Brand Manager’s Obsession for Brands: Today, with emergence of Internet, the current generation of brand managers and marketers finds themselves in a challenging situation. On one hand they are finding hard to lose their love for creating brands 
but on other hand they are also finding hard to keep their brand live and relevant in digital space.
In past years, Advertising become Brand centric and mostly made to connect with consumers emotionally and talking about product USPs became less of priority. Large number of creators of advertising started believing that, they can WIN hearts of consumers, if they drive their brand communication on high emotional grounds. This was emergence of Brand Idea lead advertising, where product started taking a back seat.
The current forms of advertising are interruption based advertising, which works on Opportunity to See (or in advertising language – frequency). In simple words – marketer tries to interrupts consumer in what he/ she is doing to communicate the brand message. You are watching your favorite program on TV and you are interrupted and bombarded with advertising, you are 
driving on road and your attention is drawn to full blown Billboard / hoarding, you are listening to most liked Radio Jockey and you are interrupted with jingles and so is done by using other mediums. Brand Manager’s idea is to make consumer see the advertisement of advertised brand as many times. It is expected that this will increase the consumer intent to purchase the product and while shopping in store, the consumer ends up picking the advertised product from the shelves. In a nut shell idea is to capture the Captive Audience. Nothing wrong with this…?
The problem became complex for Brand Managers with emergence of Digital Era and where in they found themselves in a position of losing control on Captive Audience. Marketers can’t anymore interrupt their consumers in web space when they want, but than hoping that consumer will notice and react on content which they are showcasing on the page which is open in front of the consumer. Internet has made consumers once again the KING. Now consumer can chose what he want to read, see, comment or even omit their frustration about anything which is not liked by them.
By now it is also known that people surf net for information, entertainment or for social networking. And no wonder that’s why they have a very low involvement, when they see any brand name. No wonder when compared with other website, brand related websites are hardly able to draw traffic and its hard to keep consumers hooked or coming back in the name of a brand.
Second big problem is that most of the marketers, specially FMCG sector doesn’t have the clear idea on how various websites, blogs, twitter or Facebook works or functions and can help Brand Managers in building brands in long terms and that too also without specifically talking about the brands? How a Marketer can leverage the third party resources in web space which are not controlled or moderated by them? So in the absence this expertise it becomes tough for Brand Manager to comprehend the right action plan for their brands.
So, where this takes to a Brand Managers, who has been so far obsesses with their brands and clueless on way forward in digital space? How the big Brand Idea will remain relevant on web? What will happen to brand personality, which a marketer had tried creating around the brand for last many year?
These are the some of the questions, which only will get answered with time. But one thing is sure that web space will grow in spite of all the apprehensions and numbers are increasing with everyday. And that brand managers will be required to migrate slowly and gradually to digital space.
