For one thing

Though I finished the whole thing pretty much two months ago, I haven’t had a chance to publish it since. Now here it is, though unfortunately written in German. I’d like to summarize the key points in English in the near future. So stay tuned for this abstract.

If you happen to download and read the attached German thesis, I’d very much appreciate dropping me a line or two and sharing your thoughts with me. Feel free to share my thesis but please adhere to creative-commons.

Download here: “Kollaborative Markenführung” (PDF - 4,7Mb)

“Kollaborative Markenführung” by Jörn Ballentin is protected by a Creative Commons Licence.

Radiohead held an online contest, asking people to remix the song “Nude” from their latest album. The following entry makes use of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum Guitars, Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer, HP Scanjet 3c and Hard Drive arrays. An absolutely fascinating piece of work and incredibly ‘geeky’.

Enjoy:

This presentation outlines a new approach to advertising that diverts from the old unidirectional communication modell. It not only concentrates on phenomena like the Web-2.0-hype, but tries to encompass the broad picture. Michael Zorn - S&F’s planning mastermind and advertising messiah - truly delivered a remarkable and insightful piece of work. Well done!

As part of the research for my master thesis I intend to do expert-interviews with advertising professionals to get their view on the subject. So far I managed to schedule interviews with account planners in major German advertising agencies such as TBWA, Media Arts Lab and Jung von Matt as well as with the author of “Brand Hijack?” Alex Wipperfürth. I would very much appreciate anyone’s input on swarm intelligence, open systems, network theory and consumer communities applied to branding. If you are interested to arrange an interview, be it a personal one via skype/telephone or written answers in a word document, just drop me a line. The actual research and interviews will take place sometime in January.

Here you will find a brief overview about the key questions in my master thesis.

Needless to say that I will send a copy of the finished text to anyone participating by the end of march.

The fact that human communication cannot be explained as a one-way-street is commonly agreed upon. It is always mutual and therefore does not correspond to the technical transmission of information from a sender to a receiver. However classical advertising still largely pursues that very same strategy, when sending out a message via mass-media expecting that consumers will understand and accept it with no divergence. Advertising therefore takes a top-down-approach in almost all ATL-Media, that consumers increasingly oppose to. The discussion ranges from the hybrid to the unmanageable consumer, from the decline of interruptive marketing to the dawn of participation or engagement marketing.

In my master thesis I act on the assumption, that brands a largely owned by the consumers themselves and not by the big corporations: They possess the power of interpretation concerning the brand’s meaning which is largely defined in their everyday consumption practices and mutual conversations about the brand. In other words, brand advertising is noticed by the consumer (How could they not regarding the media pressure of big budget campaigns!), but decoded and understood in his life context as well as negotiated with other consumers. This collaboration between consumers leeds to brand meanings which sometimes drastically differ from the intended definitions. There are countless cases like communities professed with Barbie, that certainly do not discuss the brand in the sense of the all-america-girl intended by Mattel.With the rising of interactive media consumers are more and more getting involved with the construction of brand meaning. Crowd-sourcing and mass-customization are fields that are inspired by the open-source-phenomenon of the business world. Even in offline-media such consumer-involvement is feasible: Alex Wipperf?ɬºrth elaborates on the case of Red Bull, a brand that heavily relies on BTL-strategies and hardly uses any ATL-campaigns. In my opinion consumer involvement is a huge opportunity to get closer to customers and to regain brand relevance, as long as the collaboration is productively channeled and implies a real value for the consumers themselves.In the course of my master thesis I would like to develop a hands-on approach to collaborative branding that structures consumer-collaboration and that can be used as a tool-set for marketers. The following key-questions will be discussed:

• How linking to the consumer’s life-world can replace or support the interruptive advertising approach. The techniques and mechanisms, that initiate and foster conversation between consumers themselves as well as consumers and companies.
• The exploration of how networking phenomena bring about emergence and swarm intelligence and how those can be used by companies in branding strategies.
• The difference between expert-knowledge (companies and agencies) about the brand and the individual fragmentary opinions of consumers. How is a handling of collaborative networks feasible, that productively channels network dynamics without pressurizing and destroying them.
• How innovation and fresh ideas can be a result of collaboration when taking into account that those are commonly related to creative individuals.
• (One last thing: The master thesis is explicitly not about user-generated-advertising. I regard this controversial subject as one facet of collaborative branding that has to be critically discussed.)

From what I can see, there are 3 forms of consumer-collaboration when it comes to branding resp. advertising. They are organized according to an increasing consumer-involvement.

• Participation: The consumer participates within a clearly defined framework which is set and controlled by the company. Collaboration is initiated by the brand owner and channeled towards its goals. A subset of this category would be the idea of user-generated-advertising.
• Commenting: The consumer reacts on the company’s branding and is actively involved in discussing the brand’s meaning.
• Appropriation: In the sense of Alex Wipperfürth’s concept of a “brand hijack” the brand’s meaning is actively constructed by the consumer, mostly without the company’s knowledge and sometimes even without the comapny’s approval. As Bernard Cova and the academic discussion of postmodern marketing showed, this process can be observed within communities that are either constructed around the brand itself or a joint field of interest.

Oh I really like the unpretentious way the band steps in the background. Wade Shotter’s latest clip for Vincent Vincent & the Villains is a true master-piece of understatement and therefore even more intriguing than any of those the-band-rocks-on-some-kind-of-stage-kind-of-videos. It’s really amazing what you can do with a hula-hoob.

Watch it:

Ever felt a slightly uneasy with marketing claiming for sustainability? Well, there might be an answer: John Grant explores marketing strategies that not merely pretend to be responsible for economic reasons but that are based on a sincere belief to do good. His recently launched book “The Green Marketing Manifesto” seems to be a true source for inspiration on how companies might find an approach on CSR that actually affects business strategies. John Grant offers extensive case studies on companies such as Marks&Spencer or Toyota showing a corporate behaviour that not only positively supports public image but also drives economic growth.

A nice lesson on authenticity as well as on consistency in your strategies and a slap in the face for companies that still don’t get it by considering CSR a purely image-related marketing tool. Click on the image below to find out more:

Though I always considered user-generated-advertising as a rather desperate attempt to apply the user-generated-content-mechanism to marketing, Apple and TBWA\Chiat\Day will air a tv-spot that started off as a student project in the U.K. It shows that collaboration between users and companies works as long as it is a controlled process. I think that the idea behind the Citizendium project reflects this notion: In an attempt to further improve the sometimes shallow and incorrect content of Wikipedia they are trying to excert some control over amateur collaboration. By introducing expert supervision they establish a controlling instance and quality management.

I think that the same principle applies to the Apple case: User generated advertising is not about solely putting the consumer in charge, but rather about collaborating with him so that both - the company’s and the user’s knowledge background and abilities - complement one another.