Across the world, inequities are becoming more stark, and increasingly, brands are being pushed to move from activism to action. Where do things go from here for a business and its communication, for us as consumers, and for (some of us) as marketers?
Across the world, brands are waking up to the need to be part of larger cultural narratives. But being ‘woke’ brings its own challenges.
When Nike took a stand last year, I saw it as an excellent brand play. While that hasn’t changed, recent developments based on LeBron James and the protests in Hong Kong are proving to be a test of character for the brand, because billions of dollars of revenue from China are at stake. Despite the high stakes, this could prove to be an invaluable lesson for the brand on how to shape its personality to navigate the storms that lie ahead. The die is cast, and Nike now needs to fill its own big shoes.
My take on the importance of a world view in brand building. With the ever-reducing shelf lives of brand and marketing play books, a “skin in the game” approach is a strategic imperative. What is that, how does one arrive at it – my perspectives using Nike as an example.
After the ‘social product‘ post, the brand guy in me wanted to reconcile this evolution of the product with the brand story. After all, ‘network effects’, ‘purpose’, ‘community’ etc […]
A few days ago, I read this post that cited studies on consumer sentiment (US, UK) about brands being present on social media. There are plenty of interesting perspectives […]
Lifestreaming and I go way back, at least 5 years. 2008 was when I wrote about it first, though the experiments had started earlier. Most of the services I’ve […]
Google’s Project Glass demo was the best product demo I’d ever seen. The sheer possibilities with such a device was amazing, but in essence, it was the theatrics that […]
For a while now, I have believed that one of the inevitable consequences of the sprawling social networks we see around today, would be niche networks. This is not […]
<context> I missed the Twitter debate, but it was still interesting to see the two perspectives shared by Karthik and L.Bhat on Nike’s ‘Bleed Blue’ campaign. Bhat’s initial post […]
