The Charles Darwin of branding, Patrick Hanlon, discusses how to build effective brand communities

Conventional branding and marketing has been broken and disrupted, says leading brand practitioner Patrick Hanlon. After decades of being told what to think about products and services via expensive advertising, consumers no longer care, he says, adding that in this new ecosystem, what they really care about is what their peers are saying about those products and services. As bottom-up marketing replaces top-down marketing, that five-star rating from consumers counts far more than any advertising. In this new environment, it’s not only the quality of the idea you build that dictates success, but the quality of the community you build around that idea. The majority of new products fail, Hanlon says, because they have failed to create a storyline around the brand that attracts and appeals to people thus allowing it to grow through word-of-mouth marketing. A brand, he insists, is not a logo, advertising or a website but rather a community wired together in a common belief system. Widel...