an article by jason xenopoulos

Amr Salama is a soldier. He does not carry a gun but when he fires a tweet it explodes across thousands of screens. In January this year his words punched holes into a regime that ultimately came tumbling down under the barrage of fire. Amr Salama is one of the blogger-activists who joined The Day of Revolution in Egypt. He and thousands of others like him, armed with little more than an Internet connection, forcefully dismantled President Mubarak’s powerful regime. After 30 years of Egyptian rule, Mubarak’s government proved to be no match for the power of social media.

I was fortunate enough to hear Amr Salama speaking at Cannes Lions this year. He was invited onto stage to tell marketers and ad execs how he and other social-activists managed to mobilise so many with so little. Together with a thousand other delegates, I waited eagerly to find out how we could apply these learnings. But Salama reversed the current. “Don’t ask how you can use the revolution to sell more products,” he said. “Put yourself in the position of the government, not the revolutionaries”. Salama believes that corporations who are not open and honest with their customers will ultimately be punished. “Some day you will be busted,” he warns. “Social media will get you!” Those of us who had come to this session to find our how we could apply the techniques used by Egyptian citizens during the revolution, walked away with the crack of a warning shot ringing in our ears. “Yesterday it was the government,” Salama proclaimed, “tomorrow it is the corporations”.

One might easily dismiss these statements as the rhetoric of an impassioned freedom fighter, but Paul Polman, the CEO of Unilever, a Fortune 500 Company and one of the leading marketers on the planet, echoed these sentiments when he warned, “if they can bring down a regime in Egypt in six weeks, they can bring us down in nanoseconds”. Both Polman and Salama are trumpeting the arrival of a new era – one in which the consumer is now firmly in control. Egypt’s Day of Revolution may have been driven by a political agenda, but its relevance to us, as marketers, cannot be ignored.

Back in 2006, Time magazine announced the dawning of this new day when they nominated You, the reader, as their Person of the Year. But much has transpired since then. In less than five years, Facebook’s user-base has surged from 12 million to over 750 million, and they continue to grow at a rate of 15 million new users per day. Twitter, which was only launched in 2006, has grown from 5 000 tweets per day in 2007 to an average of 200 million tweets per day in June 2011. This stratospheric rise of social media has triggered a consumer revolution that is changing the dynamic between consumers and brands. Today, more than three quarters of all brand collateral that exists online has been created by consumers. Whether it is in the form of a user-generated video on YouTube, a blog post, or a product review on Amazon, consumers are remodeling our brand messages to suit their tastes. As marketers, we can vainly try to resist this change by exerting greater control over our messaging, or we can harness these consumer voices in order to amplify the resonance and relevance of our brands. There is no doubt that the latter is a more productive strategy.

And that is where Devolution™ comes in.

Part philosophy and part methodology, Devolution™ sits at the heart of NATIVE, underpinning everything we do. As a philosophy, it is based on the belief that marketers are no longer the sole proprietors of their brands. As a methodology, it provides us with a set of tools to govern this new, collaborative relationship.

But embracing this consumer-led reality isn’t always easy. “It was very uncomfortable for me to give our brand over to people,” says Jim Farley, Ford’s Vice-President of Global Marketing. But as difficult as it may be, those marketers who have been brave enough to embrace the principles of devolution are discovering the immense brand-building potential that exists within their existing consumer-base. “You have to give your brand up to your customers,” Farley insists. “It was the scariest thing for me to do as a client. But it was the most rewarding thing I have ever done.”

The biggest question for marketers is often where to start. And for us, answering that question is the most important part of the strategy. Devolution™ begins with a process that we sometimes refer to as Psychoanalysing the Brand. During this phase, we take an inside-out look at the business, trying to understand some key questions, such as, ‘how open does this brand want to be, and why?’  We also benchmark the brand’s relative openness against other brands in its category. This inside-out view is then balanced by an outside-in look at the business, where we try to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes. The primary objective of this two-part process is to identify an ‘opening-point’ or ‘angle-of-attack’, that will allow us to begin gently prizing open the brand.

It may seem like a clumsy analogy, but opening a brand is not unlike opening an oyster. While the outer shell is as hard as stone, inserting an oyster knife into the hinge and applying the appropriate pressure will split the shell like the softest petals. But exert too much pressure with the wrong kind of knife and you’re likely to lose a finger. When opening a brand, we begin by identifying an angle of attack that will limit the company’s exposure to risk while providing the biggest potential impact. The prize, of course, is the pearl housed at its center.

A pilot project that can be ring-fenced and managed separately from the company’s day-to-day operations is often the best way to start. The European automotive giant, Fiat, experienced the transformative effect of such a project when they set about building the world’s first crowd-sourced car – the Fiat Mio. Designed to allow consumers to have a hand in the notoriously guarded automotive manufacturing process, the Fiat Mio project attracted 17 000 participants from 160 countries and generated an unprecedented level of collaboration between the brand and its consumers. The teachings that arise from such a project can be cascaded through the organisation using change-management tools. This may sound more like Organisational Development than brand building, but in open organisations your culture is your brand. “The automotive industry was built on the idea of secrecy,” says Abel Reis, Chief Operating Officer of Isobar Brazil. “The Fiat Mio project challenged that concept in a new and radical way.” If handled correctly, what begins as an experimental project can often have a profound and lasting impact on your business.”

But unlike what happened in Egypt, Devolution™ is not about revolution, it is about evolution. It is a safe and effective way for marketers to begin the process of re-orientating their brands. Putting your customer at the center may be a simple concept to grasp, but the implications on your business are anything but. Devolution™ can mitigate the risk involved in that process while improving your chances of success.

From despots and dictators to the CEOs of multinational corporations, today’s leaders are being forced to adapt to a new people-powered reality. Those who embrace the change may discover a wealth of untapped resources capable of fueling their growth for another generation and perhaps even further into the future. Those who resist will feel the earth crumbling beneath their feet. Just ask Mubarak.