OWNED TOUCHPOINTS / BY BORIS NIHOM

Recently, there has been much attention for the concept of 'owned media': brands that create proprietary (digital) platforms, in order to engage in continuous interaction with their target groups. There is something wrong however, with 'owned media'. It's the word 'media'.
 
This implies that there is some entity beyond the natural manifestation of a brand that is needed to communicate with an audience: media. This view fits an old-school view of branding which separates the company's brand (the external image of the company as conceived through various media channels) from 'everything else' (its products,
employees, store and other expressions of company behaviour).

The digital age however, has brought about consumers that are no longer passive receivers of brand messaging (if they have ever been), but engage in active relationships with the brands they love or hate. In these relationships, the brand promise is under constant evaluation: is a brand delivering on its promise or breaking it?

The main lesson of the digital age should therefore be that all factors that shape the perceived performance of a company, including product and service development, distribution etc., all need to be taken into account when building a relationship between the brand and its audience(s). To quote the famous Dutch brand scholar Giep Franzen: 'That is because everything a brand does, and sometimes what it does not do, delivers a message.'

So the key question is: If everything a brand does is both carrier and proof of the brand promise, why do brands need 'owned media' in the first place? The idea that all brand activities deliver a message implies that we can no longer separate the media through which people come into contact with the brand promise, from 'everything else': the touch points where people find the proof of this promise. So when we talk about 'owned media', we should also take into consideration those channels that exert influence on the relationship between consumers and the brand, but fall outside of traditional definitions of media and advertising.
 
These intrinsic touch points are not digital per se, although they can be. They are not free either, but their required investment usually falls outside of the communication budget. They can deliver high value without requiring a lot of additional communicative investments. For example, Dutch shoe brand Bronx used its shoeboxes, which they made anyway, as its main campaign medium. Quickly, they became a collector's item in girl's bedrooms.
 
Companies can use their stores as a platform to build relationships; as Apple does with its in-store workshops. Brands can use their customer service to spread and prove their brand promise, as Best Buy did when it implemented its Geek Squad customer service and Twelpforce initiative. Similarly, Dutch private bank Insinger de Beaufort made a huge impact when it sent its top 250 prospects a 'Private Office Remote Control': a brand new cell phone, with the direct mobile number of their private banking director pre-programmed.

 
When we want to create owned media, we merely have to consider what a brand does already, and do that a little bit better. Messages need media to travel, but these media do not have to be 'media'. Since all brand activities deliver a message, we can extend the notion of owned media to include a multitude of intrinsic touch points, that are not only the carrier of the brand promise; at the same time they are the
 proof of this promise.

Boris Nihom is strategy director at THEY, Amsterdam