Life, Thoughts and Social Media…

I recently read this article in BusinessWeek called « Are Brand Managers Dead? »(http://bit.ly/28ae3P). It explained why the term brand manager was out dated. The author basically described that today brand mangers were limited to being brand editors as they can no longer control everything that is being said about their products or brand.

As anyone can have a voice through social media and interact with other users, brand managers are not anymore the only people producing content about the product. In order to be fully effective, the recently renamed brand editor must listen and interact with his customers. And when bad criticism emerges from an influential blogger for instance, he must try to defend his brand by creating a valuable dialogue with the involved person.

With a public Facebook profile or with a Twitter account, you are now able to learn a lot more about your customers. Before, obtaining all this data required long and costly market studies. And honestly, there is nothing more boring than filling up one of these surveys where you feel you are being asked the same questions five times. And the segmentation you would create eventually would only rely on a few criteria such as age, gender, social status…

But here is the time where you can just pick up plenty of information about your customers with just a few clicks. The brand manager now has the opportunity to collect almost infinite data allowing him to analyze what his customer’s needs are and create a way more precise segmentation.Who are these customers? What do they do for a living? What are their habits? What do they like? Where do they shop? How to reach them? Bla bla bla. The number of details is tremendous and thus the work of the brand manager is closer and closer to the work of a sociologist.

My good friend wiki tells me that sociology is the study of the human social life. Based on empirical investigation and critical analysis, it develops a knowledge about social structure and activity. With the amount of information available, the brand manager now has the opportunity to make a way more complete analysis of his customers and a few sociology classes might be useful to exploit all of it.

Social media are all about finding your appropriate communities, the ones that you feel connected to because you share a sport, a passion or a something you are annoyed with. And analyzing communities is the work of the sociologist so why not imagine in the future brand mangers having majored in Marketing but minored in sociology?