Browsing archives for August, 2007
links for 2007-08-15
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pity they havn't maintained momentum on this blog after this first great post
links for 2007-08-10
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hmmm
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Worth a browse...BDW operates entirely virtually with Skype, Mbox, Google Docs, Gmail, and web based admin for all the reporting and billing etc. I
Beetle mania
Dave's got a thing for BMWs, which got me thinking about VW's. I'm not really a car guy, but I have developed a *brand association* with VW.
My first car was a '57 oval window beetle which gave me great service for a few years, original gear box and all. It's crowning glory was charging up the mountain road at Turoa (fully loaded down) and overtaking the fluro suit wearing clowns in the Jaguar XJS :)
More recently we had this new beetle which was just sex on wheels...cream leather interior and awesome Rivieria Green paint, hmm.
I'm gutted that VW canned the new Combi project...that would have been way cool.
links for 2007-08-09
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sure would be nice to have a link from this pr8 page
The intersection of brands and search
A very interesting post over at Bubblegeneration discussing the challenge of the burgeoning 'edgeconomies' and the impact on brand marketing. I guess a simpler way to discribe this is to think about the fragmentation of pretty much any market your care to talk about...the flattening of the world, the near limitless choice for just about everything, and personal portability are all creating a thousand niches, or edge economies.
Marketers are at the cusp of strategic reinvention.
That means they can either rise to the challenges of - and seize the opportunities of - the edgeconomy. Or they can get commoditized by those challenges.
Here's a mini case study of how to actively get commoditized: M&C Saatchi's One Word Equity. The big idea is to reduce a brand to a single word - to "own" a word, globally, permanently, always and everywhere.
There are a few drivers of this. The first is globalization, and the opportunity to market globally, reaping enormous efficiency gains. The second, and more important, is search. Single words, to put it bluntly, are tailor made for search-focused marketing.
[read the rest at Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab]
For me the interesting part is how this all intersects with search. I’ve mentioned before that search is not really about brand, and this is another way of thinking about the same idea…
More simply: as consumer hyperfragment, and market power continues to shift to them, guess who already "owns" words - which are really just shared representations of value?
You guessed it - markets, networks, and communities, and the prosumers that make them.
For example, it doesn't matter how much the RIAA pays to own the words "fair use" - because markets, networks, and communities are too busy living - and redefining - it.
Exactly! When it comes to search the really important thing is to be plugged into what and how your customers think and talk about your products and the way they use them. Trying to ‘own’ a single word for your brand, however relevant or popular it might be, is a really narrow way to think about the way your product is positioned in the mind of consumers, and in the search engine results pages.
Why naming your business after a domain name you don’t have is a less than brilliant idea
As seen in Invercargill. Can you just imagine the conversations that lead to this?
"I hear those internets are the future, let's call our new furniture shop furniture.com...that will sound all cyber and stuff."
A couple of months later...
"What do you mean we can't have that website location?...It's already registered to someone else! But that's our business name..."
LOL
The Vayniac
This is cool…WinelibraryTV is one of the best video blogs out there and the host Gary Vaynerchuk recently appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien taking his unique style to the masses.
And, to make it even cooler, one of the wines they tasted was a local Sauvignon Blanc from Allan Scott…back in the day we sold a metric shed load of Allan Scott Savvy at the Dockside (they probably still do).
YouTube - Conan - Wine Expert.
Thanks RWW for the heads up.