Tag

Branding

Finally a Sustainable Idea

By | Branding, Licensing, Uncategorized | No Comments

“Our industry is global and powerful because of its reach across multiple industries. Many would suggest that the responsibility rests within each sector of business. Others don’t really care. However, before we get influenced by any single entity or regulated by the government, perhaps we could take a defining step in shaping our own economic, social and environmental responsibility.

After all, sustainability, even if regarded as enlightened self interest, is ultimately about survival; both personal and profession.”
—Ken Markman

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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.

Hanging Around A Newsstand : A Window on Culture

By | Branding, New Media | No Comments
photo by Eric E. Johnson

photo by Eric E. Johnson

I remember walking to work in Manhattan and glancing at a Newsstand’s cascading color pallet of magazine covers.  Pure eye candy; a bespoken world of words and pictures with all  those visual images screaming at you.

Hey! Choose Me; Choose Me!

Every masthead meticulously quaffed and designed to capture: size, shape and color to perfection.

The result?  Being able to assimilate pop culture in about three seconds … a Blink.

Cosmopolitan was an early adopter, thanks to Scavullo and Helen Gurley Brown, who together redefine women and fashion in the ‘70s. It established itself as a brand for women: attainable, albeit dramatized: the Cosmo Girl. ? Its counter was MS magazine fueled by Gloria Steinem.  Other influence came from Conte Nast which made a science of melding titles with branded content. Clay Felker did the same with New York Magazine. Time made it an art; National Geographic made it an industry. Life magazine made it our window to the world. It was literally larger than life and proved it. Then, Vanity Fair and Anne Leibovitz’s glorious gate-fold front covers made a clarion call to pop culture and Vogue made its indelible brand mark necessitating advertisers to participate within its pages or perish.

Women's Magazines on News Stand

So, what happens now after a century of published Brand building and recognition?

Reinvention is calling. Every corporate identity designer, editor and photo-journalist is reimagining their art form.

Today, iPad is the publisher and the iconic branded mast heads of the past are now chapter headings.

That of course is all going to change. What fun it will be to see how it manifests itself and which brands retain their resonance and relevance.

Click here to read more: http://www.apple.com/ipad/ready-for-ipad/

Don’t look now, but the iPad just stole your brand.

By | Branding, New Media | No Comments

Don’t look now, but the iPad just stole your brand.

Lines this weekend stretched for blocks around stores in New York and Los Angeles. 700,000 units are estimated to have been sold. That’s a big number. Everyone is talking about it as a technology and social phenomena.

Not since 1450 has technology become such a cultural event. Back in its day, moveable type was a revolutionary technology: it recorded the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy to education and inform the masses.

But, in 1450, it was about ideas. Not the paper it was printed on or its packaging. There is the issue and the problem. The iPad is only the package and it has superseded the content and the power of the print brand.

Today it’s about the packaging, not content.

We seem to like this process. Remember when Vaudeville was repackaged? They called it Radio and when it was repackaged it became television.

If you are a journalist, a writer or an artist, are you losing your voice to repackaging?

In an attempt to deliver “eye candy” for the sake of attention, are we commoditizing the value of the message? When did content, that was king, become the present?

Don’t let the creative get in the way of your message and commoditize your brand.

iPad ABC iPad NPR iPad Men's Health

Publications dedicated to print and digital media, need to protect their Intellectual Capital, not simply repurpose it in another medium. In doing so they are diluting their core brand .

iPad USA Today iPad WSJ

You keep score. Media brands on the iPad from Day one.

Issue:

How should I leverage new technology to enhance my core brand?

Here is a review of the current status. Click here to read more.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=143115