• Brands, Identity and Consistency

    So, Google+ kindly consented to host brands and organisations on the platform (announcement) and immediately gave examples of pages already available. These include Pepsi, WWE, Burbery and so on. The typical ways most brands have approached their new Google+ page is to use the features of the network (mostly Hangouts) to reasonably good effect, in addition to using the platform for content distribution and in a few cases, even displaying their employees. This last one was an interesting use case and has potential, I thought, and better than Facebook’s fanpage Admin version.

    When I read the announcement, I immediately thought of brand identity. In the initial days of Google+ launch, the circles feature that allowed users to compartmentalise their different identities created a little flutter. It helped that, at that point, Facebook’s options for achieving the same ends were pretty well concealed. The visual identities of the brands on Google+ remain consistent with other online and offline platforms and so far, so do the tone and activities.

    I have a different identity for different sets of people I deal with. Work, Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Twitter connections etc. How I behave with them and what I share with them varies too. (though there are overlaps)  I thought about this from a brand’s perspective. My relationship with a brand is different from the one that another person has. (use cases, context etc) And if I do have to share this relationship, what I’d share and the way I would share it would also vary among my own different audience sets.  In a world where the consumers are moving towards a fluid identity, do brands have to consider one too?

    In the real world, brands sometimes tweak their identity according to geography. This was reasonable and worked fine in an era of mass media. With the internet, the whole world would easily see the changes across geography. And the end consumer could ask questions too. He/she even expects the brand to communicate like a human. If we consider different networks as different geographies, with peculiar consumption patterns (of information, for starters), does the consistency that brand currently focuses on become a constraint? Considering that different platforms have different advantages and are used for different objectives, how fluid can the brand and its communication be, on the web and off it?

    until next time, identity crises

  • Your next avatar

    There was a good debate at Slate on how far (if at all) we should go in augmenting what we have been biologically endowed with. I’d noted earlier the three tracks of speciation, and how we are already on two of the tracks. (prosthesis and cell/tissue engineering) The debate introduced me to the word ‘transhumanism’, and its proponents believe that nature has done all it can do in terms of human evolution, and we should now take the ownership of driving our evolution forward. The opposing view (that’s not religion based) is that by manipulating all this, we might lose track of ‘being human’. There is a middle path that advocates augmentation to the “species’ typical best”, so that everyone would be ‘maximum humans’.

    One of the conclusions of this debate is that it will happen to us slowly. This is one of the fears I’d expressed in that earlier post – that we won’t realise when it happens to us. One of my other fears on account of increasing lifespans is the economics of it all, again something I’d written earlier. In yet another post, I’d wondered if we would speciate on the basis of whether we want to keep up with the information deluge or not. Those who choose to, would most likely need augmentation of the mind.

    ‘Evolution on Steroids’ is the theme of this article in BBC News (via Vedant), in which Prof. Church would now like to write/edit DNA, now that we have started reading it, with devices that will monitor internal and external environments, warn us, and then change our body accordingly. It’s probably an inevitable reality, with the only real question being ‘when’ and not ‘if’.

    ‘The Cyborg in us all‘ is another excellent read, this time from the NYT, in which I learned of scientists who are working on controlling computers via thoughts. In one of computer engineer Schalk’s experiments, on the effect of Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall – Part 1” on human brains, a particular brain created a model of what it expected to hear, after the music had been switched off in between. What the guys are really working towards though, are neurons and language – eg. thinking ‘cat’ and the image popping up on screen. Towards the end of the article, there is the NeuralPhone – which lets you pick a name from the phone contact list, telepathically.

    That brings me back to the Slate article which mentions this argument against trashumanism -increased lifespans would cause us to be more fearful, because we have more to lose. That would cause us to opt for “safe but shallow digital experiences, leading to long, ultimately empty lives”. This debate on enhanced and extended humanity reminded me of a post by Scott Adams, in which he writes about programmable avatars, which over time, would pick up our preferences and memories so well that they could live on as us even after we die, thereby extending our mortal lives into the infinite. And in ‘Hitchhiker’ style, he wonders if this has already happened. We are avatars of those who came before us – a premise not dissimilar to one I had reached via a different path. So much for humanity, and the debate about it. 🙂

    until next time, Google Human+

  • Winter Moon

    Dean Koontz

    I was quite surprised that the book was published in 1994. I expected a much earlier date, judging by the work. Its not really bad, but it doesn’t have that gripping quality of Koontz’ later works, of which I’m a big fan. That’s when I got to know that this was first published as ‘Invasion’ in 1975 under the pseudonym Aaron Wolfe.

    The book initially follows two stories in parallel – Jack McGarvey, a cop, and his family in Los Angeles, and Eduardo Fernandez, Jack’s deceased partner’s father, who lives in a ranch in Montana.

    Jack is recuperating from an incident involving a drug-crazed Hollywood director, who opens fire on innocent people, in a service station. Jack ends up having to kill him, and lands himself in the hospital for several months.

    Meanwhile, at the ranch, Eduardo notices bizarre phenomena among the animals around, and realises that there is a mysterious alien force involved.

    Though the book does feature the Koontz trademarks – dog, single kid, quotes from the (then) non existent ‘The Book of Counted Sorrows’, it semmed to be more a Stephen King approach than the later works of Dean Koontz.

    Not really a bad read, but there are definitely better Koontz creations out there.

  • Hiremantra

    Hiremantra.com is a hiring solution that lies somewhere between job sites and recruitment software. In conversation with co-founder Subodh Vinchurkar.

    [scribd id=72386058 key=key-162d604514lctrv33sl5 mode=list]

  • Building brand stories

    There was a superb post at Misentropy last week on story-telling that opened up new perspectives for me on that art, and science, especially the last few lines on subliminal commands that could set or reset a new memory episode in our minds.

    The coincidence in the timing was excellent, because it is related to a subject that has occupied my thoughts for a while now – brand stories in recent times. Notwithstanding recent splurges, a Google or Apple or even an Angry Birds has not really built a brand on advertising. On any given day, there are hundreds if not thousands of websites and blogs which compete among themselves to ensure they get the latest dope on these companies first.

    For a while, I thought that this was largely due to the inherent domain association. Of the internet/mobile and therefore covered on the internet/mobile. But that’s not really true – Lady Gaga or Bieber or The Dark Knight Rises (check out Misentropy’s curated fan creations – Batmania) are not tech, they are popular culture, and yet they have all successfully built brand stories (also) using the internet to great effect. Are all music bands or movies operating at that level? Not. The only commonality I could notice was the ‘product is marketing’ (yes, even Bieber or Kim Kardashian actually belong here) credo, by design or not.  The product in this case need not (and is usually not) even be the core domain they’re operating in, it’s usually a core differentiator – in Gaga’s case, shock. I have no clue on Bieber, and Kim Kard’s sticks way out of the purview of this blog!

    But despite the above, and exceptions, I also wondered whether brands of an earlier era were at a disadvantage because they operated not only in domains that had become commodities, but also operated within frameworks that made their activities templates. Not just from a planning perspective, but from communication platforms as well.

    Thanks (also) to my weekly web wrap column, I noticed one interesting example of a brand that could weave its story into my life’s context – apparently by design. For 8 years, the Samsung TV and I have been staring at each other without getting into a relationship. But for the last few weeks, I’ve been scanning websites to check out the release of the Galaxy Nexus phone in India. The only other alternative I have in mind – the Galaxy S2. Samsung has piggybacked on Android to enter my life. However, just as this article states (about Samsung in the context of the Internet of Things), I’d say that Samsung has missed an opportunity in this regard. (though its Samsung Nation gamification based loyalty program looks interesting) The simple test being that I wouldn’t blink before changing my preferences if a different Android maker offered me a better product. But would I try a different OS family? Not a chance. Because, dessert name versions and all, Android is a story for me now.

    So, simplistically, I see two gateways to story telling – it’s either the story or the telling. In the first case, the product is so different that it leads the story, and in the second, the product might be a commodity, but the telling is such that it creates a story. Classic examples for the latter are ‘Will it Blend?’ and ‘The Old Spice Man’, episodic thought they might seem. Depending on its domain and competitive landscape, each brand would have to decide its focus and build the relevant skill set. The tools are more than ever before, as always, it’s how they are used. That story hasn’t changed.

    until next time, storied brands