After the Fall: What Really Happens to Bankrupt Brands

It’s easy to blame a brand bankruptcy on the economy, but it may be more complicated than that. “The brutality of this economy is not only exposing toxic assets, but poorly differentiated brands,” says John Gerzema, author of the best-selling book The Brand Bubble. “Many had a common inability to build strong brand differentiation and lead the consumer forward. Deficits that became that much more apparent in times like these” (“Bankrupt Brands,” TheBrandBubble.com, Jan. 20, 2009). Gerzema’s point is well taken. In his book, Gerzema addresses the changing role of the consumer when it comes to assessing brands. He says consumers “are increasingly acting like investors. They have heightened expectations for brands to continuously surprise, adapt, and evolve.” Brands that go bankrupt, Gerzema says, “aren’t evolving, or aren’t different enough to begin with.” The most telling public proof of Gerzema’s hypothesis is probably the recent stunning bankruptcy of General Motors. With the GM bankruptcy came the demise of several of its storied automobile brands. Even prior to the bankruptcy, GM had stopped making Oldsmobile, a brand that, despite its long history, had become, well, old. The bankruptcy itself, however, killed off Pontiac, a brand many car aficionados would agree was very much a part of GM’s prior success. Pontiac was the “muscle car” to Chevy’s “all-American car.” The Pontiac brand spawned songs like “Little GTO” and became an iconic symbol of the macho male. Ultimately, though, Pontiac was a brand stuck in the muddy past, unable to compete in a new, more nimble marketplace. Bill Sowerby, a retired GM manager, says of Pontiac: “It didn’t have a focus. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the brand had its heyday. It had a kind of gold chains, bell-bottoms and leisure suits image of its era. But then it began to lose its brand equity” (“Pontiac Closing Stirs Muscle Car Memories,” The Washington Times, April 28, 2009). Maybe the GM bankruptcy had a positive if sobering effect: beginning to cull out some of the brands that could not be relevant to contemporary car buyers. While the Pontiac brand will be gone by the end of 2009, other GM brands may live to see another day. Saturn, for example, was once viewed as the brand that was symbolic of a new direction for GM. When it was first introduced, Saturn’s association with GM was even downplayed. Now it too has been jettisoned by the company. But apparently Saturn will survive, because the Penske Automotive Group, the second largest dealership in the US, has agreed to purchase the brand and its 350 dealerships. In fact, Penske is in talks to “broaden Saturn’s lineup,” according to MotorAuthority.com (“Official: Penske Automotive agrees to buy Saturn,” June 5, 2009). What is happening to Saturn is not all that unusual. Lately, it seems, just as many bankrupt brands are revived in a different life form as enter the brand graveyard. The reason: that elusive quality called brand equity. The longer a brand name exists, and the wider its exposure, the more powerful and lasting its awareness. The brand name, bankrupt or not, has built value that counts for something. Even a brand that goes bust may have the potential for a second life. Polaroid is a classic case of a brand that failed, yet its brand equity seems too strong for the brand to die. In its day, Polaroid was a strong, well-differentiated brand inextricably connected with “instant photography.” But that unique position eventually led to its downfall, as photography evolved into a digital medium. While Polaroid attempted to reinvent itself, its association with instant photography—now archaic—couldn’t be overcome. The Polaroid Corporation went bankrupt once, sold the brand, and then the company that bought the brand went bankrupt (albeit for different reasons). John Gerzema says on TheBrandBubble.com that Polaroid “once was simply ‘magic’” but now it is “perceived as 35 percent less up-to-date and 23 percent less visionary than Canon.” Gerzema analyzed data from the BrandAsset Valuator, a massive brand database, to arrive at this conclusion. Bankrupt brand or not, the brand name “Polaroid” lives on. As recently as 2009, a digital camera with a built-in printer called the Polaroid PoGo was introduced. In April 2009, the Polaroid brand was purchased by a company that intends to license the name globally. Licensing, in fact, is one of the up–and-coming ways to extend the life of a bankrupt brand. Gerzema says, “…many troubled brands still possess enormous value. The key is to reshape a business model around the brand’s strongest points of differentiation, or invent new ways of being different.” Gerzema cites Sharper Image as a bankrupt brand that is “reemerging through a licensing business model." Sharper Image, along with bankrupt brand names Linens ’n Things and Bombay, has been purchased by a partnership of two liquidators, Hilco in Toronto and Gordon Brothers in Boston, for about US$ 175 million (“Brand Names Live After Stores Close,”The New York Times, April 14, 2009). The Sharper Image name is already on new merchandise that appears in Macy’s, JCPenney and Bed Bath & Beyond. Linens ’n Things is selling through a website. Bombay is expected to become a line of furniture. The payback? Jamie Salter, chief executive of Hilco, “predicted a billion dollars a year in sales for Sharper Image and Linens ’n Things in each of the next five years,” according to The New York Times. Other brands that have appeared to have gone out of business are still very much in business. Retailers CompUSA and Circuit City, for example, were liquidated, but the assets of both were purchased, and they still operate under their original names via online stores. The website SEOBook.com points out that keeping the Circuit City brand alive online makes good business sense: “CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website…That traffic is cheaper than AdWords, will pay for itself in less than a year, and since they are a corporation the Google rankings and traffic will stick” (“What Does $14 Million Worth of Page Range Look Like?” SEOBook.com, June 11, 2009). In times past, a bankrupt brand might have been abandoned. But today, bankrupt brands represent a new business opportunity for companies to acquire a well-known name for below-market value and revive it. With the expense of launching a new brand, it may in fact be cheaper to keep a bankrupt brand going, as long as it can remain viable, fresh and current. It could be that negative associations with bankruptcies are lessening, simply because there are so many of them. Oddly enough, bankrupt brands could end up being beneficiaries of a weakened economy. After all, if a brand name lives on despite adversity, it may be regarded by consumers as a beacon in the storm. [7-Sep-2009]

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During the last six years, Western Union has transformed itself from a U.S. operation with 100,000 retail outlets to a global network of 385,000 such outlets. The money-transfer giant has offices in 200 countries and territories and a $265 million annual advertising budget. CMO Gail Galuppo manages international marketing campaigns executed in more than fifty languages. In this interview she discusses the company's expansion into new digital remittance venues.

Chanel No. 5

	Chanel No. 5 perfect perfume? Symbols of innocence, virginity and virtue, the early 20th century perfumes were inspired and composed around single flower themes. Before the First World War, women felt no need to compete with men; softness, tenderness and femininity were their signature, and “flowery” fragrances were natural extensions of their personality.

The war changed everything. Women were forced to wear the trousers while their men were away. The experience challenged and toughened them. After the war, women embodied a more forceful character in every way they expressed themselves, including their fragrances. But then couturier Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel broke the rules by revolutionizing and democratizing fashion in its various forms—from clothing to accessories, including perfume. The Chanel No. 5 Juice “I want to give women…a scent that smells like a woman, not like a flower,” Chanel said. In 1921, Coco commissioned Russian perfumer Ernest Beaux to create what would become the ultimate Chanel masterpiece and greatest classic perfume of all time—an abstract floral overdosed and overpowered with sparkling yet heavy synthetic chemicals called aldehydes. Chanel No. 5 was ahead of its time as a composition. It was impactful, long lasting, unique and libertarian in its essence. The juice’s signature hasn’t changed since its creation, yet its attributes have evolved to become aspirational in a more classic and feminine way as opposed to being the edgy, abstract rule breaker it was in its early years. For decades, Chanel No. 5 has remained a bestseller around the globe. Interestingly, the juice doesn’t test well blind, but when women experience it within the context of the Chanel brand, a certain je ne sais quoi happens just like magic, and women just embrace it. The Chanel No. 5 Experience Its flacon is a simple square bottle with a rectangular top. It has been altered only minimally since first designed by Coco Chanel. Black and white colors and straight lines convey simplicity and purity. The black is not just black; it is the blackest possibly attainable. The famous double-C logo created in the early 1920s embodies all elements Chanel and remains strategically unchanged. The glass feels heavy, conveying quality. The simple style of the overall package holds classic stylistic codes that have become intrinsic to the brand’s DNA over the years. The Chanel No. 5 experience is highly regarded, and the brand pays a great deal of attention to detail, juice quality and components durability. The label, colors and coatings must be durable so the consumer can keep the flacon impeccably intact for years, even when it is empty. Branding the experience is quite important for Chanel. Repeated consumer interactions with the product are meant to result in an accumulation of pleasant multi-sensorial moments that ultimately reaffirm Chanel’s quality and render awareness, recognition and loyalty to the brand. Consistency, Consistency, Consistency Perhaps consistency is the main reason Chanel No. 5 remains successful, aside from being true to its heritage. From Marilyn Monroe accidentally endorsing Chanel No. 5 in the 1950s to Audrey Tautou and all her “Frenchness” as the new face of the fragrance, the brand has been consistently linking popular cinematic figures to appeal to a younger generation with every passing decade. Catherine Deneuve, Ali MacGraw, Carole Bouquet and Nicole Kidman—to mention a few—all embodied qualities the brand wanted to portray to characterize the quintessential No. 5 woman. Aggressive advertising campaigns over the years have been critical for the brand to stay current and keep its image young and fresh. Many attributes of Coco’s unconventional personality are incorporated into her brand, as is evidenced in an upcoming biopic film, Coco avant Chanel, featuring Audrey Tautou as Mlle Chanel. In 2008 brand Chanel decided—for the first time, after decades of careful brand strategy—to take a bold step by launching Chanel No. 5 Eau Première—a lighter, more modern version of the original No. 5 with a quieter sillage. Chanel in-house perfumer Jacques Polge stated: “Eau Première is for all those women who came to me and said, ‘No. 5 is fantastic but it’s not for me.’ Eau Première is lighter, more transparent, but, in essence, it is still No. 5.” According to the NPD Group, a research firm, Chanel revenues increased by 14.5 percent after Eau Première was introduced. Chanel No. 5 stays young by embracing a classy, ladylike attitude that could go just about anywhere, day or night. Chanel’s quality is uncompromised, distinctive and has an engaging history—from its avant-garde and socially progressive beginnings, to the traditional, luxurious and classic status that it has perpetuated throughout the decades.

Per nytimes.com...Facebook Exodus

Facebook Exodus

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: August 26, 2009

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing — some of them ostentatiously.

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life. As Facebook endeavors to be the Web’s headquarters — to compete with Google, in other words, and to make money from the information it gathers — it’s inevitable that some people would come to view it as Big Brother.

“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”

The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.

My friend Alex joined four years ago at the suggestion of “the coolest guy on the planet,” she told me in an e-mail message. For a while, they cultivated a cool-planet online gang. But then Scrabulous was shut down, someone told her she was too old for Facebook, her teenage stepson seemed to be losing his life to it and she found the whole site crawling with mercenaries trying to sell books and movies. “If I am going to waste my time on the Internet,” she concluded, “it will be playing in online backgammon tournaments.”

Another friend, who didn’t want his name used, found that Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”

That friend was not the only Facebook dissenter who was reticent about specifics. Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their breakups with Facebook. “I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.” Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello.

But then came the truly weird part: “Facebook was stalking me,” Harting wrote. One day, on another Web site, she responded to an invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the rating. “I didn’t appreciate being monitored so closely,” she wrote. She quit.

Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said in her own e-mail message, “I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy.” Klam, who still posts updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a few months ago, she told me, Facebook “felt dead.”

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique

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Mobialy DeMarketing

Who is after Mobily ( one of Saudi Arabia mobile and internet service provider)? Is this spoof is user generated or rivalry sponsored?

Either ways, it is poor production to demarket a great brand.

Wikipedia Goes Offline to Help Rural Students in Peru

Internet access is still considered a rare privilege in some developing countries of Latin America. However, the lack of available technology is nowadays often mistaken for a failure in education or cultural activity. If children are days away from internet access, their education faces major obstacles.

Samuel Klein with an 'XO' laptop viewing Wikipedia.

But surprisingly enough, many developing countries in Latin America are known to have maintained an optimal level of education in primary schools. With scarce resources, the educational system has managed to face technological flaws creatively. For instance, take what rural Peruvian schools are doing with an offline version of Wikipedia.

One of the main features of Wikipedia is that it's "alive." It's constantly growing and improving its content with the help of thousands of online volunteers from around the world. So does it even make any sense at all to imagine an offline version of Wikipedia? According to Samuel Klein, one of the speakers at the fifth-annual Wikimania event held last week in Buenos Aires, it definitely does.

Mr. Klein is an activist for universal access to knowledge. He's director of content and head of community development for One Laptop per Child. The nonprofit organization distributes special low-power notebooks to children in developing countries.

One of the countries that has joined the OLPC initiative is Peru. There are 55,000 children in rural Peruvian primary schools who use solar-powered XO laptops, which cost about $200 each. Since these children live from three to six days away from internet access, computers include an offline version of Wikipedia. Children can access a great portion of the Wiki encyclopedia, which works as a digital library.

The Wikipedia content lives inside the laptops' memory using software that's been specifically designed for them. Kids are able to distinguish between two different kinds of links -- blue and green -- that indicate whether the content is or isn't available offline.

Uruguay is another South American country that is working with the OLPC program. In fact, it was the first one to participate in the region where the government adopted the program as part of its national politics, known as the "Ceibal Plan." About 315,000 Uruguayan children are using the laptops now. Brazil, Paraguay, Mexico and Colombia are other examples of countries where this initiative is working successfully.

Mr. Klein said most of the truly offline schools get updates every semester or two, and they get new software of all kinds after about a year. When they get new software, they also receive new activities and updates from Wikipedia. Mr. Klein said the program is supported by a number of technology and media groups, not by brands. Governments buy the laptops, and some of the costs are covered by sponsors, which include companies such as Google and News Corp.

Snacks merchandising and smart branding

Cup noodles always been and always will be

about convenience and consumer ability to lock his instant

hunger or craving for hot spicy full meal on weird

times of the day. Smart branding is about fulfilling needs and expectations profitably and engaging with users among highest NEED time.

BRAND AWARENESS: IT’S ALL A ‘TWITTER’

By Carol Chapman, Principal & Co-founder of The Brand Ascension Group

Have you been wondering how Twitter, a free social networking service (www.twitter.com), can help you build brand awareness for your company? I must admit, I was a bit skeptical at first, but after encouragement from a business associate, I decided to give it a whirl and a whirl it has been so far. After just a few months of investigative use of the tool, I am now a firm believer that Twitter can definitely build tremendous awareness for any brand.

To date, no one really knows how many users are registered on Twitter. Some say as much as 5 million; others say as much as 10 million or more worldwide. When I heard these numbers, I thought, ‘Now that’s a huge opportunity for exponential brand exposure – with no hard costs!’

One thing we do know is that Twitter has grown in popularity at an extraordinary rate. So many people are using Twitter from all walks of life to expand their reach and express their brand—whether business or personal. This includes individuals, businesses, professionals, celebrities, and politicians—from all over the world.

What is Twitter?

1. Specifically, Twitter is a micro-blogging and instant messaging tool for your company. You can literally Tweet what you want all day long just so long as you stay within the 140 character or less limit per message.

2. It’s a mass-communication tool to leverage your business message to the world. Some businesses are even dedicating staff to manage their Twitter accounts. And best of all it’s free to join – what a great brand awareness tool!

What are Some Basics in Getting Started with Twitter?

1. When you register your account, create a complete profile on your business. Make sure you fill out all requested areas to include a graphic (visual) of your brand’s logo, your website URL, and a bio of your business. Your bio is very important as it is one of the first things people check out when they go to your Twitter page. They want to find out more about you. In your bio, be specific and to the point, as you are limited in the number of characters – 160. I am constantly referring to other’s bios to determine whether I want to follow the person/company or not as it’s important to connect with those who have a mutual interest in what The Brand Ascension Group does in the area of internal brand definition, creation, strategy and management.

Also, your website URL in your company profile is important. People who check you out see this as well and they can click on it to get to your website. I check out everyone who has a website URL as that provides a lot more information on who they are and what they do and helps me determine if I want to follow them and their Tweets.

2. Create a custom background on your Twitter page that is highly appealing and has the same look and feel of your brand based on your unique Brand DNA. See http://www.brandascension.com/Brand_DNA_Process.html for more information on defining your unique Brand DNA. This is extremely important. Your Twitter page should mirror the look and feel of your website, and emulate your distinctive brand attributes (Values, Style, Differentiators and Standards), which are the foundational elements of your Brand DNA. This creates consistency every time when others engage with you on Twitter, not to mention how essential it is to define and build your brand, and catapult your business growth. Notice how ours is highly relevant to our unique look and feel of our visual brand dress. Check out www.twitter.com/CarolChapman, www.twitter.com/SuzTulien, or www.twitter.com/brandascension (which we just set up).

How Can I Build Brand Awareness on Twitter?

1. If you want to gain maximum exposure, keep yourself on the “public timeline” so everyone sees your tweets. To do so, leave the “Protect Your Updates” box in the Settings area unchecked. If you check this, then your Tweet updates will become private and you’ll have to approve who can follow you every time. It will also keep your updates out of search results within Twitter and you don’t want that to occur as this dramatically reduces the ability of others to find your company.

2. Use the ‘Find Other People’ or ‘Search’ tool on Twitter. Just type a name or particular concept such as branding, culture, marketing, etc. This can be huge if you type in people in your industry and then find others that are following them. It opens up your reach significantly within your targeted industry or area of interest.

3. Post Tweet updates (messages) regularly (i.e., several times daily but don’t bombard your followers). Share your knowledge and resources (remember 140 characters or less) on something of interest and that will help others such as case studies, business events, key ideas, etc. Don’t forget to provide any links to the information.

4. Make your Tweets understandable, inviting, compelling and informative. You want to attract the right Tweeters as followers and you’ll want to follow those that have a common interest in what your business brand has to offer. So, make sure the information you Tweet is useful.

5. Use hashtags by using the hash symbol (#) before a subject (e.g., #brand) in your update. This allows the search engines and others in the ‘Twitterverse’ to find your updates on the subject.

6. Use Twitter to make connections, identify prospective customers and point others to your company’s website or others’ website for resources. This is a huge opportunity, as you build followership, to share your knowledge, communicate information on what you are doing, create a mini-press release, share info on your products and services, new product or service launches, or other resources (e.g., white papers, research, etc.) you may want to point others to.

7. Create multiple accounts to exponentially expand your company’s (brand) exposure.

8. Leverage powerful tools to manage your accounts and the exposure of your brand. Go to http://adecon101.blogspot.com/2009/03/100-twitter-tools-to-help-you-achieve.html for 101 resources you can use. In the meantime, here’s a few tools I’ve checked out recently and am using that you may want to consider:

• TweetDeck.com –allows you to stay in touch with what’s happening at any given point in time, and connect you with your contacts on Twitter in a single concise view.
• TweetLater.com– enables you to create and schedule Tweet messages in advance and manage these activities so as to increase your productivity.
• TweetScan.com – allows you to find out information that is being Tweeted about your company and brand keeping up real-time with what is being said about you.

HAPPY TWITTERING! Feel free to respond to this article as it will be posted on our blog at http://feeds.feedburner.com/BusinessBrandingTips. We’d invite you to share your experiences in the use of Twitter with us and others who read our blog.

To understand more about Brand DNA, go to http://www.brandascension.com/Brand_DNA_Process.html before you get too far using Twitter—as it will only ensure consistency, relevance and distinctiveness in how your brand shows up on Twitter.

And….stay tuned for future additions to this article as The Brand Ascension Group expands its knowledge, expertise and success in using Twitter and other social media tools to build brand awareness and grow our business.

About the Author

Carol Chapman is Principal & co-founder of The Brand Ascension Group, an experiential consulting firm that helps businesses build memorable brand experiences. She is an engaging speaker, consultant certified trainer and coach. She is author of an ebook – Getting Your Employees on the Brand Wagon: Learn the secrets of highly successful brands and how they engage the hearts and minds of their employees to deliver consistent and distinctive brand experiences. She is also co-authoring a soon to be released book entitled Brand DNA: What every small business entrepreneur needs to know to define and build a GREAT brand, and sustain it for years to come.

Carol can be contacted at carol@brandascension.com. Website: www.BrandAscension.com Blog: http://brandascension.com/Blog/

Guerilla Event Marketing—A Mob in a Flash

The choreographed dance, not surprisingly, was captured on film. Spontaneous shimmying spurred on by commuting ennui? Not quite. The event was a brand-orchestrated flash mob, a gathering (usually precipitated by an elaborate set of e-mail instructions) of large numbers of people in a public place, where some preplanned event takes place to entertain, amuse or generate buzz and publicity for a well-known brand (in this case, T-Mobile). The mobile-phone company pulled off a similar Trafalgar Square sing-along three months later, attracting nearly 14,000 people. T-Mobile isn’t the only company to employ viral marketing using a colossal street cast and the Internet to build brand awareness. One hundred leotard-clad young women danced in Piccadilly Circus to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” for Trident Unwrapped. And sunglass giant Ray-Ban staged its own guerrilla-marketing ploy in Manhattan, with “street teams” (decked out in Ray-Ban shades, naturally) standing and gazing skyward at a huge Ray-Ban building wrap. Some companies have even merged their performing plebes with some high-profile talent. SKY HDTV commissioned supermodel Gisele Bündchen to flip through the TV channels in an airport lounge while more than 1,000 cast members “brought the TV to life.” And a clothing store on California’s Sunset Boulevard was suddenly overrun by hundreds of dancers wearing gold parachute pants and cutting a rug to “You Can’t Touch This” (an A&E mobile-marketing ploy to attract attention to its Hammertime documentary about rapper MC Hammer). This viral marketing is a form of guerrilla advertising that not only directly touches its participants and the spectators who witness the event live, but also the viewership that subsequently gets a chance to view the event via e-mail, text messaging, podcasts, blogs, forums, social networking sites and other Internet resources. You know the drill: Your brother sends you a link to some YouTube video or Facebook group, and voilà—instant brand awareness that spreads like a California wildfire. There are even websites dedicated to helping brands track how well their viral campaigns are doing. Visible Measures, for instance, offers a Viral Reach Database that collects data from more than 150 video-sharing destinations. It then generates stats on not only how many people have seen a video campaign (and how many times), but also on how they’ve interacted with it via comments, ratings and their own video responses. Married to the Mob The flash mob is said to have originated in 2003 with Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine. For his first successful flash-mob attempt, Wasik blasted out a detailed instructional e-mail to a bunch of people. More than 100 willing participants then converged on the rug department at the flagship Macy’s store in Manhattan, where they gathered around a carpet and informed the salespeople that they all lived together in a warehouse and needed to search for a “love rug” as a group. Just as weird as their arrival was their sudden departure—after a burst of synchronized clapping, all the participants ran out of the building. “I really just did them as a sort of social experiment,” says Wasik, whose book And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture debuted in June. “I wanted to see what would happen—how far would the e-mail spread? How many people would come? I had seen e-mails and webpages go viral, and I was really interested to see if I could make something like that happen myself.” The fact that companies have tapped into flash-mob types of viral marketing to promote their brands doesn’t surprise Wasik. “It’s an image that captures what people find so exciting about the current information age: a group of strangers using technology to come together instantaneously,” he says. “It makes technology seem like the cure for loneliness and alienation. Of course, the irony is that sometimes our technology has the opposite effect: It lets us connect with more people, but at the expense of the depth of connection.” Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere (a comedic performance-art group that proudly states on its site that it “causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places”) and author of the recently penned Causing a Scene: Extraordinary Pranks in Ordinary Places with Improv Everywhere, isn’t surprised that some companies are using the flash-mob technique to promote their brands (Improv Everywhere itself doesn’t stage events that advertise specific brands). “Anything that’s popular will eventually be co-opted by the advertising world,” Todd explains. “It’s usually just a matter of time. Brands see people getting excited about something, and their first thought is always, ‘How can we use this [phenomenon] to get people excited for our brand?’”
	What Works, What Doesn’t For such a public-event-driven campaign to work, you need to keep the element of surprise without alienating your audience—or your participants. “I think a mistake many brands make is not being transparent,” Todd says. “No one wants to show up to a flash-mob-type of event only to find out later on they were used as pawns in a marketing campaign. If you’re making a commercial for the Web, don’t kid yourself or anyone else involved that it’s anything else.” Wasik agrees. “I suspect that flash-mob marketing will be more effective for [companies like] T-Mobile as an image in advertisements (where it gives that sense of instant togetherness) than it is as an actual viral campaign (i.e., creating mobs that try to market to participants),” he says. “People don’t want to feel like they’re shills in a corporate campaign, and once they realize that’s what you’re asking them to be, they won’t show up.” Brands also have to weigh the risks in attracting participating players. “You look stupid if no one shows up,” Wasik explains. “But if you try to solve the problem by sweetening the deal somehow (book some attraction like a celebrity or band, for example, or give something free away), then you risk having people show up and cause problems. There have been almost no cases of ‘real’ flash mobs leading to violence or arrests, in part because the absurdity of the idea filters out the kinds of people who would start trouble.” The psychology behind why flash mobs and viral campaigns work speaks to an individual’s inherent need to create—and connect. “I think people are excited about creating their own entertainment,” Todd says. And participating in an Improv Everywhere type of mission is an active form of entertainment: “You’re creating something with a group, rather than passively watching a movie, TV show, or sporting event,” Todd adds. Wasik warns that brands can’t rely solely on these manufactured free-for-alls and their viral nature. “It speaks to our great dream about the Internet, and about technology in general—that it will cure our alienation and allow us to feel connected,” he says. “And sometimes it does. But other times it makes us just feel distracted and stretched thin—keeping up with 400 Facebook friends but never really feeling connected to them.” In the end, even campaigns that thrive in the age of computers need to still rely on good old-fashioned human relationships. “It’s a matter of really thinking through what makes people press that ‘forward’ button,” Wasik says. “Jonah Peretti, a really smart thinker on viral phenomena who I profile in my book, says that things that go viral have a ‘social hook’—they speak to the specific relationships that we have with people in our lives. If you have friends you talk to about politics, you’ll send them viral media about politics; if you talk to them about dating, you’ll send them viral media about dating. We use these Internet memes as extensions of our conversations.”
	Jennifer Gidman lives and works in New York.