The original 1947 production of Miracle on 34th Street (the only version worth watching) features the great Thelma Ritter in her first major motion picture role, in a scene that, amidst all the sentiment in the movie, is often under-appreciated for being the climactic depiction in a series of scenes about the actual miracle that occurs on 34th Street: Major retail brands telling their customers to go elsewhere for the right product to suit their needs.

Did story author Valentine Davies have a premonition of Internet transparency and the consultative power of social media? He might as well have. As characterized in Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus is the ultimate 21st century brand: an expert adviser displaying not only an intimate knowledge of the customer but an ability to literally speak the customer’s language (the tear-inducing moment without which the film would not have the heart connection it does). The source of the customer solution is immaterial, and Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) even says so:

KRIS
The only important thing is to make the children happy. Who
sells the toy doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you feel that way?

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Who, me? Oh, yeah, sure. Only, I didn’t know Macy’s did.

The use of two real-life retail brands in the picture, Macy’s and Gimbels (it’s rival across the street, closed in 1986), gave studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox a real-life challenge: They had to agree to screen the finished film to both department stores, and if either did not approve, the film would have to be reworked to their specifications, potentially causing cause significant delays and additional expense. Fortunately for the studio, both Macy’s and Gimbels were delighted with the final product.

In Miracle on 34th Street, the spirit of Christmas is evidenced in the way corporate interests are subjugated to the needs of the consumer for the sake of, well, corporate interests. It’s a lesson from which many brands could still benefit, even as the digital marketplace makes customer needs and the advisory role more prevalent and powerful than ever before.

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Pardon me. The guard said to speak to  you. You’re the head of the toy department?

SHELLHAMMER
Yes, madam…

WOMAN CUSTOMER
Listen: I want to congratulate you and Macy’s on this wonderful new stunt you’re
pulling. Imagine, sending people to other stores. I don’t get it. Why, it’s…

SHELLHAMMER
It certainly is…

WOMAN CUSTOMER
You said it. Imagine a big outfit like Macy’s putting the  spirit of Christmas ahead of
the commercial. It’s wonderful. I never done much shopping here before, but from
now on, I’m going to be a regular Macy customer.

SHELLHAMMER
(dumbstruck)
Thank you, madam…

In a way, social media and the virtual marketplace are returning us to a time before the advent of the brand itself.

Before the industrial revolution, products and services were associated with people rather than with organizations. The qualities and values brought to the marketplace by individuals — tradesmen, shopkeepers, builders, tavern owners –  were as much personal attributes as they were professional ones. Indeed, businesses were commonly co-located with residences, with the shop on the street and the home above or in back.  The geographical separation from work life was a distinctly modern idea, brought on by the arrival of the factory, and by the growth of business districts that were the habitat of men; women and children were sequestered uptown or in the suburbs. Even the concept of an employee was rooted in the notion of apprenticeship, which implied not the formation of a group identity, but a combination of service and education leading to a single proprietorship. In modern parlance: The individual was the brand.

The industrial revolution altered what had for thousands of years been the human construct for the transaction of business, and what set the foundation for what is now being upended by the social media revolution (it’s no wonder that steampunk culture is so popular with the digital gamechangers). In the late 19th century marketplace, identity became increasingly associated with an idea rather than with a person. At first, this idea was represented by a label, a corporate identity, a recognizable symbol of quality and consistency — the paramount attributes of mass production. Then, with the advent of mass, one-way media, this “label” evolved into a much more comprehensive set of ideas and associations — functional, emotional, and self-expressive. This 20th century notion of The Brand reached its zenith in the 1990s, with reams of books and consulting firms advising businesses on the vast and sometimes esoteric aspects of brand strategy.

Ironically, the promise of today’s social media revolution, with its multidimensional forms of broadcast and connectivity, was already in place in the 1990s (albeit in somewhat rudimentary form) on “solid state” services such as CompuServe and America Online. Similar to today’s social networking platforms, these were closed systems. As such, they could offer many of the collaborative features that the initially flat, open-source environment of the Web could not. The transition to the Web was exciting from the standpoint of access and reach, but it took another decade before the confluence of technology and adoption actually delivered on the early implications.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital media revolution is the way in which the empowerment of the individual is changing the very concept of brand as defined so exhaustively at the end of the millennium. In a business context, the access and proximity to individuals facilitated by virtual connectivity is effectively placing people in a position at least commensurate with the once-lauded brand idea. This represents a clear challenge to many of the established principles of branding, particularly and especially around the rigid adherence to representational consistency, one of the earliest and deeply-rooted tenets of brand strategy. There is no better symbolic illustration of this evolution than the vast array of icon permutations for the social networking brands themselves.

And then, of course, there is one other brand that not only embraces the individuation of its identity, but instigates and celebrates it.

The difference in user profile set-ups on Google and Yahoo is pronounced, and highlights the contrast between brands that get it and brands that don’t.

The first major difference one encounters is that Yahoo requires a birth date. Now, many people are sensitive about supplying their birth date, not only because of age sensitivity (and Yahoo! provides no advance notice that public display of the information is optional), but because of identity theft and other security concerns. Brands looking to advocate the de-cloaking that encourages legitimate personal and professional socialization online should communicate an understanding of security issues and give people a stronger sense of comfort about personal information use.

If you leave the birth date field blank — or even if you attempt to leave out just the year (as if Yahoo! merely wants to send you an e-card on your birthday) — you are informed, complete with a warning icon and an angry red font, that “your full birthday is required.” As you complete this field, a seemingly reassuring message appears beside the entry claiming, “Knowing your birthday lets Yahoo! provide you with a better experience.” Oh, sure. It’s for my benefit… I’m not even halfway through the registration procedure and I already know that Yahoo! is full of crap. If you’re going to provide such a dubious rationale, at least use it as an inducement to fill out an optional field. Then I might buy it.

Google doesn’t even ask for a birth date. (Of course, Google probably has algorithms in place such that after a short period of activity tracking, they can pinpoint not only my date of birth but the time, the hospital, and the name of the attending nurse.)

But the biggest differences in the sign-up sequence is in the degrees of personalization offered the user in the actual profile section. Although Yahoo! is forced to to accommodate digital behemoths by enabling a user’s twitter feed display, for example, it is readily apparent from what is highlighted that Yahoo! wants to encourage users to update, share, and blog directly from the Yahoo! platform itself. There is no enabling for either WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress feeds, for example, and — in a miss that seems inexplicable even for Yahoo! — no way to even post simple links to any of your other online locations. As is almost always the case with these kinds of inane decisions, there is an obvious but inelegant workaround: Use the Yahoo! sponsored blogging element to post a link to your real blog. The thing of it is: Transparency exists whether brands acknowledge it or not, and the fact that Yahoo!’s preferences are so obviously prioritized over the user’s preferences is plainly and painfully evident.

Google’s profile set-up is a different animal altogether. It has the feel of an open source platform: options instead of requirements; fewer barriers to completion (Yahoo! has not one but two required password recovery questions, plus a captcha code verification). The display area of the Google profile offers the freedom to post links in a simple and well-organized manner. A series of optional questions  also convey a bit of brand personality (“What is your superpower?”), even as they deliver a clear message that your personality is what is valued. Good stuff.

Which approach to the user is likely to succeed over the long term?

When it comes to what is valued, respected, and trusted online, any missed opportunity for user empowerment is a ding on the brand. Transparency and authenticity are not just about resisting the old-school inclinations for hyperbole or pretense, “keeping it real” also means extending to the user, in the form of functional options, an acknowledgment that their choices are vast and only a click away. Any brand that tries to limit user options for the sake of “protecting the brand” — failing, in other words, to not only recognize but facilitate access to potential competitors — is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Users don’t get angry at these naive tactics so much as they pity them.

And clueless is not a particularly valuable brand attribute.

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Why did it seem like a natural opportunity to place advertising in smart phone apps (short for applications, of course) when for over 20 years of desktop applications nary a single ad banner appeared? The majority of smart phone apps are more about content and special interests than about the business-oriented heavy lifting of spreadsheets, word processing, project management, or graphic design, but the semantic line has now been crossed: Applications contain ads.

Certainly part of the historical barrier lay in technology itself: The absence of APIs or similar source-driven update functionality was a high wall. At one time, desktop applications didn’t even have self-prompted version updates (oh, for a return to the user experience of Word 97). Today, persistent connection and constant updating is one of the most powerful features of information technology, and it won’t be long before “disconnected” desktop applications feel segregated from the rest of the world. The lack of collaboration opportunity alone will drive the desktop application into…

The cloud.

Ah, the cloud. The fluffy migration that will undoubtedly be a boon to marketers: constant connection, direct eyeball access, a single click away from engagement. It won’t happen all at once, of course. Adoption — getting people accustomed to the idea of their work product residing somewhere other than in their very own machines — would only be jeopardized by the an initial confrontation with ads. But it will happen. As applications of all kinds, heavy lifting or otherwise, take up residence in the cloud, the advertising opportunities will become irresistible.

As someone captivated by semiotics, the contemplation of what is happening to the @ symbol as a result of Twitter is fascinating to me.

For centuries a mark that designated the relationship between quantity and price — 24 pomegranates @ $.12ea — the symbol was appropriated (reportedly from monks in the Middle Ages seeking greater pen-stroke efficiency for “at”) by Ray Tomlinson in 1972 for the purpose of sending individual messages from one computer to another.  Like many of the Internet founders, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor, and selected the symbol from a keyboard display. For anyone using Internet standards thereafter, it was simply a matter of designating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer.

Employed in this fashion, individual users are associated with a particular location. Even if that location is essentially virtual, there is nevertheless a tether to a particular domain — communication is exchanged between people residing “@” a specific virtual place. Indeed written messages are sent, as they have been for thousands of years, to an address where a person is presumed to be. Now, however, we are starting to see what may someday amount to a paradigm shift.

The use of the @ symbol in front of a name instead of an address — @rpgranger, my own Twitter designation — suddenly removes the address altogether. It doesn’t matter where I am. I no longer have any direct association with a location, virtual or otherwise. I am the destination. Even if the technical aspects of this shift are not as profound (it only requires being inside a closed system, or networked with other closed systems), the symbolic and metaphorical change is unmistakable. It represents an evolution into a world where not only physical but even virtual location is irrelevant, and where domain (and, potentially, brand) association can be marginalized or even eliminated altogether.

The further empowering of the individual in digital media presents both exciting opportunities and unusual new challenges for marketers. On the one hand, sales efforts — especially on the b2b side — can become more direct and personal, leveraging values that have long been identified as critical to complex transactions. On the other hand, the ubiquity of the brand can be easily lost without the corporate associations and controls that have been in place since the advent of mass media.

More than at any other time in history, @ is evolving to mean that which is directed toward an individual rather than toward an address. What may be most intriguing about this progression from a metaphorical standpoint — and a possible balm to brand managers — is not what this new permutation contains but what it’s missing. Where once the there used to be a name in front of the @ symbol, there is now a new and alluring emphasis on the message that goes in blank space in front of it. And we all know what advertisers do with blank spaces.