Archive for the ‘business’ Category
Urban Spam Deleted In São Paulo
IHT: Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom.
Tony de Marco’s photos of São Paulo
07.06.28 / art, business, culture
Advertising Practitioner: The dismal nature of the branding science has started to become clear to business recently and they’re starting to vote with their investments and appointments. They’re turning from the people who create perceptions of value to the people who create actual value - the designers, technologists, innovators…
07.06.22 / business
Chris Anderson: The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare…
07.05.29 / books, business, culture
Mutual dependence has unexpected consequences
… people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.
Mark Busse: Looking beyond the issue of divinity and objectively examining the psychology and behavior of religious groups and comparing this to brand loyalists, we find parallels and lessons we can learn as marketing strategists and communication designers. Both passionate religious leaders and cunning marketers use carefully crafted icons and symbols to create visual references and identifiers for their particular group. Both groups rely heavily on the message, doctrine and ideology to create a feeling of like-mindedness in their followers. They each hand pick and elevate deacons or heroes for others to look up to and emulate. And perhaps most importantly, both groups use fear and play on emotions with their promise of salvation to elicit reaction and devotion from their particular tribe, creating a sense of belonging to a clear community…
07.03.12 / business
Virginia Postrel’’s The Substance of Style - How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness: The twenty-first century isn’t what the old movies imagined. We citizens of the future don”t wear conformist jumpsuits, live in utilitarian high-rises, or get food in pills. To the contrary, we are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world. We want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. We expect every strip mall and city block to offer designer coffee, several different cuisines, a copy shop with do-it-yourself graphics workstations, and a nail salon for manicures on demand. We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative facades on our supermarkets auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell. Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate develops, and BBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it…
Mark Crispin Miller: Advertising, like all propaganda, tends to work despite your will and reason. It wants to work around your reason. It’s not persuasion. Sometimes people in advertising like to say they’re in the business of persuasion. It’s not persuasion. They want it to work on a much more visceral level than the persuasive level. They’re not arguing with us. They’re trying to push our buttons. They’re trying to bring a tear to the eye, trying to give you a hunger pang, trying to make you mad.
07.02.16 / business
Branding has become so successful, so ubiquitous that even institutions that we thought were above branding, antithetical to branding, have succumbed. Such cultural institutions as religion, higher education, and the art world have learned to love Madison Avenue or lose market share. Of course, most ministers, university presidents, and museum directors will insist that branding has nothing to do with them, but as Twitchell brilliantly demonstrates in this witty, insightful examination of three of our most important cultural institutions, wherever supply exceeds demand branding follows.
Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
Nation of Rebels: Angry about all that packaging? Irritated by all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the “mental environment”? Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demographic.
Thomas Frank: Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution. Commercial fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright “revolution” against the stultifying demands of mass society are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming.
07.01.24 / books, business, culture
