The Justice

One story described in the lecture detailed the online exploits of Ameriprise, an offshoot of American Express. Realizing the value of a forum in which their customers could voice their opinions, Ameriprise set up a site in which customers were encouraged to share their dreams for the future from a financial perspective. The result was twofold. Not only did the company develop its own forum for customer opinion, but they created a community.

However, some companies Adamson described did not share the same foresight and suffered as a result. He offered the audience the example of the Kryptonite bike lock, a product promoted as completely secure and with a $50 price tag. Shortly after the product launch, a video surfaced on the Internet of a man opening the lock by inserting the end of a pen into the keyhole. The product was a bust. "Nothing spreads faster than when you make a promise and don't keep it," Adamson warned. He also gave the example of Cablevision, the self-proclaimed champions of customer service, embarrassed when an Internet video surfaced of one of their repairmen taking a nap on the couch of a customer.

Adamson also warned that even great products are vulnerable to decline if they don't keep pace with the technology. To illustrate the point, Adamson told the story of Shreddies, a staple cereal in Canada, which was declining but was revived by viral video campaigns. The company that owned Shreddies spread on the Internet videos of test subjects sampling between the original Shreddies and the "new" Diamond Shreddies, the same square-shaped cereal simply rotated into a diamond shape on the box. There was no actual change being made to the product, but customers were nonetheless thinking about the cereal in a new way.

The lecture also touched on the new need for corporations to market themselves, as well. Thanks to the wide range of information available on the Internet, customers can now track all of a corporation's products and activities. Not only must products stand for something, but also now must corporations. Adamson described the recent fuss made over the company Unilever, which makes and promotes Dove soap products, and the related "True Beauty" campaign, as well as Axe products, a line often derided as being sexist.

The lecture concluded as Adamson reminded the audience that the basic principles of branding and marketing remain the same, but with the digital market comes a need for a more complete customer experience, one which "who you are becomes much more important." A product still needs to distinguish itself. "You still need to stand for something different," he said.

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