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.
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