Kelly Mooney Keynote: The Open Brand

The opening keynote was again given by Kelly Mooney, President and CEO of Resource Interactive. Known for her well-produced presentations, Kelly gave a fast-paced presentation on the Open Brand. She pointed out that over 1.5 billion pages of content are created each year by consumers. As a result, this proliferation of user-generated content is fundamentally changing the traditional relationship between brands and their customers. She implores the audience to begin thinking about transforming their brands to open brands.

What is an Open Brand?
The best way to think about an open brand is to contrast with a closed brand. A closed brand has these characteristics:

• Target consumers
• Monologue
• Is about creating awareness
• Push
• Guided communication
• Top down
• Created by marketers
• Brand managers

In contrast, open brands have these characteristics:

• Fosters community
• Dialogue
• Is about creating engagement
• Pull
• Open communication
• Bottom up
• Created by consumers
• Brand stewards

As an example, she points to George Lucas and his Star Wars brand. Lucas was notorious for controlling his brand very tightly and making sure his assets were licensed under strict guidelines. If you tried talking about his brand in any unacceptable fashion, cease and decist letters would start appearing in your mailbox. Over time, however, he discovered that his brand was simply becoming less relevant to his audience. He then decided to open his brand by letting people access--for free--much of his library of digital Star Wars assets including clips from his films. The web community took those assets and started to create cool mashups and other creations that brought the Star Wars brand back to life. In the process, Lucas was able to increase revenue, ROI, R&D insights, and relevance for his portfolio of brands.

The OPEN Brand moniker also serves as a nice acronym for what it means:

On-demand: people want things NOW

Personal: people demand relationships with real people

Engaging: people want to interact have dialogue with others

Networked: people like to influence others

In 2002, eCommerce was about researching, shopping, and self-service. In 2007, eCommerce is much more about social, web-empowered consumers who are creating, sharing, and influencing others. People are not just consumers, they're also content providers who are influencing others on what to buy and from whom. 86% of people online claim to have contributed content--whether that's in reviews, blogs, discussion boards, YouTube movies, or in newer web 2.0 formats.

Why are people doing all this?

Mooney segments the motivations of all these users generating content into four reasons:

1. Competence (74% of all). These are people who are learning the new skills of web 2.0 technology and want to show they can use it. They think it's fun and cool. These are people who tag, digg, add things to delicious, or are Flikr users
2. Collectivism (16%). These are individuals who built a fan base around a particular niche or area of expertise. She gives an example of the Harry Potter enthusiast who accumulated an audience of over 27 million users to his blog. Or the 80-year old British storyteller who built a regular audience of 40,000 subscribers to his YouTube movies.
3. Influencer/motivator (7%). These are people like power reviewers (Harriet Klauser on Amazon) or eBay pundit Marcia Collier who are individuals who influence millions of others
4. Celebrity-seekers (3%). These are folks looking for recognitition and notoriety such as Ask a Gay Man or Ze Frank, who created the Dance Teaching video on YouTube that's generated millions of downloads.

So what should we do with our brands?

Instead of the traditional purchase funnel (build awareness, trial, purchase), we need a different paradigm:

1. Listen and learn-->monitor what the web community is saying about your brand. Understand their shared passions
2. Build relationships, not just awareness-->literally enlist the services of those blogging about you
3. Facilitate participation-->provide tools that help your audience create, share, and influence
4. Support purchase-->accommodate multiple purchase modes
5. Re-engage and empower-->invite consumers to participate in purchase CSIs.

Think of the world on two axes: consumption <--> production and anonymous <--> notoriety. Using the OPEN acronym, Mooney gives examples of how companies are becoming more open brands.

On-demand: Google Checkout; Amazon tag searches; Travelocity's travel booking via email; Like.com's price range searches; mobile ratings and reviews

Personal: TripAdvisor's real customer pictures of hotels; ATG's click to chat or talk; Gymboree's personalized search pages; Zafu's personal fitting

Engaging: InStyle provides audience five ways to get the content (e.g. RSS feeds, blogs, emails, etc.); Coca-Cola's customizable widgets for MySpace pages;

Networked: Netflix's friend recommendations; People's Choice Awards; Lemonade.com; the Member's Project by Amercian Express

To recap, Mooney concludes with a strategic framework that measures how well a company is employing Open brand techniques and how these are contributing to business objectives.