Open-sourcing your Brand

One of the discussions that came up this week was around how to control a Brand in the wake of Facebook, YouTube, etc.

My simple opinion is that a) you cannot; and b) you shouldn't. The a) part scares marketers and b) part is heresy to most traditional brand experts.

Despite what trademark lawyers, VPs of marketing, brand consultants and customer experience companies want to try and claim, the territory of brand is no longer under lock and key. If you look at organizations such as the MPAA, RIAA, large companies such as Amazon, IBM, Bell Canada, etc. attempts to control their "Brand" via the Internet have largely failed.

A few examples of Brand control failure:

1. In 2003, the RIAA started mass litigation against random people, including trying to take to court a 12 year old child. This has had little impact on reducing file-sharing and a lot of negative press across the world as large multi-national record companies brand became one associated with bully tactics by ultra-rich recording companies trying to make money off of ultra-rich recording artists.

2. In 2001, Warner Brothers started sending out letters to owners of URLs relating to Harry Potter to cease and desist all fan site activity because of copyright violation. What they failed to realize was that most of these fan sites were run by teenagers. A 16 year old girl from Virginia organized a boycott of the Harry Potter movies as a response.

3. The latest case I've heard about is Apple is trying to squash anyone using the word "Pod" in their product name. Apple has filed a trademark for "Pod" and has been going after people with legal letters.

In all these cases, you see a common pattern and a similar result:

1. A corporate entity decides to protect its "Brand" through legal means.
2. The corporate entity takes on a Goliath vs. David fight with some person, group or document to try and squash the use of their "Brand".
3. In cases where the organization is perceived as being a bully, the press is called in and their tactics are widely questioned. What may have started with one lawyer sending a warning letter to a few people turns into an internal press incident.
4. In most cases, the organizations back down - in a few cases they have continued to press on and in the most extreme have launched counter-promotional campaigns trying to explain to the public why they have a right to take a 12 year old girl or an fixed income veteran to court.

Another interesting note on all of this: in 2001, there was no YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook. There were web sites, some news groups (which were largely populated by geeks) and just the beginning of a peer to peer culture. In 2007, the ability for a single action to be amplified either positively or negatively is much bigger than it was in 2001 given the amount of the Internet space that is content driven by individual users and the ability for communities in mass numbers to form overnight.

So in light of this reality, my opinion is that for "Brands" to be successful online in the next few years, marketing folks should look at the best features of the open-source model:

1. Community
2. Mass participation
3. Enabling by sharing
4. Efficient means of control (but not zero control)
5. Ability to change and adapt
6. Technology-enabled

The best open-source projects/companies have figured this out, and the best Internet 2.0 web sites have also followed this model. Facebook is a perfect example of this as a success story - seemingly overnight, Facebook has become a premier community because it adopted these principles. People don't use Facebook because it has a traditional "Brand" - they use it because the site makes them part of the branding process and makes the community the "Brand" itself.

Think about the success of Apache as a "Brand". It powers about 70% of the worlds web servers yet it has never been marketed. Its brand is entirely based on cult popularity amongst a community of developers, techno-geeks, Internet experts and commercial partners. Its the web server that's shipped with most UNIX servers and is bundled with IBM and Oracle products and it has never been marketed. In addition, the product development is all community based, constantly evolving and moving quickly to adapt to current needs. The Apache Foundation has leveraged its "Brand" in the Apache web server to create several other successful projects such as Lucene, Struts, Velocity, Tomcat, Maven, etc. All of these have been nurtured by a community of followers who have help to evangelize and market the product for free.

Any marketing/brand expert with millions of marketing dollars would be a superstar if they could do what the Apache Foundation has done for years with no marketing muscle but lots of good will, cooperation from corporate partners and a true partnership with their customers! Wouldn't it be nice if your car company, your bank or your grocery store adopted the same model...