About three years ago I was thinking a lot about brands, consumers and the reasons why they buy things. I started talking about people, not consumers, and gave my clients the advice to treat them as such. People, I said, want to be taken serious. They don't regard themselves as consumers anymore. They care more about their own needs, their passions and their daily lives, than about a glossy advertising world they are confronted with.

From this point on, my research and conclusions about people and brands started spinning towards a new thinking model, which I later called Brand Streams. I began talking about Brand Streams in early 2008 and in a recent article in German I thorroughly explained what Brand Streams are. I used this expression in my presentations and speeches, and it seems that the message found reception, because today I discovered a FriendFeed group called Brand Streaming.

What are Brand Streams?

Here is an excerpt from an upcoming series of articles, which will explain the correlation between Brand Streams, people, experience fields and interaction points:

A Brand Stream emerges when there is not a singular entity involved in the shaping of an image of a brand, but it's also influenced by people participating in the brand experience. Those people become an active part of the brand, passionately defending it and, to a certain degree, even defining its identity.

A recent example of a Brand Stream is the presidential election campaign for Barack Obama, in which the person brand Obama was not only built by the campaign team. Its initial creation was strategically planned and orchestrated by Obama's campaign managers, but it was a chain reaction of factors beyond their direct influence, which were eventually leading to the campaign's successful result.

To understand the working principles of Brand Streams, one has to examine the principles of branding and the liberation of media by consumers. Brand Streams are an entirely new phenomenon, following the basic principles of game theory and networking theory.

More Links about Brand Streams

• Twitter post on May 13, 2009
• Another early definitions of Brand Streams, also on Twitter, on April 20, 2009.
• On March 16, 2009I defined Brand Streams on Twitter

For future reference, please respect the CreativeCommons license when referring to Brand Streams:

Brand Streams by Henning von Vogelsang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at corebasis.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://corebasis.com.