When considering upmarket brands, consumers have higher expectations than when considering mid- and down-market brands. They put more thought and energy into their purchases, do quite a bit more online research and demand more transparency from the upmarket brands they choose. If in the pursuit of this information they find inconsistencies in the story, they become skeptical of the brand truth. This is why a proactive strategy is so important in controlling how your brand is represented online.

Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh.

In my spare time after work, I volunteer as the Marketing Committee Chair for our regional YMCA summer camp (to protect the innocent, we'll say it's the Camp Granada in Alan Sherman's famous song). While the mission of Camp Granada is different than your typical upmarket consumer brand (the camp's mission is to serve both those who can afford to pay full freight and those in need of financial aid), Camp Granada has successfully built a desirable upmarket position to the entire market it serves. It's the summer camp of choice – for one of the most significant life-defining experiences a child can have.

The competitive operational strategy for the camp has been to constantly keep improving the quality of the camp experience by upgrading facilities and adding new programming, in much the same way upmarket brands must do to maintain their position. However, they've barely begun to upgrade their marketing communications strategy to provide a more complete brand experience. By and large, all camp marketing communications are still done the traditional way (brochures, print ads and direct mailings), while the target audience has changed its media habits and is looking for brand experiences in new places. Most kids come to Camp Granada for a week or two, sometimes more, each summer.

In our last Board Meeting, there was a lively discussion around the idea of making the Camp Granada brand experience continue long after summer camp ends. The goal of this idea is threefold:

1. To encourage campers to come back at other times of the year, bringing their families and friends and further contributing to revenue;
   
2. To keep campers and their families feeling like part of the Camp Granada community long after they leave, so they come back next year; and
   
3. When we do fundraising, they feel emotionally motivated to give.

Much of the conversation revolved around how this could be accomplished, because everyone agreed that extending the brand experience was vital to keeping Camp Granada upmarket. I suggested creating an online community, featuring blogs, chat groups and monitored postings on the camp website. People loved the idea, but Camp Granada's website could not support this technologically and no one on staff knew how to make it happen (more on the technology behind Web 2.0 in an upcoming newsletter). So I offered to ask my daughter, who is fairly well-versed in online communities (as are most 15-year-olds), if she could get together a group of campers who could volunteer to do it for them. Everyone thought this was a great idea.

When I got home, I asked my daughter what she thought. Her reaction was both one I had hoped for (I had taught her the importance of giving back to her community) and one I had failed to even consider: “Like, that would be so cool, Dad! I can get a bunch of kids from the Camp Granada group on MySpace.com to do it with me.”

It turns out that while the camp remained solidly fixed in traditional media, the kids took the Camp Granada brand experience online – without the camp's knowledge. There are pages and pages of discussions about the camp, some very positive and some not so positive. One of the campers took it upon himself to ghostwrite a MySpace blog “authored” by Camp Granada's director – complete with pictures and a personal bio – without his knowledge. While considered appropriate and respectful by the well-meaning aspiring fiction writer, this blog was not exactly how the director of Camp Granada had imagined he would enter the online world.

The moral of this story?

In the old days of mass marketing, the marketer was in control of how their brands were represented. Today, the consumer has a tremendous amount of power and if we leave it to their own devices, we will lose control. It's extremely important to reach out to consumers with consistently branded messages when and where they're paying attention.

Our best advice is to extend your upmarket brand experience well beyond traditional consumer touch points and into the online world, because, if you don't, the consumer will beat you to the punch. This involves far more than just creating a standard website or blog: it means contributing to the online community, paying attention to the constellation of tags associated with your brands and those of your competitors and making sure that your brands are represented online in the manner you desire. While we cannot completely control or stop the use of public blogs, we can deliver online brand content that supports the overall upmarket brand message.

Need motivation to get started? Visit any one of the consumer-created sites or blogs about Nike, Hummer, McDonald's or Starbucks. Then, hold your breath while you check to see if anyone has as of yet created online content about your brand.