Interesting thoughts came up while listening to the Podcast Brand Fast-trackers with Peter Hirshberg, Co-Founder and Chairman of The Conversation Group.
Or, maybe not as much thoughts as a “my creator, he might be on to something here” experience.
They conversation concerned that companies must work hard to keep their brand updated to the ever changing market. Though this is a not new finding, what struck a chord with me was when Peter Hirshberg said that too many companies are now updating to Web 2.0 and will soon understand that they need to use Marketing 2.0 (applying social media in their marketing) as well. However, what a company must do while doing all this, is to update their company to COMPANY 2.0.
I never heard anyone talk about it, and that might be the reason for why I became so excited. It is easy to say that one should update to web 2.0 and marketing 2.0, because that only means to exchange one part of the company structure or plan, for another. The old marketing plan can be changed of the course of a month or maybe a long weekend at some hip resort.
But, can your company take all this? Does your customer get all this, or will they be lost because too much of what they once knew about your company are now lost due to all of this.
Think of your company as a computer that you bought in the year 2000. Think about the design, the size of the hard drive, the processor, the CD-ROM and all other features.
Now think of the same computer today. To make it work, you have probably updated the hard drive to get more size since files are bigger, and you need more data. You have bought more RAM to operate the huge programs you are running everyday. This means that you have probably update the programs, and the operating system.
The only thing that is still what it was is the shell that surrounds all this.
You might work or started your own company a few years ago, and up until now you have done these changes that one have to do. When the market grew, so did you – more people being hired, and you had to get educated on how things that you ones knew by heart, work in today are setting. The company has a website, if you are a hip company you might have a Facebook group or a blog that is used to communicate to your customers. And right about now, it is time to operate the marketing plan as well.
The problem is, that no one of your customers sees this, or the market. They just see the same company that ha been there for many years. Same CEO, same theme, same logo. The attributes that forms the structure of the company are still the same, and people might find that as negative.
IBM found themselves in a situation were their company was not needed anymore. They had changed everything INSIDE the company, but to really make that leap that they needed, they had to change the outside, the shell as well.
It is easy for a author, researcher or mr/mrs Know-it-All to use expressions as “2.0″. But what about the ones who are supposed to do all this, the companies? It is time that some one stopped talking about “all the cool” things, and focused on what this means for the market.
For more on this subject, read these posts from other blogs, Carl Rosenberg & Passionate.
