Blogs Are Corporate Brand Threats

Global PR Blog Week Day 2: Corporate Brand Threat: Blogs & Disruptive Messaging

The power of the one-way brand marketing strategy via static print collateral and websites is losing ground to the interactive “talk-back” power of blogging. Are PR-backed blogging initiatives the “needed mechanism” which will save the corporate marketing branders’ day?

Micro Media is Changing the PR Practice

The proliferation of Weblogs and RSS news feeds has changed the practice of public relations forever. Despite the belief in media consolidation, as TechJournalism’s Rebecca MacKinnon says, “We are no longer living in a world dominated by mass media conglomerates. Today readers are just as likely to be influenced by something they see on a blog as they are by an article in the New York Times.” As P&G’s Global Marketing Chief, R. Stengel, said in a recent Business Week article, “The Vanishing Mass Market,” which outlines the death of mass marketing, “P&G is now standing mass marketing on its head by shifting emphasis from selling to the vast anonymous crowd to selling to millions of particular consumers…[companies] find the people...are very focused on them....and become relevant to them.” This shifting American media mix means that to keep clients relevant to consumers today that the role of the public relations counselor is changing quickly. Corporations are still looking to communications agencies to reach key audiences. The difference, however, is that PR pros must not only secure the "earned media coverage" they have been known to do for decades, but now they must also know how to include bloggers and their niche audiences (many of whom are part of the audiences they are trying to reach for their client organizations) into their media relations outreach. As MacKinnon says, “the rules of engagement are different” in this world of participatory journalism and disruptive messaging, or as McDonald’s Chief Marketing Officer now calls it “Brand Journalism.”

Fortune 500 Abandoning “the Universal Message”

In June 2004 McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light, made history. He announced in Advertising Age that the company is pulling further away from mass marketing because no single ad can tell the whole story in today’s economy. Pointing to the fact that we are a society now surrounded by the web, email, and wireless technology (which give us 24/7 global connections to each other), he went on to announce McDonald’s adoption of a new marketing technique called "Brand Journalism."

“No single ad can tell the whole story in today’s economy…brand journalism represents the end of brand positioning as we know it… We don't need one big execution of a big idea. We need one big idea that can be used in a multidimensional, multilayered and multifaceted way.” -McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light

The announcement of a change in McDonald’s marketing strategy was probably due to the fact that in January of 2003, the Company announced its first-ever quarterly loss--$343.8 million--since becoming a public company in 1965. Undoubtedly the announcement is also reaction to the movie, Super Size Me, which slapped McDonald’s in the face by coupling a gentleman’s one month McDonald’s-only diet with an extensive online marketing and blog monitoring campaign of his weight gain (which ripped through the blogosphere like wildfire). This caused brand damage. Mr. Light described the “Brand Journalism” concept he plans to use as marking "the end of brand positioning as we know it." (Al Ries & Jack Trout are you listening?) This is not ‘light’ news coming from the Chief Marketing Officer of the world’s #8 most valuable brand (see Business Week’s 2003 Interbrand Study).

Light’s new strategy entails using many stories rather than employing one message to reach everyone.

In effect, he declared that McDonald's was abandoning the universal message concept. He went on to define Brand Journalism, which he also referred to as a “brand narrative” or “brand chronicle,” as a way to record "what happens to a brand in the world," and create ad communications that, over time, “can tell a whole story of a brand.” To branch out, he said, “The Company is using many platforms and has shifted the advertising budget….two-thirds of that budget was once dedicated to prime time broadcast TV…now, only one-third is,” he said. Surely we wonder where exactly his budget is being shifted? Surely Light doesn’t mean merely moving his media budgets to the already heavily-funded customer touchpoints like email newsletters and wireless alerts to cell phones. Perhaps he means blogs?

“The Company is using many platforms and has shifted the advertising budget.”-McDonald’s CMO, Larry Light

Summary

In light of the above, blogs are posing threats to Fortune 1000 brands and in order to meet the new brand threat that blogs pose, corporations are attempting to influence bloggers in their media relations outreach programs, as well as shifting media budgets to strenghthen their own online corporate brand voices.