Who controls a brands vibe? Is it what the company says it is, or what the public says it is? This is the basis of the website Brandtags.com. The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.
The Harley Davidson brand looks closely aligned in corporate and public meaning. Other brands are not so successful.
Let’s make the work week suck 20% less!
A plan we can quickly endorse. No doubt the work of our buddy Dylan - promo/web guru at Yakima. On-line/off-line promotion at its best.
Dylan with the Pope
A study by the Luxury Institute, reveals that 6 in 10 wealthy consumers use social networks on a regular basis. No longer just a MySpace, youth driven on-line media channel; social nets are pulling in the wealthy at a dramatic pace.
I guess this should indicate continued e-commerce growth and provide major opportunity and support for ad agencies to divert customer funds on-line. Hopefully the “social media” will keep things under control - and self-police the marketing (read: Facebook Beacon).
Networks such as LinkedIn have done a great job of keeping pages “clean” and without MySpace style page clutter. But time will tell, as the “participatory web” community members become desensitized to the brand messages. The “Wealthy” in this report has been identified as those with an average income of $287K and average net worth of $2.1 million (Source: Luxury Institute).
Let’s hope we can keep golf (and anything associated with golf) off-line as luxury brand marketers design interactive strategies to reach the social elite.
Original article from MarketingVox.com
Fast Company did an article in Feb titled “Is The Tipping Point Toast?” - putting Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point under fire. Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist working at Yahoo has performed a number of experiments challenging the Tipping Point theory. Overall the article is an interesting read - but full of many “no shit” points.
Seems like the biggest trend is to grab hold of some “silver pill” philosophy with the hopes that it will launch that “shitty product” that nobody seems to want. Come on - what happend to brand “Touch Points”??? There are no short cuts and spreading a message is quite different than motivating a sale.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
The Information Architects from Japan have put together a very nice visualization map of the 300 most influential websites. To create the mashup, IA took the sites and pinned them down to the Tokyo area train map. I had been playing with version 2.0 for a little while, and they already have the new, updated 3.0 version. The key change on V3 is that they featured the most influential websites - regardless of category.
Check out the clickable on-line version with live links to each site.
Version 2 was a layout of sites based on category.
All the V2 details are on the IA site.
Visualizing complex networks is challenging and the folks at Visualcomplexity.com are striving to be the one source place for anyone looking for information on the subject.
The Ford Modeling agency is featured in the new Inc. magazine - with a great article about how they have leveraged YouTube video for company exposure. After creating a number of high quality videos, the agency found that they had created a new media category “organic product integration” - as they call it. Ford partners with (sells placement) fashion brands for “organic” use of products - and discussion, by the models. The videos are getting tons of hits which means big dollars to the media owners; Ford. What a sweet twist on traditional channel strategy. They already have the hot models - so they create, sell, market, and own the distributed content.
The video topic got me searching for some other unique new media uses, and examples of higher quality uploads (not that the normal bike face plant on YouTube isn’t sweet) - and I came across a killer flick on Vimeo.
Very cool.
Advertising Age has announced some trends to watch in 2008. The one that jumps out is strategic alignment, which will be crucial to new media success.
THE POWER OF STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT: Marketers succeed when brand messages are fully integrated and synchronized across all media channels. That requires strategic alignment — leadership that ties everything together — particularly when the forces of change can potentially pull them apart. Strategic alignment is one of the most important roles of the chief marketing officer, and In 2008 more CMOs will ensure organizations are strategically aligned. Lead agencies will be appointed to make sure all supporting agencies carry out the same brand message.
There has been a lot of media focus on our state over the last few days, as the Presidential campaign trail made its way through Michigan. Now this may be the first and last time I ever post about politics - but it hard to ignore the subject when your right in the middle of it. The major point point of interest here, is the platform that Republican John McCain was preaching in our state. Call it realistic or what, but it is suicide to promote that “Michigan is hurting” and that “manufacturing jobs are not coming back”. Misery does not always love company.
All the T.V. analysts thought it was a great approach - that somehow we would all relate to the message and jump on board. The only person that thought it was suicide was Joe Scarborough, and on his “Morning Joe” show stated that he thought the approach was crazy. Mitt Romney took the side of optimism and told the state that good change is on the way. A no-brainer strategy to me.
Michigan is a little depressed - but maybe its because the sun comes out once every 10 days. Or because we are the laziest State in the Country, and people just need to get outside and play once in a while. Or, perhaps, it is because our manufacturing industry is drying up, which has people moving out of faster than any other state. What do we do? I say “Innovate or Die”. It is time to re-tool the manufacturing base and focus on technology integration across multiple industries and media channels. There are amazing engineers, designers, tool and die, fabricators, etc. - in this state - and we just need to figure out a new way of utilizing their skills. Web 2.0/New Media - merging with Manufacturing/Engineering to create a hybrid industry?
Sounds like a pretty go mashup to me.
