Relationships

The moment social media became a thing companies, I wrote, in The Tribe That Discovered Trust strove to be our friends. They behave like entities. They have personalities and a public voice. They have a social conscience. Done right branding gives substance to something that exists in the intersubjective space between objective reality and subjective beliefs.

This is where things get interesting. It appears that customers and fans also form attachment to brands and personas. When we really come to think about it, it's inevitable. Content is information. Information delivers both a message and subtext (like attributes, character and values).

Seen often enough a brand becomes something more that fulfills a need in the individuals who then associates contact with the brand as a means of fulfilling their emotional needs. This one-sided relationship is called parasocial and it has real implications when it comes to branding and brands because it forms an implicit premise and promise upon which the entire one-sided relationship is founded.

Wreck that by failing to deliver on the implicit expectations or breaking the perceived promises made and the brand suffers. Reputations are wrecked, brand-audience relationships are broken and marketshare and bottom line are affected.

There's a recent study that backs all this up (check out the "parasocial" link above). And now that you know all this building an amazing brand and a world-class business should be easy, right?