"The Illusion of Brand Control" is a great article at Harvard Business Publishing. Andrew McAfee, who is a research scientist at the MIT Sloan school Center for Digital Business, offers the insight that in today's market it's not possible for a business to "control" its brand. "New media" like the internet and Facebook are bi-directional. People no longer just absorb a crafted message, they are able to push back. Bloggers and internet commenters can have more influence on a brand than traditional advertising and PR. As a result, a business's brand becomes the result of what others say about it – not just what the owner says.
And this mirrors what is happening across business today. As we've moved from the industrial to the information economy, success is no longer about amassing and controlling assets. Scale advantages have disappeared, with scale accessible to anyone who has a browser and a credit card. Where the business leader of 1965 likely felt success required controlling everything from employees and facilities to the brand message, in 2015 success is about adapting to rapidly shifting market requirements.
If you want your brand, and your business, to grow and be profitable, you have to realize the dramatic limits of "command and control." That approach works in very static, clearly defined environments. Like the military. Businesses today no longer operate in slow moving static environments with high levels of regulation and rigid business limits and significant entry barriers. Businesses today operate in complex, highly adaptive systems. Competitors can move fluidly, quickly, globally to offer new solutions and react to changes.
Today's leaders have to recognize that many of the most important impacts on their business (or brand) come from outside their organization. Completely out of management's control. Being Locked-in on what you know how to do has less and less value when you might well have to react very quickly to an external event in an entirely new way in order to maintain product position and growth. Just ask the leaders at Circuity City, who could not adapt quickly enough and saw their company fail. Adaptability to shifting market requirements becomes key to sustaining growth. Competitive advantage is not created by seeking entry barriers. Rather, competitive advantage now comes from understanding market shifts, and moving rapidly to position yourself in the right place – over and over and over.
Executives who feel like they have "control" of their business are under an illusion in 2009. And that has been demonstrated time and time again as this recession has driven home a plethora of market shifts. There are many things managers can control. But many of the most important things to success are completely out of management's hands. Thus, the ones who succeed aren't trying to control their brand, or business. Instead they are building organizations that have great market sensing and are quick to react. Just compare GM to Google and you'll see the gap between what worked in 1965, and what works 45 years later.