communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

2/11/2008

DO marketing

We spent Sunday painting the hallway and went to bed with this rewarding feeling of having been active in ways other than exclusively with the brain.

And this got me thinking about something called DO and also about marketing. DO is an old project by KesselsKramer from Holland: they created a brand called DO with absolutely no product behind and asked people to create their own products that would fit the brand. The only condition was the the product was aligned with DO, meaning that owners had to DO something to it. Some DO products included a rubber-coated vase which you broke to make it your own, or a block of aluminum foil that you had to hammer into a chair :-)

Now, we are in the midst of conversational marketing. We talk, brands talk, consumers talk, there's a flurry of words being exchanged and the trick now is to be part of the conversation. But sometimes it's just fun to shut up and do, like people have to when they make their own Adidas in the adidas shops, or when they create new Lego models, or when they place a pixel on a pixelmap. I think there is some value in interaction and creativity unleashed, and maybe sometimes connecting with the consumer is not all about allowing him to talk back but about giving him the tools to DO.

LATER EDIT: I mean look at this below. Even advertising looks better when it's made with people who DO :-) (from W+K via Scamp)

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