user generated love

Influx Insights — 2008-04-01T04:07:00Z

Learning to Love You More is both a web site and a book comprised of work by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher.

The project and its assignments range from lighthearted (snap a flash photo under your bed) to thoughtful (feel the news) to painfully real and honest (spend time with a dying person), and the responses are so impressive and unexpected, that it's just as amazing to look at them as it is to make your own.

An uncountable number of brands have also given the public a chance to express their creativity. It's the age of user generated content and it seems everyone has utilized some type of contest or opportunity for people to make their own commercials.

At first glance, Learning to Love You More might be mistakenly lumped with those efforts. But here's why it's not:

For one, the assignments are purely self expressive. The content is not merely an interpretation of the brand from the user's eyes - it is the brand. There is a book you can buy, but without the participants the product would be nothing. How many brands can say that about their content?

Furthermore, it creates an experience. It adds something to people's lives. According to Lovemarks by Saatchi & Saatchi, that's the level of communication brands need to aim for if they are going to compete in the future of branding (which they paradoxically dub "the future beyond brands.")

Another example of a lovemark that has influenced users to generate content (and also that falls into the same self expressive/experiential realm as Learning to Love You More) is the "fan fiction" created by readers of Harry Potter. The readers are so emotionally tied with the brand that they create their own stories about the book's characters. At one point it got so out of control that JK Rowling announced that her fans' fiction was actually true and intended.

Instead of recognizing it as the ideal version of user generated content that it was, she ruined the experience and more importantly, the self expression of millions of fans.

As user generated content moves from the road of innovation to the beaten path, it needs to be thought about differently. It seems a litmus test for a truly experiential dialogue could be, if we took away the marketing, could the experience still exist?

If the answer is no, we're still just making ads.

Posted by katie facada

forget lovemarks, it's all about trustmarks

Influx Insights — 2007-08-21T13:20:10Z

In their original incarnation, brands were signifiers and guarantees of quality, something consumers could rely and depend upon.

In the later part of the C20th, two forces emerged that changed branding.

The first was the drive by marketing experts and ad agencies to suggest that brands needed emotional differentiation in a world where all brands were functionally similar.

Secondly, businesses discovered that a quick way to improve shareholder value was to strip out as much of the costs as possible.

We are now starting to feel the consequences of both these actions. We are starting to see a "brand vacuum" emerge, a fault line between what brands say they do and what they actually do. The rapid rise of the Internet is making it hard for brands to manage and control this ever widening chasm.

Recently, the notion of marketing experts that brands are at parity and that it’s therefore impossible to provide rational brand differentiation is being severely tested.

If the global factory, producing all our goods, China, can’t be trusted for safety, what does that say about the quality of the brands produced there?

What If airlines can no longer guarantee that their planes fly on time?

How about if banks can’t guarantee that their customers will be able to withdraw funds from ATMs?

We’ve got so enamored with the development of emotional connections and business strategists have driven down costs to such a point that brand trust, the fundamental platform for brands has been eroded.

While brand experts may still wax lyrical about Lovemarks and emotional bonds, isn’t it time to go back to basics?

I don’t think you can become a Lovemark without being a Trustmark first.

Agencies may hate me for saying it, but the rational has just suddenly taken on a whole new level of importance.

For brands, proof has now become the order of the day.

Posted by Ed Cotton

Influx Insights Tag Feed: lovemarks

user generated love

forget lovemarks, it's all about trustmarks