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Corporate brand imagery as kudzu. Great points.
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The logo-ing of our cities and neighborhoods is this process in reverse. Instead of borrowing the ambiance and associations of a place, the product infests it with its own characterless generica, diminishing and voiding out its authentic qualities. The omnipresent logos, like a kind of corporate kudzu, cover and conquer all.
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richard_florida atlantic_cities branding marketing cities advertising

Part of a series on "The $300 House," this piece is by Seth Godin, addressing the problem of marketing to the world's poor. Don't scoff - Godin's piece is a real eye-opener. If we agree that innovation (and innovative approaches & thinking) is (are) critical in solving poverty, then we have to realize that it's those in poverty who have to be convinced to *adopt* innovation. Godin shows why this is difficult, and offers suggestions for overcoming the problem. Excerpt:
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If you're a tenth-generation subsistence farmer, your point of view, about risk, about life, is different from someone working in an R&D lab in Palo Alto. The Moral Economy of the Peasant makes this argument clearly: Imagine standing in water up to your chin. The only thing you're prepared to focus on is whether or not the water is going to rise four more inches. Your penchant for risk is close to zero. One mistake and the game is over.

As a result, it's extremely difficult to sell innovation to this consumer. The line around the block to get into the Apple store for a gadget is an insane concept in this community. A promise from a marketer is meaningless, because the marketer isn't part of the town, the marketer will move away, the marketer is, of course, a liar.

Let me add one more easily overlooked point: Western-style consumers have been taught from birth the power of the package. We see the new Nano or the new Porsche or the new convertible note on a venture deal and we can easily do the math: [new thing] + [me] = [happier]. We've been taught that an object can make our lives better, that a purchase can make us happier, that the color of the Tiffany's box or the ringing of a phone might/will bring us joy.

That's just not true for someone who hasn't bought a new kind consumer good in a year or two or three or maybe ever. As a result, stores in the developing world tend to be stocked with the classic, the tried and true, because people buy refills of previous purchases, not the new. You can't simply put something new in front of a person

seth_godin harvard_business $300_house poverty innovation marketing tribes

Great blog post from Doc Searls:

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Right now it’s hard to argue against all the money being spent (and therefore made) in the personalized advertising business—just like it was hard to argue against the bubble in tech stock prices in 1999 and in home prices in 2004. But we need to come to our senses here, and develop new and better systems by which demand and supply can meet and deal with each other as equally powerful parties in the open marketplace. Some of the tech we need for that is coming into being right now. That’s what we should be following. Not just whether Google, Facebook or Twitter will do the best job of putting crosshairs on our backs.

John’s right that the split is between dependence and independence. But the split that matters most is between yesterday’s dependence and tomorrow’s independence—for ourselves. If we want a truly conversational economy, we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered. Once we have that, the level of economic activity that follows will be a lot higher, and a lot more productive, than we’re getting now just by improving the world’s biggest guesswork business.
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doc_searls marketing data

Provocative post from Daily Conversions about "split testing," in this case using a real live example (not a website): a man who is homeless and panhandling unsuccessfully for change gets a "make-over" to increase participation (and donations) from the passers-by on the street.

daily_conversions homelessness marketing split_testing

One of the better definitions of "brand" that I've read in a while:
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"You can build a brand (shorthand for relationships, beliefs, trust, permission and word of mouth)."
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Love the last sentence, too:
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The reason the internet is such a home to wow business models is that it's easier to create a network here than any other time in history.
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So true.

seth_godin branding competitiveness marketing

Still one of the best talks on ...well, sliced bread and all it has spawned.

seth_godin marketing ted_conference

PDF companion to the book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (http://tinyurl.com/6fklwd), by Seth Godin: a booklet of Q&As around growing one's tribe (eg. "Is it possible to influence a tribe without being the leader?"). The questions are at the beginning (six pages), and after each there's a clickable "answer" button - very convenient.

seth_godin tribes marketing

Available as a 15-page printable PDF, too, this is the website version. From the intro:
"FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business."

free marketing trends trendwatch

The 3 Us -- damn that apostrophe, it's all wrong as used in the article's title. But if you leave it out, it reads as "the 3 us," as in *us* or *them*... Regardless, an interesting summing up of what might make applications interesting for users. See notes.

apps economy marketing socialnetworks web2.0

Read the entry, "What's 'authentic'?," by Andrew Taylor, but then read the first comment that follows, by Bill Ivey. Taylor, writing from an arts manager perspective, observes: "Since arts organizations are often perceived (or perceive themselves) as havens of authentic expression, it might be worth a moment to define, exactly, what that means." Ivey, donning his "folklorist" hat, contrasts the "authentic" barn-raising, say, with the construction of a pre-fab barn -- or "authentic" blue jeans and their history of being workwear, with the "brand" of "authentic" designer jeans. Apples & oranges, and the oranges, it seems, are watery -- or "thin," as Ivey puts it: they offer "the illusion of purchasable membership in networks defined by exactly the history and shared values that in modern society are available to very, very few."

authenticity branding culture culture_industry folklore ideas ideology marketing