From Brand Manager to Maestro, Doc.
What’s up with the classic “What’s up doc?”, you ask? The one from long ago where Bugs conducts the opera and the great maestro himself at the Hollywood Bowl, literally bringing the house down? What’s up is this Advertising Age story from today, “Why It’s Time to Do Away with the Brand Manager,” and its preview of an upcoming report from Forrester that puts forth a few ideas we think are worth any marketer’s consideration. Ideas about how managers need to think and act more like maestros of advocacy.
The report is set to recommend that marketers make a number of structural changes as a result of, and a response to, the changed media and consumer world today. Chief among them: changing the role, and name, of “brand manager” to “brand advocate.” Why? So marketing can be nimbler. More consumer-centric. More opportunistic. More open and real-time. More adaptive. And very much more digital, according to the article. So a brand manager acts less like a “manager” and more (here it comes) like a maestro (an analogy actually coined over at Unilever). A maestro of advocacy for the brand whose mission is to bring a diverse range of players and experiences, interactions and influences, together in concert to generate greater alignment, engagement, favorability, loyalty, growth, etc.
It’s no Looney Tunes idea. In fact, we’d go a step further at Weber Shandwick and say that the imperative today is to create not just well-orchestrated marketing but truly “Inline Brands.” Brands that are in-line with what engages the consumer and creates more fans. In-line with what influences them from traditional opinion shapers to those of empowered consumers. In-line with their shifting media and news consumption habits across offline and online channels.
All told, the kinds of things that are by definition often unmanageable, beyond control and often shifting, especially now. The goal, then, is to take what’s immutable and core about a brand and connect and relate it to what is inline (again our nomenclature) with what will create greater advocacy among your fans and beyond.
Let’s just hope they are not all fans of the opera. As the iconic wascally wabbit himself intoned at the end of this 1949 short: “Well, what did you expect in an opera, doc? A happy ending?”
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