Top 5 Branding Related Stories This Week

1. Everything Old is New Again

It seems every week we’re being told that the 80’s are back, or the 90’s or back, or some other decade is coming into vogue. This story in FStoppers this week traces the influence of some historic photographs on recent fashion campaigns. As photography becomes ever more important to the look and feel of modern brands, the photos make a compelling case for looking backward in order to find inspiration for the present day. For an extra dose of then and now, check out this piece on a Justin Timberlake photo by Hedi Slimane that is derivative of an iconic photo of James Dean by Phil Stern.

2. Put Brand in the Hand to Make an Impression

Though intended to persuade professional photographers why it can be profitable to put prints in the hands of potential customers, this article in Psychology for Photographers is also a great lesson for brand marketers. When stakeholders think they own an object, their opinions of its worth goes up. It’s known in psychology as the endowment effect, and it reminds us in branding how important it is to engage stakeholders through tangible touch points in the brand experience.

3. How Art and Commerce Can Go Together

The always insightful Maria Popova published a terrific review of the new book Make Art Make Money, which profiles the business and creative legacy of Jim Henson. The book focuses on one of Henson’s principal beliefs: that you can be very creative and make money while doing it. The message is particularly relevant to those in the branding trade, where creatives and clients often struggle with the false assumption that a brand can be beautiful or practical but not both.

4. Commercial Breaks Aren't Twitter Breaks

AdWeek reported on a study published by Nielsen that debunks the notion that Twitter is reducing the value of television advertising media. It found that 70% of all air-time tweets were sent during the actual content, and not during commercial breaks. The report further bolsters previous research that found the volume of tweets sent out during a broadcast is positively correlated to television ratings. This research and many studies that are now being released are painting a picture of how important it is for brands and content developers to consider how to engage audiences during the actual experience.

5. US Military Solves Unanswered Tipping Point Question

It’s an ongoing branding and marketing challenge: how do you target the most influential stakeholders to help your brand campaign go viral? It’s the question most often asked after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Chalk one up for the US Military. A story appearing in the MIT Technology Review this week reports that network theorists at the West Point Network Science Center have developed an algorithm to identify a seed group that “when infected, can spread a message across an entire network.” They found success by abandoning the common practice of trying to identify the smallest possible group that can spread the largest possible message. Instead, they constructed their algorithm to focus on the nodes within a network that can cause the entire population to activate. If the method can be translated into everyday marketing contexts it could be a useful tool for developing segmentation strategies and for tailoring social media campaigns that are more efficient at amplifying critical brand messages.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t solve a related question: what’s more important to a brand marketer, activating influentials or those that are easily influenced. For more on that mathematical model, check out this 2007 article in the Journal of Consumer Research.