I had the great pleasure, along with the entirety of the North London Croc wearing classes, of spending Sunday at the Innocent Village Fete in The Regent’s Park.
All the usual stuff applies about how lovely Innocent are (too lovely perhaps?) but what interested me was the brand ecosystem that Innocent is nurturing around themselves. Not least, because I have talked about many of the companies in this ecosystem in the posts on Dynamic Micro Brands.
Time for some good old fashioned brand fawning.
Anyone from our business worth their salt knew that when Levi Roots wrapped up his presentation to the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den in March that his Reggae Reggae Sauce was a sure fire bet.
The sauce, so far made only in Levi Root’s own kitchen for sale at Nottinghill Carnival, already had all the ingredients of a Dynamic Micro Brand. All it needed was someone to get his distribution sorted and help find a manufacturer to meet the new levels of demand.
Lots of nonsense is talked about brands.
Especially these days when the entire marketing community seems to have gone beardy weirdy, believing that cosumers and brands are now best buddies. This approach largely ignores the small issue of capitalism – the way that businesses extract a profit from the consumer.
For me the primary service a brand delivers to a business is in getting consumers to do things that are irrational and often against their best interests – to trade-off price, quality or service. If not why would a business have them?
And two retail experiences pointed this up to me in their very different ways – Wholefoods Market and Ikea.
I found this data on Ofcom’s website (the long winter nights simply fly by in the Huntington household). It got me to thinking how many real brands there are in the multichannel universe since it asks people in multichannel homes which channel they would chose if they could only have one (as good a definition of a brand as any). Clearly there will be a long tail but interesting that the big boys still rule (even the last gasps of ITV1). Note also the performance of Sky Sports – as many 16-24s would take Sky Sports as Channel 4.
People have talked about the value of the meme concept in advertising for a while. I like to think I have gone that bit further, suggesting that we substitute memes for the brand concept wholesale.
This is some thinking I did about ethics and advertising around the beginning of the decade. It lead to the idea that in order to promote sustainability (the ultimate aim of any business) advertising has to find ways to create desire more responsibly. This paper tries to explore the issues that surround this idea.
