From The Head Of Zeus Jones

I was inspired by one of Ashley’s comments in my last post. She said:

“But the criteria of what makes something ‘good’ (design, social, health, energy use) is still being defined and led by the specialist or ‘passion’ sector. Big brands are more in the position to enforce and execute.”

It got me thinking about the setting of “the agenda.”

It’s well known that a strategy of leaders – or those who would be leaders – is to set the agenda or “rules” for a category thereby forcing everyone else to follow and measure themselves against you. The increase in transparency that has been brought about by technology and social media as well as the rise of the participatory culture have created some new ways for companies to set the agenda. Ways that benefit both small companies and corporations, but differently.

For example the fact that public opinion and public demand are now such vital forces in shaping categories has greatly benefitted companies like Netflix who have used their customers’ desire for streaming to force a host of fairly radical agreements with many of the studios.This has enabled Netflix to set the agenda in the video rental business, it’s not about physical retail locations, nor physical media; it’s about immediate access to the widest variety of films possible.

Conversely the increase in transparency within corporations as a whole and the increase in the public desire to know more about the companies with whom they do business, has benefitted companies like Walmart who turned an employee sustainability and wellness program into a marketing vehicle and one of the first steps in, what has now become, a heralded commitment to sustainability. It allowed Walmart to claim that scale and impact are the defining criteria in being green, that it’s better to cast a wide, but light, green shadow than a small but deep green one.

I think this is interesting because it is another point that supports a growing hypothesis of mine that modern branding which has been pioneered by small companies is being adopted by big companies with a twist. What do you think? How else can companies set the agenda, am I missing something?

Technorati Tags: agenda, influence, rules

Image via: mushon

I have no direct evidence for this, but I’ve been thinking recently that big companies appear to be coming back into favour after many years of having been dismissed as irrelevant.

• For example, Walmart are now getting lots of recognition and publicity for being green. While it’s clear they’re making a real commitment to helping, it’s largely their scale that has everyone talking, not the intensity of their actions. As a percentage of business, green is far smaller at Walmart than it is at a company like Method that was founded upon green principles, however small actions go a long way at big companies and it’s hard for smaller players to compete.
• In the airline industry, there’s lots of talk around the discussions between United and Continental and the potential for efficiencies that the World’s largest airline could reap. While Southwest and JetBlue were the darlings of Wall Street for years, the last couple of years have shown that even they aren’t immune to financial troubles.
• And in the auto industry BMW, one of the lone independents, has suffered job losses and sales declines while Ford has seen dramatic growth in the US and Europe.

These appear to me to be a contradiction of the axiom that passion could trump scale, that size was no longer a determining factor in success in the Internet economy. Instead, I think our networked world has increased the amount of impact that a large company can have exponentially over the impact of a small company.

For example, in the marketing world, some of the new rules for brands and branding put companies with deep pockets and lots of assets at an advantage. Bigger companies can create a larger number of communities around themselves and they can give their communities more support. This is why I think we’re seeing that companies like Starbucks, Coca Cola and Best Buy are community marketing stars, even though they aren’t brands that ignite the same levels of passion as smaller companies.

Maybe it’s just me, but it also feels that a blanket of pragmatism that has descended upon all aspects of culture which are sharpening this trend. What do you think?

A couple of pieces today: this story about the imitation economy (which came my way via Edward) along with this new Chinese Warcraft film via Techcrunch, (which starts off with a very funny  rip-off of Terminator and blends themes from the Matrix) reminded me that copying, once regarded as a small step above theft, has been transformed in popular culture and now the copyists (copiers?) are the hipsters.

Of course this isn’t new, it’s been moving steadily in this direction for ages starting with “Jap-Crap” which, over the course of a decade, transformed our view of “copied engineering.” As a result, we’ve lived with this trend for long enough for it to have seeped into the deepest levels of society and long enough to have influenced the values of one or more generations.

However,  I think we are starting to value copying above creation. For example, remixes and covers of songs frequently get more play than the original versions. Movies based upon existing franchises or copied story-lines top the box office and blog/news aggregators gain far more traffic than the originating sources. Likewise we often value people who have broad experiences or influences rather than people who have depth in one specific area. This has a reinforcing impact upon the tools we create like RSS, Twitter, etc. We skim rather than dive deep because our culture is increasingly based upon re-appropriating not re-inventing.

Technorati Tags: copying, invention, original, remix

I am heading down to Austin tomorrow evening for SXSW as the sole Zeus Jones attendee. It’ll be my first time there so I’m looking forward to experiencing the awesomeness in person. I am planning to be a complete dork and rely heavily upon Plancast, the my.sxsw iphone app and SitBy.US to figure out where and what to go to but I’d love any suggestions you all have on what’s going to be hot. Also, if you see me there and I look lost and hopeless, please point me in an appropriate direction.

If you’re awake on Sunday morning, I’m on a panel with some smart folks about apps and their role in branding, would be great to see you all there.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Adrian

Technorati Tags: sxsw, Zeus Jones

One of the most important strategies that brands use to create desire is to erect “gates;” barriers that its customers must pass through in order to gain access to its products or services. In the past, these gates were things that required “traditional status” in order to pass. For example, your birth or the family that you were born into has long been a gate for admission to Oxbridge which in turn is a gate for a job at places like the BBC. Wealth is a gate for many brands whose products are simply out of reach for regular people. Other traditional gates are your social circle, which ASW plays upon, your taste or discernment and your intelligence (Mensa).

By and large, traditional gates are things that you can’t change. They’re things that you either have or you don’t, they can’t be earned or achieved very easily, and therefore don’t require effort or achievement on your part.

However, the gates of today are quite different. These tend to be things that almost anyone can acquire and achieve, as long as you’re prepared to put in the effort. H&M has a gate of physical fitness. it’s extremely hard to wear their clothes if you aren’t slim. Video games have gates of dexterity. ATI, the video card manufacturer, has created (possibly unwittingly) a gate of knowledge through having a completely incomprehensible numbering system for its various models, and web companies often create gates of skill through closed betas available only to power users.

I think there are a couple of interesting themes here for me. The first is that our collective fascination with all things social and digital, generally leads us towards advocating open systems and open brands. We try to make our brands as transparent and accessible as possible, yet by doing so we could actually be damaging their overall appeal.

The second is that the democratization of gates feels like an area ripe for creativity. Because a gate has the dual role of keeping you out as well as keeping you in, gates that require effort but which are symbols of achievement can be very powerful. (The Boston Marathon is a great example of a brand that has a gate that operates this way.) Erecting gates that enable people to accomplish things that they never thought possible could be an extremely powerful strategy for some brands.