The latest issue of AdEdge Magazine, Pana’s official publication, highlights innovative brand-selling ideas and fearless marketing techniques. It showcases inspiring stories of reinvention and new strategies to make brands stronger.

Featured are car firms Lexus, Mitsubishi, Hyundai and Suzuki, and their fearless ideas of brand strengthening despite facing recession and competition. Geo Estates’ big boss, Francisco Licuanan III, tells how luck, hard work and determination made him one of today’s most successful entrepreneurs in the real-estate industry.

Make a misstep at the beginning and you can create a domino effect that you may not able to recover from. The quality of polish and professionalism displayed when executing your business events will directly determine the level of return that you receive on your investment and affect to what degree your company objectives are met. Bubuwit was tipped off that one company’s executives who were in charge of handling their biggest event of the year were publicly embarrassed, their reputation in jeopardy by placing responsibility and accountability on untrained and unskilled hands without proper preparation, guidance and direction, and the company up for failure.

There is no place for “marketing gurus” anymore, just enlightened human beings who market. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in the very near future there will be no longer brands, merely reflections of consumers’ lives and value sets manifest through marketing style and corporate infrastructure. For a philosophy based on quick fixes and illusion, branding has gone further than anyone imagined. Companies once turned to advertising and marketing firms to spread the word about a new product or service. But over the past 15 years or so, even some of the most established advertising firms have begun calling themselves as “brand specialists.” Whereas advertisers and marketers tend to reach out to broadcast a message, branders often begin by reaching in—attempting to realign the business and resculpt the corporate psyche.

By virtue of their access and influence, branders wind up assuming far greater roles than the advertisers and marketers who preceded them. Where an advertising firm might attempt to understand a company’s mission and communicate those ideas to consumers in a palatable way, the modern branding firm will often turn the process on his head, reworking the fundamental ideas and values upon which the company has operated for years with an eye toward giving consumers what they want to hear at that moment. Branding has gradually superseded the advertising industry, either claiming advertising outright or dictating the messages that advertisers are allowed to deliver. Increasingly, marketing has also become a division of branding.

“Many executives are so focused on the strength of the all-encompassing idea—the brand—that they ignore the physical properties that compose it,” Ian Rowden, chairman and CEO for Asia Pacific of Saatchi & Saatchi, told this columnist, during the top brass visit in the country for the 60th anniversary of local unit Ace Saatchi & Saatchi. Rowden leads 17 countries, 20 offices and over 1,500 employees. A 20-year marketing veteran with a career spanning four continents, he was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Achievement in 1999.

“Lovemarks” is the doctrine at Saatchi & Saatchi. Kevin Roberts, perhaps the most widely recognized and powerful personality in advertising today, is Saatchi’s outspoken worldwide CEO—a figure reviled and revered for his brash opinions, unorthodox strategies and penchant for theatrics. Two years ago, this columnist had the privileged to hold a one-on-one interview with him at the Global Brand Forum in Singapore. His belief in “loyalty beyond reason,” the underlying phenomenon whereby customers are so enamored with a brand that they ignored price, convenience and competitor parity. To reach this ideal state, Roberts counsels his clients to court consumers in such a way that the later abandon their critical thinking skills. Roberts understands consumer behavior as an emotive, rather than rational, response. In his world, “changing the language” is the equivalent of changing a conversation. In other words, the path to a promised land for brands isn’t merchandise or ministration, but marketing.

Are consumers so gullible that emotional manipulation will overwhelm their innate reason and logic? Science supports Roberts’s position. Emotion has been shown to activate the brain 3,000 times faster than regular thought, and studies in consumer behavior indicate that shoppers are willing to pay more when their decision is based on emotion rather than reason. “We are the lovemarks company. We stand for proposition that has indelible strength with consumers. We have most recently redefined what a lovemark is in the consumer world that is much more value-driven because consumers demand much more for less today,” Rowden furthered.

“The days of the brand economy where brands spoke to consumers or the attraction economy where brands were trying to attract consumers have long gone. We haven’t even begun to realize this in many facets around the world yet because we still talk about living in the attraction economy market. [That economy is gone.] The economy, I believe we are in now, is a different economy. What we’re building now is communicating and building relationships with consumers. That’s a whole different thing,” stressed regional CEO for Saatchi & Saatchi Patrick Brett in an interview.

Compared with the widespread unblinking of the past, more and more people began to turn off, skip past, or tune out mentally. There are no mass consumers anymore, and people don’t act just because someone tells them something. We are rapidly moving away from the “attention economy,” where brand marketing is about grabbing attention, to an “attraction economy,” where engagement, involvement and participation are now the name of the game.

So the best and the brightest of today’s marketers are following this strategy: Lovemarks Community Marketing—a new brand-building approach from Saatchi & Saatchi leveraging on the social network mindset. A marketing strategy that take these steps in this direction can make a deeper impression than advertising claims that skitter across the surface of the mind.

“Let’s not get hung up on traditional versus nontraditional, digital versus interactive, below-the-line versus above-the-line—that’s all language that consumers don’t care about because they are so far ahead of us [in this game] that they can look at us and say, what are you [people] up to?” asked Rowden.

“Because if we think in terms of solutions [which we encourage our people to do], providing solutions for our clients through consumers and building relationships—now, you have that established relationship and being prepared to let consumers managed that [relationship],” Brett added.

According to regional executive creative director for Southeast Asia of Saatchi & Saatchi Andy Greenaway, many marketers approach the online world with an old world, broadcast mentality, interrupting people’s Internet time. “Today we find that brands must attract people rather than try to grab their attentions and push messages out to them. It just doesn’t work that way anymore.”

Studies by global advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi shows that most digital advertising efforts are not effective because they are not implemented properly. This despite the potential of marketing brands on the Web. There are over one billion Internet users worldwide, of which about 437 million are in the Asia-Pacific region. In the Philippines alone, there are over 23 million Internet users, with Internet use in the Philippines increasing by over 20 percent in the last seven years.

He said that most online ads, which consist of banner ads on Web pages and ads on social networking sites and search engines, only have a 0.15-percent average response rate, or the ratio of positive responses or unique hits in relation to the number of times the ad was exposed. The study further found that 90 percent of respondents are unqualified or not the advertisement’s target market.

He noted that online advertising must be purposeful, and attract consumers to the brand. “The idea is to create what we call a happening, it can be an event, a hook or a movement that galvanizes and attracts people online.” That’s how consumer attraction is caught today.

“The future is actually screens. I wouldn’t be surprised that 10 years from now, your newspaper will be available in kindle. That’s where it’s heading. Kindle is a visual medium so you’ll see living images within a newspaper. They’re already doing it in the US. Ten years from now, every newspaper in the world will either be on a tablet device or some kind of a platform,” Greenaway explained.

Indifference, after all, is the intent of “loyalty beyond reason”—a cleverly worded corporate battle cry for shortcutting critical thinking with emotion and lulling consumers into passivity. When we recognize that brands are courting our impulsive emotions, we can pause and consider the role of logic in the equation.

Saatchi & Saatchi is one of the world’s largest and most creative advertising networks. In the Philippines, the Saatchi network is represented by Ace Saatchi & Saatchi.