After my last post about crowd sourced design, I rather enjoyed Rob Walker’s Consumed article “Banana Democracy” here in today’s New York Times Magazine. The piece explores Chiquita’s public competition for designs for stickers on its bananas. Arising out of the popularity of a web-based design-your-own sticker tool (some 25,000 people took part, apparently), the company decided to extend it into a competition. Public voting on the 1,355 entries starts tomorrow.

Walker goes on to refer to the “pop” nature of this design framework. DJ Neff, the Chiquita art director for this campaign, is quoted as describing this as the creation of “a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic.” Walker, in turn, suggests that “A big part of being ‘pop’ anything these days is prodding the masses to participate directly.” It is this element of the crowd sourced design competition that makes me wonder about the authenticity of connections between the brand and its audience. My last post queried the ethical nature of these public design frameworks, but Walker identifies another aspect, which is the brand stewards’ desired enhancement of attachment and meaning between a brand and its audience through this sort of interactive contributory evolution. (more…)

Surprise: Mom’s talk a lot. Apparently, mom’s drop up to a whopping 29 brand names in a typical 15 minute conversation, according to this NY Times Magazine article. While the article points to well known observations about female domination of consumer spending and the trend toward peer-to-peer influence, it was interesting to see that brands have become so immersed in our social fabric that brands are social small talk’s lingua franca. That is either a testament to our industry’s talents at brand communication or an indictment on the perniciousness of a society driven by consumerism (at least until the crash). Or maybe it is just how things have always been.

Great article in the New York Times today (Do you want to “Friend” a Detergent?). It speaks to the difficulty for brand managers of using social media to promote their brands … or their incompetence in doing so and, in fact, of trying to do so.

Ted McConnell, the manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, is quoted as saying “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand. Its just stuff.” McConnell’s suggestion is, by and large, that brands frequently assume that the large number of people on Facebook and other like social media applications can be segmented into their customer base or target audience and approached via that medium. However, they seem to ignore the reason why their consumer or target audience is on Facebook in the first place, which is to maintain a conversation with their real friends. It is not to be talked at by brands.

Of course, some brands align neatly with social media as a mechanism for brand expression and conversation. But many don’t. Its just another bad attempt at brand extension, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

A fun survey of Presidential nominees brand associations was published by Landor Associates and Penn, Schoen & Berland on October 21. While I did not feel the brands associated with the candidates reflected my own views of which brand I would associate with each candidate, the exercise was a good reminder of the power of brand archetypes. A more considered perspective was that of Robert Draper’s piece, The Making (and Remaking and Remaking) of the Candidate, in The New York Times Magazine’s October 26 issue, regarding the shifting sands of McCain’s campaign narrative. In either case, what is compellingly evident is that Presidential politics are an excellent illustration of the power of associating an iconic story with the person. (more…)