How you talk about your brand not so important

In a meeting today with VML, Mike Lundgren, VML’s creative technology director, had an interesting comment about one of the big mind shift changes happening in marketing today:

“It’s not about how good you look talking about your own brand. It’s about how you make other people look good talking about your brand.”

In other words because people pay attention to people like them through Facebook, blogs, YouTube, and word of mouth, an important marketing goal should be helping people talk about your brand in ways they find easy, interesting and natural. That is more important than how YOU the company talk about your brand because people pay more attention to people like them than your company’s marketing programs.

It’s no longer messaging as usual.