Building brands has evolved from the one dimensional, top down era where the company controlled the relationship and essentially managed that relationship using broadcasts across mass media such as TV, Out of Home, print and radio with messages and content created to tell you what the company wanted you to know into the bottom up, customer economy.

In the bottom up customer economy, brands and their success or failure are defined and determined by customers. Those customers will create content and messages and disseminate that content and those messages across multiple platforms and to communities who are interested in their opinions. Now, how you interact with consumers is on their terms.

This is not revolution, simply evolution in the branding space. Brands are to blame for this loss of control because they have consistently misled consumers or over promised and under delivered. Brands can no longer be built using one-size-fits-all messages broadcast across traditional media channels to anyone who will listen. Basically because no one is listening.

Sure, there is still a place for messages, campaigns, and so on but because there are so many sources of information, so much clutter, these messages don’t have the impact or influence they had 20 or 30 years ago. In the digital age you can spend as much as you want on traditional media and reach everyone in the country but if they are not listening they won’t buy your product or service.

If a brand wants to be successful it must learn to communicate with multiple segments, and messages must be targeted and must be dynamic, using content and channels that resonate with those segments. But brands must move away from the traditional demographic approach to researching those segments. After all, how many 15 – 24 communities are there on Facebook? And content must constantly be revised and updated with new content.

And organizations must ensure that they deliver on promises and that promise must deliver economic, experiential and emotional value to each of those multiple segments. In the consumer business, this is most often done, initially anyway, in the store. Because in the customer economy, no matter how much you spend, if your staff don’t know how to build rapport with your prospects then they may buy once but rarely will they become a loyal customer. And without loyal customers, you won’t have a brand.

So if you are looking to build a brand, forget about reach, awareness, positioning and brand equity and trying to be all things to all people and start thinking about delivering value to specific segments and building customer equity.