Rosencrantz And Brandenstern Are Dead
I was linked to this blog post by a tweet highlighting that “94% of conversations about brands happen offline”. It’s probably true. It feels truthical. Maybe it’s really 93% or 81% or 74.6%, it doesn’t really matter. What jumped out at me was the phrase “conversations about brands”, which I’ve seen in a few places.
I think this phrase might mean something silly. I can’t prove it, mind you. But I wonder if it’s mixing up two things: conversations about brands - which happen occasionally, don’t get me wrong! - and conversations about activities, friends, news, life, and so on in which brands have a walk-on part. I bet those happen more.
In 1966 Tom Stoppard made his name with Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, a play which follows two minor characters from Hamlet while Hamlet happens offstage largely without them. The play is very clever - and because I read it when I was 17 and susceptible to very clever things, I remember it being really good too. For poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the action of their lives is somewhat baffling: they lack agency; enormous things are happening which they don’t fully understand because they rarely perceive them.
Now consider the consumer, and the walk-on role brands play in their life. A story of a consumer’s life from a brand’s point of view would - like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead - be a rather strange one. A string of disconnected occasions, the occasional mention, a number of decision points (crucial for the brand - not terribly exciting for the consumer) and in the end - perhaps - a lonely and unmourned delisting from a consumer’s repertoire.
Now, that’s OK! That’s the kind of story market research tends to tell. You also get some parts of research and planning which try and peek into the wings and get to a bigger story. But now let’s go back to that phrase above, “conversations about brands”. Here the brands aren’t in a walk-on role, they’re central to the action. You sometimes see people say things like, “1 in 5 tweets are about brands” or “50% of conversations are about marketing messages”. If you encounter such people, shun them. For Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, after all, every scene in Hamlet which has them in is a scene about them. But it’s not, not really.
But when you get technologies - like social media monitoring, or I guess word of mouth monitoring - whose express purpose is to isolate mentions of brands, it’s very easy to spin that into “people talking about brands” or “conversations about brands”. It’s very easy to give the impression that your client’s brand is Hamlet when it’s really Rosencrantz. Or Guildenstern.
