Category

BrandCulture

DREAMLAND

By | BrandCulture, Branding, UCLA, Uncategorized | No Comments

Four Seasons Magazine 2014 a portrait

By steven Beschloss Photography by  Dave Lauridsen

FOUR SEASONS MAGAZINE / ISSUE 2 / 2014

In the early morning hours, a soft, rose-grey fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean, shrouding beach communities like Santa Monica and Venice in a moist murmur. By noon, the warm sun will burn away the clouds, but that gentle feeling often lingers, dewdrops on leaves, reminding residents of nature’s presence amid the urban setting. This is one of those special, seemingly immutable things about living in Los Angeles—just one of many reasons people come and stay. “Over the last five years, LA has experienced its share of tumult, dealing with a troubled national economy and a fresh wave of Californians heading eastward for new opportunities. People began to wonder and worry: Could it be that LA, which has exerted such a powerful pull on the global imagination, was losing its sway? More than a century after Hollywood began spinning out stories here, was this town still a magnet for dreamers and a window to the future? ”  Through a series of portraits, we take the city’s pulse to rediscover what draws people here, and what keeps people here. A marketing mogul, a radio personality, a painter, an acting coach, an environmentalist, a musician. What we find with each is an intensified entrepreneurial mind-set, in which there is rarely one singular path to success. This is enriched by a city that inspires—indeed, demands—passionate self-expression. With an openness to new ideas, an expanding sense of possibility and a readiness to work hard, these ambitious Angelenos are not looking back at the city that was, but looking forward to what can be. Read More

Strategy & Culture: Flexible Specialization

By | BrandCulture, Future Think | No Comments

Barry Wellman meets John Hagel at the Fourth Turning (note William Stauss and Neil Howe)

Concept: Global localization and open flow are at the intersection of post-Fordisnm and specialization. We are witnessing an economic and cultural transition from the third turn to a forth: the emergence of a renaissance.

Impact: Product specialization, technology, personal expression, social media, alternative conformity, content segmentation, on time marketing and product availability, partisan politics and instant gratification.

Result: The changes in production with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism were accompanied by changes in the economy, politics, and prominent ideologies. In the economic realm, post-Fordism brought the decline of regulation and production by the nation-state and the rise of global markets and corporations. Mass marketing was replaced by flexible specialization, and organizations began to emphasize communication more than command. The workforce changed with an increase in internal marketing, franchising, and subcontracting and a rise in part-time, temp, self-employed, and home workers. Read More

The Advent of BrandCulture

By | BrandCulture | No Comments

Recognizing change is as important as acknowledging its cause and potential effect.

In a recently published Huffington Post article, reaching 17 million readers monthly, we brought focus to a consumer group that  is both creating and manipulating change. They are called Millennials. Their collective expression and use of digital media is the message of the brands they embrace and the cultural agenda they are creating. We call it BrandCulture.

Understanding them and how they are setting our cultural agenda is critical if we want to recognize the future when it arrives.

We are just beginning to witness the nuances and shifts of their consumer behavior.  The real ah-ha will arrive when we unlock the coding of this generation and the hardwiring of their brains. If you know a Cognitive Scientist, hire them; they’ll be your most trusted resource when unraveling the mysteries of your new consumer and the behavior that is driving businesses, brands and culture in the 21st Century.

Huffington Post Article: http://huff.to/9pvTCu

Marketing: 21 Twitter Tips

By | BrandCulture, New Media, UCLA | No Comments

Adapted from his book Engage, Brian Solis presents his list of suggestions to help businesses learn how to engage customers on Twitter through the examples of those companies, from Dell to Zappos, already successfully building online communities…as reported in Fast Company, April 23, 2010.

A  must-read, must-know, for twitter marketers and the voice of a generation shaping the next social agenda in a realm, kkm calls, BrandCulture.

http://bit.ly/a5o3TL

Of particular are the following :

Tip      Context and Importance

18. ….. Events Marketing and promotion traffic building,

19. ….. Research and Intelligence Direct access and data bases; knowing your consumer

20. ….. Fund raising For the Greater Good (take note Documentarians).

Excerpts:

Number 18. Events

Organizing and promoting events are natural applications for Twitter. Tweetups transcend online relationships and become real-world connections.

Using Coffee Groundz as an example again, the Houston-based business regularly organizes tweetups to draw hundreds of customers into the store for each event.

Number 19. Research and Intelligence

The Social Web is a real-time collective and assembly of valuable information that mostly goes unnoticed. A few existing services are dedicated to applying a magnifying lens into the dialogue that leads to insight, direction, creativity, and inventiveness.

For example, brands.peoplebrowsr.com and celebrity.peoplebrowsr.com provide real-time insight into the most actively discussed brands and celebrities on Twitter at any moment in time, while also revealing the sentiment that is most associated with each.

StockTwits provides an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can listen to traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation. The service leverages Twitter as a content production platform and transforms tweets into financial related data structured by stock, user, and reputation.

Number 20. Fund Raising

This is a big opportunity and one that will yield amazing stories on how people are using Twitter and social media to raise money for charitable causes and capital for projects and companies. It’s the art of spurring contributions through information and education, not solicitation.

When it comes to social media for Social Good, we don’t have to look much further than anything Beth Kanter touches or spotlights. She’s one of the most influential people in using social media for raising awareness and money for her causes. One of the projects that she remains dedicated to is helping orphans in Cambodia and, to date, it has raised over $200,000. She has also used Twitter, Widgets, and other social networks to help many other organizations and causes. In one live demonstration, which still leaves me in awe, she raised over $2,500 to send a young Cambodian woman to college while she was on stage at Gnomedex in Seattle.