Social media platforms create huge scale. If Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest in the world. When using a social media platform, because there are so many people in one place, a marketer needs to decide something early in their branding strategy. Are we going to have a single brand or are we going to have multiple versions of the same brand?

The classic case of this is how the early car business was called. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford of Ford Motor and Billy Durant of General Motors had to make a decision about the make of the car. They both knew that the preeminent brand in cars would be the company that could produce a low-cost car that the masses could buy. If a single brand were created, it would contain costs. However, people want variety. Henry and Billy branded their products in different ways. His dilemma is the dilemma of the modern social media marketer. Do we go with single or multiple brands for the same product?

The early automobile business is an excellent point of reference because what happened between 1908 and 1928 is a barometer of how modern products develop their brands. In the age of social media, in general, a brand is created in three ways. A product is positioned. Then it is repositioned. Then it is put back. This happened in the automobile business.

Henry Ford made a glowing assessment of the 1908 automobile market. At that time, there was a weak middle class. The people were fighting. Henry Ford himself only paid his workers $0.39 an hour. The creation of a car for the masses depended on one thing – the lowest cost. Henry created the greatest brand of all time, the Model T.

Billy didn’t see this. He created multiple brands at GM. As the market evolved, this assessment turned out to be just as glowing as Henry’s.

By 1923, the market had changed. Now there was a middle class in America. People had disposable income. Albert Sloan, the new CEO of General Motors understood this. People wanted variety and had the ability to pay for it. The car market was now repositioned. A new paradigm had developed in the automobile market. People now bought cars to define their financial status in life. The new market would be based on making cars that people could afford, but low-cost transportation was not the brand’s focus. There was a car for entry level people. There was a car for middle class people. There was also a car for the rich Alfred Sloan coined the phrase “A car for every bag.” This was in contrast to Henry Ford’s 1908 phrase, “you can have any color you want as long as it’s black.” The rich would not buy a poor man’s car.

Henry did not understand this. Ford Motor Company was on the verge of bankruptcy because he did not realize how the markets had evolved. As a rule, in general, individual brands are not effective in the long term. As markets evolve, different versions of a brand are created. In many cases, you enter the market with a single brand and then expand. The best thing about social media is that its scale allows you to monitor the speed of the market. You now have a tool to monitor your markets in real time.

Dean Hambleton

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