Oh dear! More marketing terminology.

Read this research document on trends. Came across these terms ‘Live brand experience’ and ‘real time’ branding.

They're defined as follows :

"...'live' because the brand experience now needs to function like a show, event or multi-club experience so that its essence cannot be copied in any way."

" ‘Real time’ because consumers are now expecting brands to respond to their needs as soon as the ‘send’ or ‘post’ key has been thumbed."

Gosh! 

As far as my understanding of the English language goes, to me, the consumer experiences the brand when he/she uses the product/service, in the moment and at the moment. That sounds like ‘Live brand experience’ and ‘real time’ branding.

Can we just do away with these fancy terminologies? They're confusing and ambiguous.

That aside, these days there are many examples of brands attempting to connect with their customers using new ways, some of which fall under the category of ‘live brand experience’ and ‘real time branding’.

For example, companies deploying blog monitoring tools to search for bloggers who are unhappy with their brand, so that they can get in touch with these guys before the whole thing escalates into an organised witch hunt against the brand, the way Jeff Jarvis did it with Dell.

Or maybe looking into using GPS technology to develop location-based activities and incentives.

Or CEOs of big companies writing blogs to talk about what's new and what's coming up. Seriously, CEOs writing blogs??? Pffft...am sceptical about that!

All this in order to show the ‘human-side’ of brands.

I’m a-thinkin’ that’s a lot of work to compensate for less than stellar customer service, advertising or product development. The basics!

I mean really, folks. A blogger that complains about a product/service is either unhappy about the after-sales service, or that the product doesn’t work as advertised or the product doesn’t work, period.

As for location-based advertising (LBA), sounds intrusive to me. Much like old-fashioned advertising but this time even more annoying coz' it's on your mobile!

And CEO blogging? What's wrong with press releases? Doesn't the CEO have other more important things to do?

All these new methods are about connecting with consumers. I dig that.

But connecting with them has to make sense. Good 'ol customer service that listens and provides solutions, can still do a great job at connecting with people. So does developing products that work.