Virginia Postrel at Dynamist.com had an interesting post today about “Conspicuous Consumption in the Intangible Economy.” It got me thinking about Brand Membership. If I’m such a strong brand member that I wish to wear a logo on my sleeve (a common occurrence, to be sure), how would I signify a similar endearment to a brand which offers only intangible benefits.
Are blogs the (whew! finally!) outlet where consumption of information and intangibles is finally visible to the Jones’? Maybe so. Perhaps this is the true explanation of all these (to me, meaningless) posts about how “no one uses Twitter for anything worthwhile, except me.”
I must share this quote, overheard while working with a major brand (>90% brand name recognition). We were working on an online promotional program for this brand when we received a frantic call from the client’s IT department — it seems we were supplied with a number of email addresses for promo response which had not been set up yet on the corporate email server. (We would have tested it… you’d be surprised how often people make this mistake.)
After his empassioned description of the situation and what we needed to do about it, this IT staffer said:
“You know, if marketing would just tell us what they are doing… we could STOP THEM sooner.”
True story.
