How do trust networks affect the production of information?

The term brand estate updates a model espoused by Cardinal Richelieu in 17th century France. He described society in terms of six “estates”: the king and aristocracy, the church, the military, writers and journalists, merchants and trades, and the peasants. Richelieu stands as one of the first political theorists to understand the power of the fourth estate (writers and journalists) to shape political will and societal acquiescence to the rule of law.

The New Fourth Estate: Bloggers, Emailers, Flash Mobsters, Forum Participants, IMing Textsters, Podcasters, Video-sharing “Little Brother”

As members of trust networks interact with one another, they will not only exert political and economic power comparable to that of the press—the fourth estate—but will also become primary knowledge-insight sources about which products or services to buy, supplanting the traditional function of marketing and corporate communications.

As illustrated in the figure above, in the Networked Economy, the trust networks that coalesce around each brand wield the kind of influence on brand producer firms that the journalists of the fourth estate exert on governments.

Wired college students in the United States, for example, agitate for companies that produce school-branded apparel to respect the rights of workers and indigenous people and their ecosystems and to eliminate sweatshop practices in their overseas manufacturing operations. Their action has had a tangible effect on the operations of Nike and other apparel manufacturers. Other brands have begun to feel the wrath of the brand estate for their lack of employment diversity (Coca-Cola), for their environmental and nutrition policies (McDonald’s), and so on through a broad spectrum of issues of concern.

The brand estate and its component trust networks center on the brand. A deeper understanding of the brand estate’s power leads us to suggest a radical reinterpretation of brands and how to build them—brands that harness the organizing principle of trust networks and optimize a business for success in the Networked Economy.

Brands must become collaborative expressions with customers and other stakeholders. They must not only become fully interactive, but they must also deliver new satisfactions, principally through self-service satisfactions initiated by customers and other stakeholders. This means every company must develop a Networked Business Model, become an interactive corporation, and deploy a technical infrastructure uniquely adapted to the rigors of 24/7 global eBusiness processes.