A little thought piece on media brands, and how IPTV will influence them.
Brands are huge, band building isn’t
Its worth taking a time out to clarify what we usually mean by brand. We think of brand strategy as being the bit of your three year plan that deals with stimulating demand side loyalty, preference and premium.
The functional and emotional elements of how a brand can deliver loyalty should work together, but typically companies will prefer to focus on the functional since tangibles are easier to manage (something that Norton & Kaplan deal with extensively in their series of books on Balanced Scorecards).
For TV content brands there is a functionally led school of thought which starts from the position that its the EPG owners who control the game. For them, getting subscribers in with exclusive or ‘free’ propositions – supported by bundles to sweeten the deal for subscribers – is so effective that there isn’t a need to make life any more complex.
For other players in the industry, each franchise stands or falls on its own merit. Beyond the make or break magic from the combination of script, direction, actors and production; emotional engagement is focussed on promotional spend – a part of which is trade spending with the EPG owner – rather than any longer term brand strategy.
There are huge brands in the world of media, not least of which are individual celebrities, but they don’t get built by any longer term, ‘emotional benefit’ strategic planning. The drivers of success are a creative content development process that remains sublimely impervious to scientific management – and the functional measures taken by EPG owners.
An open, competitive EPG market
IP is just a distribution mechanism. It is entirely possibly for nothing fundamental to change just because EPG owners move from one distribution technology to another. In which case the relative usefulness of brand building remains the same.
However slim the realistic chances are, a change in technology does afford opportunity to new entrants. Starting from the base that the EPG is the pivot around which the industry’s customer relationships swing – the biggest impact would be the opening of the EPG market to new entrants.
Its a short sentence with a world of implication. Our conversations with industry figures have had one, emphatic answer – that it will never happen, which is what led us to create this booklet asking ‘why not?’. From a brand building view point, from the customer’s perspective, for content owners, for the regulator and for potential new entrants it could have huge benefits.
Such a platform would create a radically new level of choice for customers and would stimulate innovation as EPG owners compete for market share, using extremely flexible IP based technologies.
The competitive environment created by this would start to level out functional differential advantages which in turn would raise the importance of brand building.
In this new world, creating communities of interest around an EPG, capturing their behavioural data and using it effectively to offer a better service, innovations to enhance their loyalty would raise in importance – in short building a strong brand would become the key to success.
The inevitable rise of open EPGs
Even if, as the industry seems almost certain, TV EPGs never become an open market that’s not the only device in town. Any website can, and many already do, help users navigate to content. Its a small step to move from a mouse driven webpage, to a remote control driven one. Any networked media capable device can host an EPG – even if consumers aren’t consuming in the classic scheduled patterns that work so well for them. That means mobile phones, computers, games consoles or wireless media players.
So far the creation of aggregator EPG’s on any of these formats has been slow, hampered amongst other things by technological capability and a reticence in their respective industries to get involved in such a complex and potentially expensive market.
Many of these limiting factors are slowly dissolving. Devices are cheaper and more powerful. Connection speeds and network capacity are increasing, although transit charges are still an issue. Within the various alternative device industries, competition and a convergence of technologies are forcing the market players to look ahead for alternative ways to create advantage and profit.
The content that works on TV does not work so well with devices in different contexts, screens sizes, places or times of day. Moreover, the quantity and quantity of content available from outside the traditional TV content production sources is increasing exponentially. While the production quality of the Saturday night appointment to view may never be matched by something from the world of citizen media or a one man band – it doesn’t have to in these alternative contexts.
The content is there. The technology to access it is there. Customers are consuming more and more media outside scheduled TV. We believe that ultimately an open EPG market will become a reality, its just a question of time.
Building Community Brands
The key to brand building in a citizen media context is communities. Each EPG, channel or celebrity needs to be able to build a loyal community of interest around them. The brand strategy is about understanding what the ties are that really bind that community together. The way to build that brand is to keep delivering on that promise of common interest.
