Branding week 4

Question 1

crowd culture =

Answer 1

digital crowds as cultural innovators, producing specialized entertainment content, competing with (entertainment focused) branded content.

Question 2

2 forms of crowdcultures:

Answer 2

1.Subcultures: around almost any topic
a.Used to gather physically and had limited ways to communicate collectively (magazines)
b.Social media expanded and democratized them.
c.Together, members are pushing forward new ideas, products, practices, and aesthetics, bypassing mass-culture gatekeepers.
2.Art World
a.Distinctive modes of organization where artists (musicians, filmmakers, designers, etc.) gather in inspired collaborative competition by working together and play off ideas.
b.They cause major creative breakthroughs
c.These art world crowd cultures are the main reason why branded content has failed.

Question 3

Existing brands can make use of crowd culture with the following 5 principles:

Answer 3

1. Map the cultural orthodoxy
   a. Identify which conventions to leapfrog
2. Locate the cultural opportunity
   a. As time passes, consumers begin searching for alternatives, which opens an opportunity for innovative brands to push forward a new ideology in their categories.
3. Target the crowdculture
4. Diffuse the new ideology
5. Innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints
   a. A brand can sustain its cultural relevance by playing off particularly intriguing or contentious issues that dominate the media discourse, related to an ideology.
   b. Ben & Jerry’s sustainable business philosophy, using new-product introductions to playfully create mass awareness on issues and social causes.

Question 4

iconic brands =

Answer 4

cultural innovators that champion new ideologies that are meaningful to customers.

Question 5

2 dominant branding models, that are NOT designed for crowdculture and making icon brands:

Answer 5

• Mindshare branding: treats a brand as a set of psychological assoications
  o Benefits, emotions, personality
  o E.g. Jack Daniels: masculine, sophisticated, smooth-tasking, classic
• Purpose branding: a brand promotes values or ideals to its customer share.

Question 6

cultural branding =

Answer 6

Build on some ideology (challenges the norm) that strikes a nerve with some subculture/crowd.

Question 7

Greenwashing =

Answer 7

Misleading communications and practices that intentionally or not induce false positive perceptions of an organization’s environmental performance

Question 8

3 important elements of brand positioning:

Answer 8

1. Differentiation: from whom? What is the frame of reference?
2. Relevant: why should I care?
3. Believable: Transparency: what are the RtB? Can the consumer check those easily?