Evelyn Rodriguez looks into the debate about brand = promise versus brand = invitation, based on various discussions from last week's New Communications Forum:

[from An Invitation to Purpose-Driven Marketing]

During the Branding and Blogging Panel, Stowe Boyd speaks up from the audience reiterating his stance, "A brand isn't a promise, it's an invitation."

The brand is a promise and the brand is an invitation debate rear its head again.

Marketers and corporate communicators alike are inquiring into this 'belonging' need. Andy Lark's insightful keynote (in my opinion, it was hands down the best session in four days of business blog conferencing, BBS and NCF inclusive [I agree]; slides here) contemplates the disruptively massive changes in media and communications and asks us if something deeper is going on. "People are wanting to be part of a community, wanting to belong, wanting to join." In many ways. he says, Fast Company's founding premise was prescient, "We are declaring: 'I want to be part of something more meaningful.'" And there is a world of difference in communicating to an audience (transmit) and a community (engage and participate).

This is not just another way of looking at self-identification by class, or economic bracket, or being in the in crowd. It is a direct expression of an emergent, bottom-up exploration of our relationships to each other and our purpose in the world, where the goods and services we acquire and apply become a medium, in effect, where we interact with others.

Perhaps no better example of this invitational branding exists than the iPod, where we can not only share the superficial association of being cool, but the way that the product has grown to create a world of shared experience: I can share my playlists with my friends and the wide world, I can post the last song I played on my IM status, and, now, the new trend of spontaneous iPodjacking.

In the future, all commerce, and all brands, will have to become totally socialized to be viable.