Last week, The Economist ran a thought provoking piece on the future of news.  As I read it, I was struck by the parallels to some consumer goods and services categories, like apparel, quick service restaurants, electronics and even some kinds of fast moving consumer goods.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets:

• The era of mass news from early 1800s to about 2005 was a historical anomaly—news before the early 1800s was much more “atomized” (news came from social connections, vitriolic pamphlets printed in small runs, and from chatter at the local coffee house)
• In the past 10 years, the news scene has returned to an atomized state—the Internet and social media blew apart the mass news model by dropping production costs, commoditizing news and thereby dramatically increasing suppliers of news, while putting mass news outlets (newspapers) out of business
• The upshot: consumers of news (once again) fracture their attention across many more news sources than they used to.
• While consumers have many more news sources to choose from, they also suffer from a torrent of information coming from different sources.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to relieve this pain, and serve as filters and curators of the huge supply of news.  The best bloggers do this well (Andrew Sullivan and his blog the Dish is one of my favorite examples). It also points up a new role for journalists and editors—many of them should shift their focus from generating the news to a more curatorial role, navigating the torrent of news and stitching together select news atoms into coherent and compelling narratives for consumers

So, why would any of this affect the role that brands play?  Well, if you step back and look at what is happening to select categories, a similar story is playing out (six bullets here, parallel to the bullets above).

• Before the rise of mass production and mass brands, consumer goods and services were provided by an “atomized” set of suppliers (think pre-Industrial Revolution cottage industries)
• In the past few years, the rise of social and mobile marketing technologies are commoditizing many products (consumers can easily find lowest price and can easily source substitutes) and are injecting a huge dose of discoverability into consumers’ shopping, whereby they receive recommendations for brands or goods they never would have known about before
• The upshot: consumers are fracturing their walletshare across many more adjacent substitutes. These aren’t lower priced, carbon copy substitutes for goods they regularly buy; these are substitutes that fulfill a need in a slightly different way.  Part of their value is that they aren’t mass produced—they are unusual or different or off-the-beaten path.  Here are recent examples that I’ve observed as a consumer:
  • My wife shops the Etsy bazaar to find a more unusual pair of earrings instead of going to the mall with the same old shops for the masses;
  • On the street in Chicago recently, I saw a sheet of paper taped to a lamppost with a QR code on it, advertising how a local artist can customize your shoes with special paint and a unique design—maybe consumers spend money here instead of adding a 25^th pair of name brand shoes to their collection;
  • My wife buys me a beer tasting class as a birthday gift instead of the usual name-brand apparel (see my previous blog post that spells out how Groupon is a breaker of consumer buying routines, much at the expense of mass brands).
  • In sum, mass brands in many categories suffer from a thousand tiny cuts as consumers fracture their walletshare in ways like these.
• While consumers now have many more options against which to allocate their (depressingly fixed) walletshare, they also suffer from a torrent of choices in what they could buy.  Our recent research on the consumer decision path suggests consumers are suffering from cognitive overload as a result of all this buying choice.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to help consumers deal with this pain, by serving as filters and curators to help them navigate this greatly expanded choice set.  Many entities are edging into this role already:
  • Google is using algorithms to help consumers find apparel they might like (see www.boutiques.com);
  • Some consumers are relying on their social networks to play this role;
  • Individuals are playing this role, oftentimes celebrity tastemakers (which may help account for the popularity of some celebrities on Twitter);
  • And new hybrids are arising, like Flipbook, that weave together social and algorithmic filters.

I’d argue the more powerful of curators won’t be algorithmic—they’ll be humans or have a very strong human component.  That’s because humans are better (for now, at least) at weaving together coherent and compelling narratives to make sense of these choices, and go beyond the cold buying guide.

The humans behind brands could well play this role.  In my next post, I’ll unpack what makes for a great curator, and why I think brands like Tory Burch are charting the path for a new model of branding that is better suited to categories that are dealing with a re-atomized marketplace.  Just like the news industry.

Related posts:

1. Community Management: Marketing Discipline of the Future?
2. Thoughts from CES
3. Social Media in Europe: Thoughts from Last Week’s Roundtable
4. The Purchase Funnel is Dead (Long Live the Purchase Funnel)
5. Emotional Branding: Moving Beyond the Logo