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At the end of last year Simon Mainwaring wrote a fascinating article which posited meaning as being the new measure of a brand’s success. In 1964 Marshal McLuhan had made the famous statement “The medium is the message”. More recently Stowe Boyd stated “Meaning is the new search”. Now Mainwaring goes beyond that to suggest that “Meaning is media”.

As Mainwaring put it, the core issue is that traditional media silos no longer control content generation, and these days consumers are looking for meaning in content in many new and different places. As such, meaning must replace media as the lens through which we view the consumer landscape.

In a sense there’s nothing new here – everything that ‘matters’ in our world still revolves around generating ‘relevant differentiation’ for consumers.

But there is a new bit: It’s that consumers will increasingly decide what’s relevant to them according to stuff they hear and are exposed to in their lives, rather than just what’s piped through to them via managed media and controlled campaigns.

And the significance of that is that relevant differentiation will increasingly be generated around messages which aren’t so limited to what matters within a given brand’s immediate category context. Things in the ‘real’ world will come to matter more. Stuff relating to people, not just to consumers.

So the smart brands will work to establish meaning that goes beyond their categories, is unique to them, and relevant and compelling to their audience.

Nike’s Stefan Olander put it nicely when he said “If we can do something good for someone, no matter the product, it’s going to be good for us.”