Seminar, John Deighton, "Brand Building in the Age of the Internet" (2/6/2009)

How do you build a brand on the Web?  It is not as easy as it was with mass media. Television loved brands, but brands are interlopers on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube, more likely to be met with counterargument, parody, and reproach than the passive acquiesce that they get from prime time audiences.  And yet there have been some remarkable success stories. Unilever’s Dove brand used social media to add $1.2 billion to its brand value in three years.  In the world of politics, Barack Obama used social media to go from the state senate to the White House in two years.

The principle made plain by these successes is that on the Internet marketers must make less power do more work.  They have to accept that their brands are not in control – they are more talked-about than talking.  Brands must seek to provoke, not dominate. Success is built on a model of co-creation of meaning where the goal is no more than to rouse, to stimulate, to stir others to pay attention you.

Early in the Internet era it looked as if the new technologies would make marketing more intrusive.  Data profiling and digital media would allow for deeper targeting and more penetration of consumers’ lives than broadcast marketing.  Today that view looks to have been quite wrong.  What we did not anticipate was how effectively consumers would use technology to defend themselves against marketers.  From Tivo to Caller ID to social media, consumers are finding ways to keep them at bay. 

Drawing on case analyses of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign and the Obama versus Clinton primary campaign, this talk will explore the use of soft power in marketing. 

About John Deighton

Professor John Deighton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he has been on the faculty since 1994. He is an authority on consumer behavior and marketing, including particularly direct and interactive marketing.

He is editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, a leading journal publishing interdisciplinary studies of consumer behavior, and was the founding co-editor of the Journal of Interactive Marketing, which reports scholarly research on marketing and the Internet. He is a Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute, a board member of the Direct Marketing Education Foundation, and a Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

His research has received a number of commendations, including the "best article" award of the American Marketing Association for an article in the Journal of Marketing, and he was named "outstanding educator" by the Direct Marketing Education Foundation. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo and at Duke University's Teradata Center for Customer Relationship Management.

He has published extensively on digital marketing tools and their transformative effect on the practice of marketing. Some of his Harvard Business Review articles on this topic include 'The Future of Interactive Marketing,' and 'Manage Marketing by the Customer Equity Test.' His research on marketing management and consumer behavior is published in the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and other scholarly journals. His case writing includes cases on Hilton Hotels' frequent guest program, DoubleClick, CVS.com, Snapple, Chateau Margaux, Siebel Systems, the novelist James Patterson, and USA Today Online.

He has taught in many of Harvard Business School's programs, as course head of the first year MBA course in Marketing, and elective courses in Business Marketing, Consumer Marketing and Interactive Marketing. Currently he teaches the first year MBA marketing cours, the marketing courses in the Owner/Presidents Executive Program, is course head for the Strategic Market Management executive course and teaches on the executive education offering in brand marketing.

Prior to joining the Harvard Business School he was on the faculties of the University of Chicago, where he received the Hillel J. Einhorn award for excellence in teaching, and the Amos Tuck School, Dartmouth College. His Ph.D. is in marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He has an undergraduate chemical engineering degree from the University of Natal and an MBA from the University of Cape Town. His applied research includes consulting with a number of U.S and international corporations.