The end of brands | Fabrice Epelboin | TEDxLyon

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

How the Internet, thanks to citizen action, transform brands. And even destroys them.

I'm going to talk about transparency,
transparency in general,

which could be transparency in philosophy,
in politics, or in technology.

Transparency leads
to a certain serendipity.

A distinctive serendipity.

This serendipity is a weapon that can be
used practically anywhere on the Internet.

It will destroy many
of the brands all around us,

and it will destroy these brands,
as it attacks our imagination,

because our imagination is the land
of the brands around us.

I'm going to do a demonstration.

Let's take an imaginary:

Vermeer, a 17th century Baroque painter
we're all familiar with,

and there we have a brand
that we're also familiar with.

A very old one that is 41 years old.

It has been with us for four decades.

And now I'll show you how,
with a little imagination,

we can destroy a brand.

In reality, this is nothing else
but a food-processing giant

that produces yogurt in a factory.

That has nothing to do with art,
let alone with Vermeer.

What I just did,

and what will definitively make you wonder
every time you see a "La Laitière" ad,

was a little thing many Internet users
already know about:

every day on the Internet,

these unexpected messages are hammered
into you in a serendipitous way

so as to destroy brands.

This summer, you probably didn't miss

that reminder that all brands
have a political dimension.

And don't listen to politicians
that will tell you

that it's the fault of the Internet
or of social media.

Politicians are the first to use
transparency to solve a critical problem:

confidence.

When an intense crisis of confidence hit
the French political world,

the first thing they did
was to pass a law on transparency.

It didn't really work, but politicians
forgot the dimension of transparency

which is that transparency comes from
technological determinism.

Transparency can also be used
by technology experts

as a political response.

You're familiar with Wiki-leaks,

and it didn't escape you
that because of the Wiki-leaks affair,

we no longer count on policy

coming from transparency to impose
a reality and to destroy a lie.

And it also didn't escape you

that Wiki-leaks means
lots of internet users.

These internet users
are called Anonymous.

Anonymous is utterly fascinating

because it's the first real
social movement of the 21st century.

It's a movement distinctive
to the 21st century

in the same way syndicalism
was distinctive to the 19th century,

in the same way syndicalism was
distinctive to the Industrial Revolution,

Anonymous is distinctive
to the digital revolution;

And following the Wiki-leaks affair,

the Anonymous were part
of all the big social protest movements,

in the Arab world, here in France,
the United States, Berlin,

in Paris, China, Istanbul,
or South America,

Anonymous was in all the major events

that touched populations,
until recently, in France.

Anonymous is really interesting

because it heralds the social debates
of the 21st century.

And these debates
will oppose states, as we've seen,

but also businesses,

since Anonymous is already opposed
to a plethora of businesses.

Here is one of the most well known cases.

Four years before Sony was attacked
by Kim Jong-un and his formidable pirates

(Laughter)

four years before this sad episode

that is easily worth as much as
Saddam Hussein and anthrax combined,

Sony was attacked
by different kinds of enemies,

in what was known as a digital Fukushima.

Sony was attacked by Anonymous,

helped by another
group of hackers, called LulzSec.

And LulzSec followed
a very simple procedure:

they took what used to be, at the time,
Sony's confidential information,

such as credit card numbers,
user names, and passwords,

and they made them public,
allowing endless pirating to happen.

Users on PlayStation Network are like you.

They always use
the same user name and password.

Once I have your user name and password,

I can access anything: the Amazon account,
your Paypal, your company's intranet.

And if you work for the CIA,
this is a serious problem.

This had dramatic consequences for Sony.

Here we see Sony's share price
over a three-month period.

First off we have Fukushima
- this took its toll on their share price-

secondly, there was Anonymous.

Thirdly, the arrival
of the infamous hacker group LulzSec

who in a manner of speaking
instrumentalized Anonymous and the masses.

Compare this to Nikkei, the equivalent
of CAC 40 in the Japanese market,

and you'll see that, first of all,
Sony and Nikkei follow the same trends,

and secondly, well, it all falls apart.

After analysis,

we see Sony has lost 3.5 billion
in its stock market value in this period,

of which two thirds
are attributed to Anonymous.

In the end,

this digital Fukushima will cost Sony
1.7 times the real Fukushima.

That's huge.

And among the things
that deteriorated Sony's value,

right off the bat
we have its brand, the Sony brand.

So let's imagine that brands are valued
in the same way as companies

in the stock exchange.

A business's trademark is a part
of its worth in the stock market,

especially when it is widely known.

Today's problem is
that we are going back to a world

where a company's brand
is its Achilles's heel.

Not counting brands
that already have stock market value,

there is an astronomical quantity of them

whose prices can sometimes reach
ridiculous amounts.

This year, Apple's value
has exceeded 100 billion dollars.

If you take the 100 biggest
brands in the world,

their total worth would be
2.9 trillion dollars:

an enormous bubble.

An enormous bubble
built on the relationship

between brand equity
and confidence equity.

This brand equity is calculated
somewhat scientifically,

astonishingly enough,

using the consistency

between a company's practices
and the value their brand.

And that's what will attack the masses.

And they're going to attack
places we all know well:

Facebook, Twitter, things like that.

All of you have a Facebook account,
maybe a Twitter account, too.

And maybe you've come across
this serendipity, two years ago,

when the Rana Plaza
collapsed in Bangladesh,

killing hundreds
of working women and children,

and among the rubble and bodies
were found Benetton labels,

highlighting the complete inconsistency

between the values of the brand,
and the company's actions.

The trademark disappeared.

30 years of communication thrown away.

You couldn't have missed this serendipity

during the horse meat scandal.

Again, the masses
are armed by serendipity.

And in the Arab world,

you couldn't have missed this serendipity,

lasting all summer,

that provoked a collapse
in Coca-Cola's market shares

in the entire Arab world.

Today's issue is
that businesses are becoming

more and more attached to their brands
in a way that is inspired by Dorian Gray.

On the one hand, we have a brand that is
public, beautiful, young, dynamic.

On the other hand, a company

that's rarely public, rarely young,
and rarely dynamic.

On the one hand, we have values,
on the other, we have habits.

On the one hand, we have a brand's imagery
on the other, we have reality.

On the one hand, we have consumers,

who are imagined abstractions
of publicity agents,

and on the other,
we have citizens, you, me, all of us.

Nobody here can be reduced
to a simple consumer,

at least, not without a serious lobotomy.

(Laughter)

The issue we find ourselves in

is that little by little, this barrier
between public and private,

which we've all seen change with Facebook,
and the adolescents who use it,

this barrier also exists for businesses.

And little by little,

the private domain of a business
is becoming more and more public.

And under the impulse
of the crowd, little by little,

the private workings
of the business will become public.

Today marks the beginning
of a digital revolution,

which will force brands to apprehend
transparency, without fighting against it,

but understanding
and manipulating this transparency,

and taking part of it, one way or another.

The digital revolution will force brands

to interact with the masses,
rather than put up with them.

The digital revolution
will force trademarks

to integrate this famous serendipity.

To make it theirs, not to be victimized.

And finally, the digital revolution
will force brands

to share the imagery
which was once exclusively theirs.

Thank you.

(Applause)