Vonage’s newish tag, “one smart decision among many, many stupid ones,” has grown on me. Do they bite their thumb at me? Perhaps, but I’m convinced they’re catering honestly. And despite the takes of blogs like these I like to think that the copywriter has deliberately crafted a sniping secondary read: Vonage is the one smart decision among many, many stupid mobile comm companies.
Looks like they were announced moons back, but I just caught my first advert for Livestrong Investment Portfolios. A fine example of how a brand can get appreciably sharper as a plethora of branded products actually better define it in the aggregate. Uncommon. (Anybody know who’s responsible for keeping Livestrong from dilution? Is it Wieden+Kennedy? I’m being lazy.)
It was 1:30am: With the sound turned off, commercials for Bush’s Baked Beans are virtually indistinguishable from those for canned dog food.
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Everything is changing. As it turns out, brands don't "own" market segments. They are simply nodes in complicated human networks. And they're either influential in their networks, or they're not. To have influence, brands must become knowledge brokers. And they need to learn how from the ultimate brokers: humans. Your brand needs to learn to be more human.