Un-marketing and cultural relevance
What’s the value to a brand of producing or helping to produce something that is an experience first and a branded advertisement or promotion second? For example, what does the Cartoon Network get by lending their most popular assets to the indie hip hop duo Danger Doom? The album doesn’t have the Adult Swim or Cartoon Network logos plastered all over it, so what’s the value? Traditional marketing would consider this either a squandered opportunity to forcefully and definitively raise brand awareness or, more likely, a dangerous loss of image control.
Recently, some marketers and theorists have realized that brands are as much cultural entities as business entities. For better or worse, brands have places in people’s lives beyond the real value of the commodity or service on offer and this place in folks’ lives is where much of a brand’s value resides. In other words, beyond the product being actually relevant, the brand, or the way the value of the product or service is communicated by the company, had better be culturally relevant.
Consumers are increasingly marketing-resistant these days. This resistance is probably a natural effect of overexposure or increased media sophistication or, probably, both. Traditional, force-fed marketing tactics are proving less and less successful. Marketers can’t simply assume that consumers will follow wherever the brand leads. In the eyes of many consumers, brands suffer from a serious lack of “authenticity”. A powerful way to address this perception is getting your brand into culturally relevant areas without alienating the increasingly marketing-wary consumer.
Allowing the well-regarded duo Danger Doom to use their voice talent and characters does just that for the Cartoon Network. The album doesn’t come across as an advertisement so much as a cultural reference. It’s not a marketing ploy so much as an experience that essentially uses branded assets. Letting artists use Cartoon Network assets without demanding a stifling and heavy-handed overlay of traditional marketing increases both brand exposure and the overall perception of the brand’s cultural authenticity; they aided highly relevant (to their market) artists in the production of a culturally relevant artifact. Where’s the downside of this sort of smart and targeted patronage? In many cases, there doesn’t appear to be a downside, but it’s still a battle getting entrenched and stodgy (scared?) marketers to see that today’s jaded and attention-slim consumers just don’t respond to the old ways.
Macromedia Hearts M5
Thank you Macromedia. You were kind enough to pick Coca-Cola's M5 as your site of the day.
Peek Behind the Scenes at the team that created the site.
Leaf On Your Shirt
Trees do it. Coca-Cola's M5 does it. Some other projects wearecurrentlhyworkingonbutcan'ttalkabout do it. Our annual T-Shirt does it.
Let's do it.
Let's shake our leaves.
Time's Quest for M5
M5 has just bubbled up to TIME magazine.
"The [Coca-Cola] company is showing some new verve, assembling an international team of marketing specialists to create what it hopes will become the shiny embodiment of liquid cool."
Read the whole article:
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Reacting to brand-reactionaries...
“Brand” is one of those words like “paradigm” or “interaction” that gets thoughtlessly thrown around so much that its content and value begins to wear thin. When this happens, the reactionary curmudgeons out there invariably roll their eyes, cry “pretentious” and claim that it was an empty word to begin with. Sometimes this comes down to a real frustration with loose, largely vacuous talk. Often it’s a desire to simply be in on the next big thing early. Ultimately, though, people just love being the first to shout “The Emperor’s naked!”
The inevitable reaction to the whole idea of “the brand” as something over and above your product has begun in earnest. The gist of the reaction is a return to the old identification of the brand with product (commodity?) quality. By this account brands aren’t consumer ideas or DNA or essences or stories or vehicles for consumer self-expression, etc. Rather, a brand’s only as good as its product and that’s that; any brand equity it might have is a result of and identified with whatever it is that’s actually produced.
Frankly, I agree that the use of the word “brand” is getting out of hand. Most of the time it’s simply a catchall for those tough to quantify or seemingly immaterial aspects of your commercial worth. However, just because the word’s getting a little stretched out of shape through rough use, that doesn’t mean that it’s not an important or real feature of the commercial landscape. Though tied inextricably to your product or service, brands most definitely ARE something beyond your material product or service.
To be sure, offering a materially relevant, quality product has an immense impact on your brand’s strength. However, of two equally relevant products of identical high quality, the one that engages consumers at a deeper level or with greater cultural authority will be the one that sells better. Maybe it even sells at a premium.
To suppose that rational consideration of real value wholly governs consumption is to commit the same error that many usability advocates commit. Human animals, as a matter of evolution, just aren’t wholly rational. People’s engagement with the world is only partially governed by rationality. Most of our interactions, reactions and decisions are the result of what Don Norman has taken to calling “affective information processing”. Before most “perceptual data” works its way up to the level of awareness, there has already been a gut reaction or affective response. Affective processing considers things like aesthetics, quality of interaction, “professionalism”, etc, i.e. all those tough to quantify bells and whistles that are only supposed to negatively affect usability. Recent research has shown, however, that the situation isn’t quite so clear cut. Elements producing positive affect have a very real and powerful impact on perceptions of usability, use-intentions and overall good feelings about a site. So, though all quality sites must be usable, usability doesn’t guarantee quality; a satisfying user experience requires something more than just usability. In a nutshell, satisfaction and a truly satisfying consumer experience are far more than the sum of efficiency and effectiveness.
Similarly, supposing that consumers only consider real, material value propositions is to deny the fact that we, as a species, are very susceptible to and reliant on non-rational modes of communication and consumption. Sure, we want and demand good product, but more than that we want good product that makes us feel good, or that proclaims us part of an idolized and idealized sub-group, or that looks cool, etc. It’s this extra bit beyond the base commodity or service that people generally mean when they discuss “the brand”. Products fit into people’s lives in ways other than sheer use value. To deny this is to deny a fact.
To get even geekier, we could say that a quality product is necessary but not sufficient for a strong brand. In other words, there are a lot of strong products out there that aren’t strong brands, but probably not vice versa. However, there’s no escaping, and no real reason to try escaping, this little bit extra that can make a strong product into a strong brand. Even open source applications, those paragons of un-branded people’s-products, are branded “open-source”, with all of the utopian-with-’tude, stick-it-to-the-MSN rhetoric that goes along with it. Sure, the movement’s founders really wanted to share and share alike and it has flourished at a product level primarily because people just dig free stuff. But as a movement, a large part of its success is based on what the products “mean” or “stand for” over and above what they actually do; the movement is strongly branded.
Of course, I could be missing the point and the whole anti-brand reaction is based on a vocabulary issue. It may be the case that “product” should be understood as encompassing all of the ideas supposedly captured by “brand”. For example, Starbucks could claim that its product is the whole Stabucks experience including but not coextensive with its commodity, coffee. If this is the case, we could say that the product is a combination of that extra, non-commodity bit discussed above, i.e. what we’ve called the brand, and the commodity, i.e. the coffee. But then the product becomes partially immaterial and just as hard to quantify as the brand supposedly is, giving us no net gain by dropping the word “brand”. Anyway, it seems that for anti-brand rhetoric to really work it should be about something more than just vocabulary, more than just a call to replace “brand” with “product”.
So, although the hype surrounding “brands” is ripe for ridicule, the powerful insight provided by the core concept of a brand is still very valid. Just because the legend becomes a little over-inflated doesn’t mean it’s not based on a true story.
Brand Spanking
Back in the 70’s we were exposed to over 500 brands a day, now it’s flabbergasting 3000.
In comes the Bubble Project, placing stickers over ads in NYC, enticing us, the “demographic” to talk back.
Absolut Bugs
I hate to write a negative review, but I was so disappointed in the implementation of a new campaign from Absolut. They're releasing a series of "documentary" videos entitled "Making of Absolut Apeach." It's a new flavor they're adding to the line.
I applaud the effort, but the site is nearly unusable. The video took an unusually long time to load, then it crashed me three times. When I finally got the video to play, it was such poor quailty with jerky motion that I didn't care to watch much of it. And if I put my cursor on just the right spot, I could make the whole stage slide off screen while the movie was playing. Ever heard of QA?
Save all your files before you try it
Sit Next to Me!
Maybe it's because I've spent the last 4 months hiking around random airports, but I just signed up for the latest development in online networking. Airtroductions allows you to register your upcoming travel and connect with people who will be on your flight or at the airport the same time you are! I don't know whether I'm scared or happy.
Want to share a cab?
Wait and Win
You've seen the commercials. Mountain Dew is giving away a new Xbox every 10 minutes. Collect the codes from the bottles and register online to win. A big countdown clock tells you how much time you have until the next drawing. And you can check out a recent list of winners. Great concept, but there are a few quirks with usability/navigation - mostly related to its Yahoo integration.
Win!