brand-e

Says GHMC’s Julian Routledge*. In a world of increased personal interaction and involvement, there’s a complex network of conversation taking place around brands and the influence on purchasing decisions which brands need to understand if they are to gain a foothold in the modern marketplace.
For modern marketers to raise their game, and ultimately their sales, they need to tap into these conversations and target a different kind of customer – one who takes pride in influencing the purchase decisions of family, friends and colleagues, and in the case of bloggers, their wider social network.

By Hugh Jordan. Underground is an overused term in music today, usually applied to some tanned hipsters, and once also labelled ‘the next big thing’. But Red Bull’s upcoming music festival Sounderground aims to celebrate those pallid performers who really do sacrifice the sunlight for the chance to perform. We’re talking buskers.
Brazilian Marcelo Beraldo is the founder of the inaugural Sounderground festival, scheduled to take place in Sao Paulo this November. His inspiration came from a four-month trip taking in 17 cities – New York, London and Paris among them – where he filmed underground buskers entertaining en route passengers.

By Simon Fuller. Facebook users engaged in ‘ceaseless activity’? Coca-Cola residing in an ‘abode of angels’? Just a few snippets from a rather novel book on branding from London-based graphic designer Daniela Meloni which takes modern day brands and drops them into the middle of Dante’s vision of Hell, in a work entitled The Branding Comedy.
So where Divine Comedy found Dante encountering the inhabitants of each stage of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, here God has been replaced by the all-powerful consumer, with brands littering each level of existence as they try to get closer to this omnipresent being.

Going to music events is the top live leisure activity among 16-to-34 year-old men in the UK, according to IPC’s Today’s Man: Live! research.
Almost two thirds of males surveyed said they attended a live music event in the last year, compared to just 55% who’d gone to a football match. Going to gigs was the most popular of live music experience, ahead of festivals.
The survey also showed that music is hugely important to young men, with 69% saying that it is part of their identity and defines who they are.

Says Andy Milligan* As the world’s media went into overdrive, reporting Fabio Capello’s blunt assessment that David Beckham would never play another competitive game for England, it appears the story had already taken another turn.
Within minutes of his announcement, the embattled managerial team had seemingly apologised to the player privately, for the less than diplomatic announcement, while the latest press reports tell of Beckham’s desire to fight his way back into consideration.
This is part of the magic that makes the Beckham brand so strong. It always throws up another twist and an extra turn, and the very size of his celebrity creates reactions that are often impossible to predict.

Social media types love to talk about the Internet being the Holy Grail of marketing research. They rub their hands at the idea of the demise of the ‘outmoded’ focus group. brand-e asked Sabine Stork, co-founder of Thinktank International Research, what she makes of social media methodology… as well as tried-and-trusted qualitative techniques.

Web-based research is on a growth curve right now – how does it fit into the qual mix?