When William L. Sledd, a young manager at GAP in the sleepy town of Paducah, Kentucky, uploaded his first video on YouTube titled “Ask a Gay Man”, neither he nor GAP anticipated the consequences. The eight-minute video features a 23-year-old in the simple setting of his bedroom, sharing fashion advice with users in cyberspace.

Over the years, GAP has been struggling to keep up the pace and has been suffering increasingly sluggish sales. Desperately in need of a boost, the company had been primarily pursuing conventional marketing paths and devoting few resources to viral activities.

William’s amateur video was a shock to everyone, not because of the content, but because of the reaction it generated across North America. For some reason, William caught everyone’s attention. The home-produced video did what no TV commercial for GAP had done for ages: it added an edge to the brand and built the attention it so desperately needed. With close to three million viewers, William’s weekly broadcast quickly became the fourth most-watched channel on YouTube, an achievement which, even in traditional broadcasting, would secure attention at board level. Katie Couric, the celebrity anchor of the CBS Evening News, boasts “only” 2 million more viewers. I guess I don’t need to tell you how “Ask a Gay Man” affected GAP’s sales. Not only that, the GAP store in Paducah has been rumoured to be proceeding with extensive expansion plans.

William’s story is not unique. The fact that consumers, equipped with the knowledge and technology to broadcast their views, run the branding show is evident. The days of brands occupying pedestals, commanding ultimate power over their fates, demanding the trust of consumers, and directing the media are disappearing. All those capacities are transferring from the brand to the consumer as the online world enables a global broadcasting democracy.

Yet, if you ask brands, and the teams behind them, how they have prepared for this social trend, you’re like to be met with blank stares. The decade-old advice given by the likes of Philip Kotler and David Aarker (gentlemen who have done much to inspire me) no longer caters for a society in which the consumer, rather than the corporation, sits in the brand’s driving seat.

Long ago, when the Luciano Pavarotti visited Copenhagen, the excitement across Denmark was palpable. This was his first visit to the country and all the hotels had arranged gala dinners, special events, open-air broadcasts – you name it – all in honour of Mr Pavarotti. You can imagine the nationwide disappointment when Pavarotti, at the last minute, cancelled his performance because of a sore throat. Thousands of shucked oysters, specially created entrées, and exquisite sorbets were ruined along with the good humour of the Danish population. All the positive excitement and energy dissolved in moments.

That was when an idea dawned on my team. We would produce an ad for a popular Danish throat lozenge called Gajol. In just a few hours after the disastrous announcement of Pavarotti’s cancellation, a witty ad was produced – followed by a hasty call to the local manufacturer of Gajol aimed at persuading them to purchase ad space in all major papers. The next day, full-page ads appeared in major papers across the small kingdom: “If only Pavarotti knew about Gajol”, it stated. The ad turned a national cultural disaster into a huge sales advantage for Gajol. Even today, some 15 years later, few Danes forget those ads. Yet the budget for them was equal only to the price of a couple of thousand boxes of Gajol.

I learned a big lesson from this: quick action pays off, especially if you’re well prepared.

However , in 15 years the corporate world has changed a lot. Since then, the profile of the corporate legal departments has become prominent in all decisions; new layers of bureaucracy have formed; prescriptive processes have been reinforced through brand and marketing manuals and guidelines. Controlled behaviours have their place in well-governed businesses, and all these pieces of infrastructure have their role to play. But the other side of the control coin is an undesirable level of restriction. The rules hobble impulsive actions and spontaneous ideas. To put it bluntly, what we did some 15 years ago would probably be impossible today. Too many ‘buts’ and ‘can’t dos’ would have strangled the project at birth.

When Microsoft was required to act on a PR crisis in the United Kingdom, they managed to turn the world’s second-largest corporate machine around in just 48 hours by achieving a response to some blogger’s attack. They were proud of the rapid response because such a reaction would normally have taken at least one week to launch. Yet, ironically, as speedy as Microsoft thought its response to be, it was slow in the world of blogging. If Microsoft’s response had been truly powerful it should have taken 48 minutes to produce – at most. An impossibility, I’m sure, for the Microsoft of the world. But spontaneity is the new name of the new game – a game in which “instant” has become an attribute of brand survivor as well as the consumer’s advantage against the corporations.

Remember Gene Hackman’s advice to Will Smith in the movie ‘Enemy of the State’? After realizing the U.S. government is against them both he says, “Turn the strength of the enemy into their weakness.” If the corporation has a large army, it’s inflexible and slow. The script could have been written for the blogger versus corporate battle. Because, if there’s something corporations aren’t, it’s flexible and quick. Yet, ironically, where the biggest opportunities lie is in the few minutes of opportunity that are present after some announcement has hit the net – or rather, the world.

So what’s the solution? Here’s an idea. Some years ago, the concept of a somatic marker was identified by a professor in Portugal. The somatic marker is a place in our brain which establishes itself as a mark – a bookmark, if you like – whenever something dramatic happens in our lives. The somatic markers for such events never leave us and ensure we never forget the lessons attached to such situations. The somatic marker provides the brain with a mechanism for taking millions of pieces of data and interpreting them as a rapid response, ensuring that, if you fall victim again to a similar situation, you won’t have to go through an exhaustive thought process to decide on your action. Your brain kicks into auto-pilot and drives your actions to avoid danger. We call these responses instinctive. In reality, the somatic marker provides a shortcut from problem A to solution B in the quickest and safest way. And that’s exactly what companies need to do. Install a somatic marker for your brand – a shortcut to bypass unnecessary bureaucracy.

Your brand’s somatic marker could come in the form of a small team whose members read the press carefully, and maintain a watching brief on selected blogs and chat rooms. They’d keep up this surveillance while scanning for brand opportunities, just as my team identified with the Pavarotti-inspired Gajol ad. When the team identifies a story that implies branding opportunities, its members should immediately meet and assess how to leverage it from a brand building point of view. The group must have a mandate to make decisions and act, and be able to come to actionable and creative conclusions in a couple of hours whenever required.

Every day small PR disasters happen. According to an ACNielsen survey, the main reason for them is unpreparedness. If a corporation is unprepared, it’s in a passive position, and a passive response to disaster is a slow response.

With every consumer equipped with a TV broadcast station in their own home, your brand is a guaranteed feature on their channel sooner rather than later. Their broadcast could be good, or just as likely, could give your brand a pasting. Time is the essence. The better you’re prepared for a quick turnaround, the better you are able to secure coverage and respect among your customers. And the better armed you are against potentially disastrous consumer coverage. Put simply, the consumer world will not wait for a corporate response that’s hobbled by political correctness and delayed by bureaucracy.