory acting as a gatekeeper, is provisional at best.

In fact, some would argue that you can’t successfully launch a new brand with advertising at all. Poor credibility, people’s tendencies to tune out extraneous messages, and customer migration away from traditional media are commonly cited reasons.

The New PR Paradigm
For some, public relations has become the new magic bullet. In their book, The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR, marketing strategists Al Reis and Laura Reis make a strong case for Public Relations as the lead marketing tool for those attuned to the new branding and communications realities.(5)

The authors argue that traditional advertising has lost its communications function and, by extension, it’s role in development of mindshare. The primary purpose of advertising, they assert, is to defend a brand once it has been built by public relations and related third-party tactics.

It’s tough to argue with success. Many of the world’s most powerful brands have been built with little or no advertising. Google, Starbucks, eBay and dozens of other category leaders have risen to prominence on the strength of the new public-relations paradigm.

Or have they? While there is solid evidence that positive third-party media coverage played a strong role in propelling these and other brands into the public consciousness, it’s not time to transfer all your eggs into the PR basket just yet.

Take Pets.com, the ill-fated dot com start-up that set out to revolutionize the way people bought pet food. The venture capitalists ponied up $50 million. The technology gurus built a killer website. And the marketing team breathed life into the Pets.com sock puppet – a hit with consumers and an instant classic in advertising circles.

So what went wrong? Some would argue that this was a prime example of the growing inability of mass media advertising to connect in a meaningful way with its target audience.

It seemed that TV viewers, while entertained, could not be moved by the self-serving messages of an unknown brand. Yet Pets.com and its dot com contemporaries didn’t lack for PR either. Newspapers, consumer magazines and other media outlets overflowed with glowing reports of the dot com revolution and its power to liberate and empower consumers. Pets.com was one of the revolution’s early heroes and the recipient of lavish media coverage.

Trouble is, no one thought to check with the consumer. Brands like Pets.com and HomeGrocer.com didn’t fail from lack of effective PR, or because traditional advertising no longer worked, but because they didn’t have a viable value proposition and didn’t deliver a brand experience anyone cared about. They disappeared  because they couldn’t convert mindshare into paying customers.

Then there’s Linux – the number one brand in the open-source software category and poster child for the PR model of mindshare building. However, the Linux brand wasn’t built by PR, but by a passionate and committed community of users and developers. PR followed mindshare, more than creating it.

Linux software grew out of a project at the University of Helsinki and was placed on the Internet where it was made freely available to programmers who could apply and modify it to suit themselves. It wasn’t owned by anyone. So there was no one to advertise it. And no one to send out PR releases touting it.

The power of The Linux brand, first popularized in the mid to late 1990’s, came from its ability to deliver a high-value functional brand experience consistent with the psycho-social and emotional mindsets of Linux users. They supported and defended the brand, first and foremost, because they passionately believe in it. Champions of the Linux brand were completely self-selecting – they themselves created the compelling experiences that gave the brand power. In the process, the lines between commerce and community virtually disappeared.

It wasn’t until after the Linux brand was embraced by the technology community, that companies like Red Hat and Novell refined it and built businesses providing related support and services. The brand came first, its commercialization second.
The same basic process unfolded with online brands such as social networking site MySpace and video sharing powerhouse YouTube.

From its May2005 launch, it took YouTube just six months to achieve national brand status, and under two years to command a $1.6 billion buyout from Google. Advertising had no role in YouTube brand ascendancy. And PR came along only after YouTube had been canonized by its user community and experienced by the millions who flocked online to get in on the fun.

Like Linux and MySpace, the YouTube brand was a viral marketing phenomenon—experience-driven, community-based, and pulled into existence by brand acolytes, rather than pushed by the brand’s originator.

Putting the Pieces Together
Instant online branding juggernauts notwithstanding, when all is said and done, both advertising and public relations will have important roles in the typical brand communications program. Advertising will be applied for established brands, when control and timing are critical, or when sales cycles are short; PR for brand launches, highly technical products, or when third-party testimonial content can be effectively leveraged.

Beyond advertising and public relations is a host of tactics that move toward the experiential end of the communications spectrum. For the most part, these replace passive one-to-many communication with more interactive one-to-one communication, providing richer opportunities for customer/brand interaction.

Company websites and other online interactive touchpoints merit particular mention. One reason: they support a broad range of self-initiated processes that move users toward need fulfillment or a particular information goal. Thus, potential customers are rewarded for taking action, a basic tenet of experiential learning.

This same participative advantage is evident in search engine use, image-map website navigation, online surveys, webinars, blogs, and online games – all of which are being increasingly embraced as marketers seek to provide ever-more-engaging brand experiences for customers and prospects.

Exhibitions, trade shows, live seminars and other events are included in a group of direct-interaction communications opportunities that also includes sales encounters (direct and channel), as well as customer service and other pre- and post-purchase CRM/CEM programs. These provide the proving ground for brand promises and ultimately have the strongest influence on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of mindshare.

Mindshare as Emotion
Ultimately, gaining mindshare isn’t a matter of finding new creative ideas that will rise above the communications glut, or even leveraging new communication channels that will help better connect with your target audience (although these can help).

Instead, more powerful brand communication starts with understanding that brands are emotional constructs. How we relate to a brand is filtered through our feelings – joy, distress, fear, pride, anger, love and a host of others. Brands, the evidence shows, find their natural constituencies and gain mindshare when they resonate with the positive emotional predispositions of those with whom they interact.

Recent research reported by the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows that brain structures that think and ones that feel emotions are not walled off from each other, as has been generally supposed. Instead, emotion and cognition are elements of one brain process. We literally cannot think without feeling. Other studies suggest that emotion is in charge of virtually all human decision making. Post-buying-decision rational arguments become mere justification for earlier emotive behavior.

Emotion, therefore is a crucial part of the contextual history each brand stakeholder brings to the brand encounter. And because this package is unique to each individual, no two stakeholders perceive the same brand in identical ways. The problem for marketers – the message that an advertiser believes is being taken away may not be what any given customer actually internalizes.

This reality is why passive mass marketing techniques are giving way to more emphasis on downstream interactive communication processes that empower prospective customers to tailor the brand experience to suit their own distinctive psycho-social profiles.

Brands, then, are emotion-charged entities formed as a product of both passive and active learning. This understanding exposes the limitations of the classic “rational mind” advertising model, which holds that products and services should be promoted based on competitive advantages that potential customers can understand and find credible.

The fact is, brands gain adherents by meeting both functional and emotional needs. This means that brand communications must have both rational and appropriate non-rational dimensions to earn and retain mindshare.

Behavior Follows Feeling
All brand communications illicit an emotional response, whether intended or not. Further, customers and prospects are often unaware of the emotional under-currents that inform their purchase decisions.

This is why research into customer buying motivations rarely yields complete answers and why results can sometimes seem downright baffling. “It doesn’t make sense” is the plaintive cry arising from the marketing department.

Emotion accounts for this disconnect between what customers say motivates their buying decisions and what actually occurs. This can be seen clearly in the business-to-business sphere where study after study shows price to be a primary buying-decision criteria, yet low price routinely correlates poorly with market share, volume growth and other brand success indicators.

Brands are Ideologies
The solution is to understand that successful brands – and the mindshare they command – are first and foremost belief systems brought to life and validated through brand experiences. Brands aren’t built by marketing executives or consultants, but by communities of believers, an unstoppable emotion-charged force that advertising alone can neither create nor control.

The New Mindshare turns earlier branding assumption on their head. What was once viewed as a mass-media-driven outside-in process is now understood as an ideology-driven inside-out process. In this construct, a company’s employees embrace a common customer-centric belief system, which gives meaning to their work and informs brand outreach at every customer touchpoint.

Mindshare, then, can be seen to start with mission, vision and values woven into a coherent and compelling ideology by company leadership. As this ideology is internalized and promulgated by company employees, a nascent brand emerges. The brand-as belief-system becomes an inseparable part of the company’s overall business design, a fully integrated approach that is the only way to create a truly powerful and lasting brand.

Products and services certainly need to satisfy functional customer needs. Brands that fall short at this level cannot endure. But in an age of overwhelming choice and growing competitive parity, successful brands must also provide a durable emotional bond with brand stakeholders.

As author and advertising executive Patrick Hanlon observes in his excellent book, Primal Branding, the brand-as-belief-system is powerful because it encompasses relevance, trust, empathy, leadership, resonance and commitment – the very attributes advertisers spend millions each year trying to parlay into customer mindshare.(6)

Hanlon has understood a crucial point: Ideology is believing. And believing is belonging – being part of something larger than ourselves, a fundamental psychological longing described by Abraham Maslow in his acclaimed Hierarchy of Human Needs more than 60 years ago.

Brands reflecting these principles draw communities of true believers. Such brands achieve mindshare – and wallet share – because they provide an authentic experience that resonates with the hopes, dreams, and deepest held beliefs of those who bring them to life.

The New Mindshare
Managers can no longer afford to equate mindshare with some fuzzy notion of consumer awareness built through advertising. The Giant Media Hammer idea of mindshare must be replaced with something new – a far broader concept incorporating multiple brand encounters and every brand stakeholder – customers, employees, shareholders, business partners and anyone else who can influence company success.

How does The New Mindshare break from the past?

The old mindshare is about advertising
The New Mindshare is about touchpoints

The old mindshare is about building awareness
The New Mindshare is about building relationships

The old mindshare is about one-way communication
The New Mindshare is about dialog

The old mindshare is about gaining control
The New Mindshare is about creating communities

The old mindshare is about selling something
The New Mindshare is about being something

The old mindshare is about what the product or service does for me
The New Mindshare is about what the product or service means to me

The old mindshare is more about making promises
The New Mindshare is more about keeping promises

The New Mindshare arises from brands that originate in the hearts and minds of company leaders – those who inspire the ideological underpinnings that define, energize, and animate the enterprise. Externalizing the brand (gaining mindshare) involves validating it’s principles and demonstrating its promises in ever-widening circles.

The complete process can be summarized as follows:

1. Articulate and codify a coherent and compelling ideology incorporating the company’s mission, vision, values and core beliefs
2. Integrate the company’s ideology with operations, brand position, value proposition and go-to-market strategy
3. Recruit employees who can believe in the brand; train new and existing employees to be brand evangelists
4. Identify, rank and align customer touchpoints, based on communications opportunity and strength-of-experience potential
5. Optimize touchpoints; create and disseminate brand messages
6. Perform regular reality checks by asking stakeholders what your brand means to them
7. Assess, adjust, repeat

Concluding Thoughts
Brands can be likened to a do-it-yourself remodeling project. An architect may have created the basic design and building plans, but the homeowner does the work, modifying the architects vision along the way to suit personal need and circumstance. The key point: Companies may inspire brands, but customers build them.

Though this idea seems counterintuitive to many marketers, it is a fundamental principle of the New Mindshare – an understanding that branding is largely an enabling activity; a process of creating opportunities for customers to experience and process brand promises.

Yes, advertising and other brand communication can be important. But it should be invitational, not preachy. It should be about the customer, not the advertiser. It should anticipate and mirror the promised brand experience – light on features, heavy on practical and psycho-social benefit.

The first rule of the New Mindshare: Know thyself, know thy customer, and act accordingly in all things. The brand will surely follow, with mindshare close behind.

By Charles Weaver – September, 2007

Endnotes:

1. Daniel M. Hull, John C. Souders Jr. (1999) Enhancing Technical Literacy through Tech Prep Paper presented to NAE/CSMEE Committee on Technological Literacy.
2. Jack Trout (1996) The New Positioning New York, NY McGraw-Hill.
3. David Kolb (1984) Experiental Learning : Experience as the source of learning and development Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentis Hall.
4. Robert H. Ducoffe (1995) How consumers Assess the Value of Advertising Paper Presented to Esomar, Madrid, Spain.
5. Al Reis & Laura Reis (2002) The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR New York, NY Harper Collins Publishers.
6. Patrick Hanlon (2006) Primal Branding New York, NY Simon & Schuster.