October 2009
1 post
Companies are still scared of Social Media →
Good list of reasons why marketer still don’t get social on the web. Don’t forget to read the comments which include several more than the author’s 6.
September 2009
6 posts
Blackwater, or the downsides of a strong brand →
Blackwater is increasingly used as a generic for government defense contractors (the Mother Jones article linked here is just an example) and the tide is now turning against this industry heavily. For Blackwater, their strong branding means it’s becoming nearly impossible to hire them. Their brilliant branding is turning into a dealbreaker in times when decency is the best business strategy.
I moved this blog to Wordpress, this blog is now a...
This blog about the social life of brands is now at http://lokomotivebreath.wordpress.com. The reasons for this move are obvious. My posts grew longer, some into essay format, and Tumblr doesn’t offer any of the conveniences for the reader that we’re expecting from blogs that we use regularly.
This is nothig against Tumblr, I still like it and frankly am only now beginning to...
To Hell with Flash!
Flash is the antithesis of all achievements of the web: transparency, dialogue, participation. A dinosaur of the internet-as-medium metaphor. And therefore, a dead man walking.
The last proof I needed came with the new Deutsche Telekom sustainability campaign website (I commented on the campaign here).
Unintentional opacity comes with the pursuit of creative control that Flash promises....
Mind your own dirt, please, Deutsche Telekom!
Deutsche Telekom has just launched an environmental image campaign (watch TV spot here) that’s debatable in several aspects.
Only the smallest slip is the campaign website at www.millionen-fangen-an.de. While the site puts Flash to a really beautiful use, a non-Flash version doesn’t even exist. Strange for the company that exclusively sells the iPhone here (which cannot play Flash)....
David Weinberger: Hire Execs who love your Product →
Weinberger, in extension of a post from Dave Weiner (http://bit.ly/pBBIc), argues that managers with a passion for the product will be better and more credible leaders than managers with a passion for process.
In reality, the process obsessive type of managers is the vast majority and it is arguable whether the clock on “professionalizing management” can ever be turned back.
One...
August 2009
13 posts
4 tags
The Case for Brand Socialism
The term seems to go back to Reg Lascaris, founding partner of TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris\SouthAfrica. However, since the link to his original 2006 blog post is no longer active, I can only tell by second-hand quotes from Dave Duarte and Mike Davison at 1000heads.com what the originator was refering to. From those sources it seem as though Lascaris was referring to the new power that Web 2.0 is playing...
How Associated Press plans to regain control over... →
Niemanlab.org’s post of the original AP internal decision paper about how to control and monetize the distribution of their news content on the Internet. Contains a very interesting analysis of web traffic after Michael Jackson’s death.
Who are the New Brands?
If you have read my last post about what traits brands need to have to be ready for the network economy, you may have thought: can you give me some examples? Who are those brands that are read for the future?
Here are 5 very different examples of ‘new’ brands - just my personal selection:
Google. With its leading role in search, online ads and cloud computing (the „Googleverse“),...
5+1 Traits of the New Brands
A bright new day is dawning on brands. They will be even more valuable in the future. Brands will be the centers of gravity in our fragmented social landscapes. Monadic individuals will gather around brands in their pursuit of happiness. Customers and employees, stakeholders and shareholders will have one thing in common: enthusiasm for an idea that their brand stands for.
But brands will have to...
In the Facebook Web
The web is slowly recovering from the repercussions to Facebook’s Friendfeed acquisition. I followed comment threads on posts from Friendfeed co-founder Paul Buchheit and many long-time users, among them famous blogger Robert Scoble who didn’t stop recommending the FF service since he joined. The emotionality of the responses is heartbreaking. If you have a brand you would be squirming...
“We’re back to first principles now. Users and developers, diggin’...”
– Doc Searls in a comment about Facebook buying FriendFeed and not paying Robert Scoble for the tons of free publicity that he gave them and that drove their price up for the buyer http://bit.ly/YO9no
“Facebook is velcro while Twitter is like a fish hook.”
– Robert Scoble in http://scobleizer.com/2009/07/20/all-the-hype-in-the-world-why-pr-isnt-enough-to-build-your-business/
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New Rules of Competing for Comsumers' Trust.
If transparency is the new objectivity, as Weinberger says (see post below), what - if anything - does it mean for brands?
Trust is the only capital of brands. Does Ariel get the stains out? Will Diesel jeans make me sexy? Is a ride in a BMW more pleasurable than in a VW? Brands say ‘believe me’ all day, and their bottomline directly correlates with how many consumers do. And if...
July 2009
9 posts
Transparency is the New Objectivity →
David Weinberger’s soon-to-be seminal post about how the internet changes the way we understand and interact with the world fundamentally.
Too theoretical? We see the very practical impact of that change in almost every domain of life, from President Obama’s speeches and Vodafone’s campaign debacle in Germany to our habits of disclosing private background information on- and...
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MySpace for the Proletariat, Facebook for the...
“Many of us would like to believe the Internet is a force for unity, but Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks we’re deceiving ourselves.”
In a recent study, Boyd found that there’s a clear social divide between the two biggest social networks, Facebook and...
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“The big brands, oh yes, they’re only driven by insights.”
– Marketing Director of a company for sustainable household products in a recent conversation. What he meant was that companies should have a purpose that tells them what to do and not just anonymous consumers’ in test studios.
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The ignored social side of brands
Marketing research today is totally obsessed with the individual. And things don’t get any better with trends like neuro-marketing that promises even deeper and more hard-fact based dives into consumer’s psychology.
What we forget is that many, and not only high-involvement, high-price purchase decisions are a matter of negotiation and agreement between 2 or more individuals.
The...
September 2008
5 posts
Microsoft's next Big challenge: being liked.
Microsoft has become the big brand it is by putting their trademark on the larger part of most office workers daily time spend. This gives them by far the largest share in the attention market, let’s call it mindspace. But I don’t know anybody who knows someone who actually likes Microsoft. All MS users are somewhere between respectful, indifferent and annoyed. The nature of the customer brand...
Tobaccos burning.
The tragedy of the tobacco market is not the regulation by public health policies. Non-smoker protection is fine even with most smokers. No, the tragedy of this industry is the recent dominance of bad ads for cheap-and-cheerless low price brands; or traditional strong brands being traded down. In a market that was far ahead of most others in touching peoples hearts, with strong archetypal symbols...
August 2008
2 posts
The Branding Power of Stock Photography
Hamburg’s port featured front page in the New York Times international edition this week. A photograph of one of Hamburg’s container terminals illustrated an article about the rise of global trading costs - which didn’t even mention Hamburg in the text.
The image indeed has an iconic quality, showing a landscape of stacked up boxes and busy heavy-lifting traffic. The caption...
June 2008
2 posts
apgd Open Source 08: Werber rufen nach Führung
Beim Thema für den diesjährigen Kongress des deutschen Planner-Verbands hatte ich schon befürchtet, dass es zu einer revisionistischen Veranstaltung werden könnte. Und diese Befürchtung ist leider eingetreten.
PJ Mahreholz eröffnete in seiner Einleitung mit dem Ruf nach Führung in den Unternehmen statt Verwaltung und Bürokratie. Gemeint war damit die verständliche, aber gleichermaßen romantische...
March 2008
1 post
