Who is the real brand manager now??

Brand Manager. I was one of those once, and mighty protective of my brands was I.  But that was over a decade ago (how did that happen!?), and things change thank goodness. 

As the oft recycled quotes go, a brand is no longer what the brand managers tell us it is, it's what Google, Bing, or other consumers tell us it is. We trust other people over advertising. Nothing has changed there, but we just now all have access to a whole raft more people.  Unfortunately there's still rather a lot of brand managers / organisations that haven't quite grasped that they don't have quite the same control that they used to and that's something they need to learn to embrace, welcoming the dialogue and input consumers will happily and freely give them.

Many thanks to my friend Mark for sending me this fabulous Tom Fishburne cartoon this morning. It's very timely as I had a conversation on this very topic yesterday.  I know it's one of those images that I am going to be able to put into presentations time after time :-)