Hello from Sochi, Russia. The Blake Project is here in support our client, The Coca-Cola Company, – we have been guiding their brand licensing efforts for these games. The assignment is at the intersection of brand licensing and event marketing a place where more marketers and brands should be paying closer attention.
Brands today obsessively seek massive social followings. The driver of that social activity is content marketing. Today most content marketing is nothing more than disguised brand advertising–and customers and consumers mostly ignore it. To gain a massive following in social channels requires a sophisticated understanding and disciplined application of Brand Voice.
There’s an increasing temptation to see technology as the harbinger of hope and hazard. Every day, the trendy press and commentators on social media carry reports of the next “it” technology together with their recommendations on what every business needs to be doing to ride the wave.
I recently read a New Yorker article entitled “Twilight of the Brands” written by James Surowiecki. In it, he posits that with the advent of the Internet and the comparison shopping and consumer feedback that it enables, consumers have more perfect information about product alternatives including their quality and value.
This article from some time back by Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia sheds fascinating light on the business case not just for expanding brands but also shrinking them as well. According to the authors’ “Rule of Three”, the quest for scale is quite literally a race first for dominance and then for survival. But if you can’t win, don’t try.
