For one thing

The fact that human communication cannot be explained as a one-way-street is commonly agreed upon. It is always mutual and therefore does not correspond to the technical transmission of information from a sender to a receiver. However classical advertising still largely pursues that very same strategy, when sending out a message via mass-media expecting that consumers will understand and accept it with no divergence. Advertising therefore takes a top-down-approach in almost all ATL-Media, that consumers increasingly oppose to. The discussion ranges from the hybrid to the unmanageable consumer, from the decline of interruptive marketing to the dawn of participation or engagement marketing.

In my master thesis I act on the assumption, that brands a largely owned by the consumers themselves and not by the big corporations: They possess the power of interpretation concerning the brand’s meaning which is largely defined in their everyday consumption practices and mutual conversations about the brand. In other words, brand advertising is noticed by the consumer (How could they not regarding the media pressure of big budget campaigns!), but decoded and understood in his life context as well as negotiated with other consumers. This collaboration between consumers leeds to brand meanings which sometimes drastically differ from the intended definitions. There are countless cases like communities professed with Barbie, that certainly do not discuss the brand in the sense of the all-america-girl intended by Mattel.With the rising of interactive media consumers are more and more getting involved with the construction of brand meaning. Crowd-sourcing and mass-customization are fields that are inspired by the open-source-phenomenon of the business world. Even in offline-media such consumer-involvement is feasible: Alex Wipperf?ɬºrth elaborates on the case of Red Bull, a brand that heavily relies on BTL-strategies and hardly uses any ATL-campaigns. In my opinion consumer involvement is a huge opportunity to get closer to customers and to regain brand relevance, as long as the collaboration is productively channeled and implies a real value for the consumers themselves.In the course of my master thesis I would like to develop a hands-on approach to collaborative branding that structures consumer-collaboration and that can be used as a tool-set for marketers. The following key-questions will be discussed:

• How linking to the consumer’s life-world can replace or support the interruptive advertising approach. The techniques and mechanisms, that initiate and foster conversation between consumers themselves as well as consumers and companies.
• The exploration of how networking phenomena bring about emergence and swarm intelligence and how those can be used by companies in branding strategies.
• The difference between expert-knowledge (companies and agencies) about the brand and the individual fragmentary opinions of consumers. How is a handling of collaborative networks feasible, that productively channels network dynamics without pressurizing and destroying them.
• How innovation and fresh ideas can be a result of collaboration when taking into account that those are commonly related to creative individuals.
• (One last thing: The master thesis is explicitly not about user-generated-advertising. I regard this controversial subject as one facet of collaborative branding that has to be critically discussed.)