A visit by Dana Cho from IDEO and a rumination on what brand can be and a torrent of my own reflections.
Vision for a brand: Extraordinary brands create a new interdependent world that blurs the line between consumer, brand, and community.
Current dislocations: Social media is changing the way we communicate and the role of the consumer. The recession is leading to a shift to non-conspicuous consumption and reduced trust in all brands.
Insights:
- Design for engagement- Build a collaborative brand where consumers feel a part of the process
- Become authentic- Determine your values and then engage your company’s employees to accomplish this. Select out the most authentic employees, and then help them to buy into this vision
- Encourage the emergent- Allow the user’s power and control
Reflections from a recovering BiB Student:
- Lifecycle of marketing technologies. The give and take in the early stages when companies are all piling into a new form of media (often comically so, as Dana’s Tide Detergent example shows). And then the realization afterwards, of ways to use it effectively (or a decision not to use it at all).
- Ethical implications of marketing. “Shopping is arguably the last remaining public activity.” – Rem Koolhaas. To what degree has marketing led to a conspicuous consumption culture in America, where shopping is therapy and where there are so many benefits to fabricating authenticity? Can we somehow use marketing to create a more balanced level of consumerism?
- Crafting Authenticity. Everything wants to be authentic, and yet fabricated authenticity proliferates. For what customers and what types of brands is authenticity important? What ways can we promote authenticity in products and marketing, beyond company culture? And is authenticity overblown?
- Control. We all want it and crave it. And yet, as a brand how comfortable do we feel giving up control, and given that we may not like the results? Or is control in this new age of social media an anachronism?
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