without thought

Catch Fire

As part of research I am doing for an MA, I have started a project that I would call democratic brand development. The question is can a brand be determined by mass collaboration? So, as an experiment I have started a group on Facebook called ‘The Blank Page’. The concept is that people bring meaning to brands not brands bring meaning to people. Whether this will work or not is also part of the experiment. It may be dependent on one or two things.

In Maclom Gladwells book Tipping Point, he maps out a complex chain of events that need to happen in order for something to take off. There are specific players in all of these events. If we were to take Gladwells ideas and apply them to Arctic Monkeys for instance, we would (in theory) find that there is one person who is responsible for breaking that band. That one person is a communicator. They would know a lot of people and have an innate ability to persuade them. So perhaps there was one guy or girl who loved Arctic Monkeys. They also had a page on Myspace which had potentially thousands of ‘friends’ and for what ever reason that person got into the band. They then used the internet to broadcast that they had found this great band and everybody should hear about them. In the process they managed to persuade and influence a lot of people that this band was (in the vernacular of Paris Hilton) ‘Hot’.

Arctic Monkeys catch fire.

So what is likely to happen with my little experiment here do you think?

More and more I am seeing a theme of complete reversal in society. The old maxim ‘form follows function’ has been turned on its head and its spitting out some interesting results in the process. So is there a way of harnessing the power of the internet as a tool of creation? Don Tapscott hints at this idea when he talks about motorcycle manufacturing over the internet. So if the future of industry is mass collaboration, what is the future of branding?

In the meantime, if anyone out there feels as though they have strong powers of persuasion and know a lot of people, we’d like to hear from you.