Continued

2 Soft Rebellion, The Anti-Corporate Voice

No longer a one-size-fits-all application, effective brand development is becoming an organic process drawing the individual consumer into the development of the brand's communications, products, and services. Savvy brand marketers have engaged cultural activists to make brands relevant in local environments and/or have enabled consumers to interact with the brands. Watchwords of this trend are:

• Spontaneity. The now ubiquitous pop-up store concept has played a role in brand spontaneity, but is no longer enough without local tie-ins. To become relevant to youth, Swatch operated pop-up stores around the world from a day to a month, using movable, modular fixture systems of hexagonal units linked together in various formats. The local tie-in: promotion of the stores with street events such as Mexican wrestlers or Hong Kong Kung Fu fighters.

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Photos courtesy of The Swatch Group

• Co-creation. Brands are becoming semi-permeable membranes, designed to elicit consumer feedback, with some companies letting consumers create something for others to view. Witness the recent Nike campaign allowing consumers to change the image on the Times Square billboard via cell phone. A similar interaction is offered by C&A, a Berlin-based fashion store. A life-size hologram of a lingerie model in its window responds to commands issued by consumers via the store's web site while images of observers outside the window are streamed live to the web site.

• Bucking Category Tradition. U.K. mobile phone service provider Orange opened an unbranded store. Unlike the typical humanity-lacking phone store, this London store emphasizes staff-customer relations. Plain with wooden floors and customized fixtures, it even has parakeets in the window. Another unbranded store sells iPod accessories with the blessing of Apple in several London locations. These stores are not about corporate image, but simply about selling products.

• Perfectly Imperfect. Flawed and unfinished may become a new venue for personalization, as when a shopper enhances a gift's incomplete package with hand-drawn graphics. Drawing on the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which glorifies the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, brand consultancy/product development firm Erasmus Partners conceived Fallen vodka, a distillation of impure vodkas originally developed for Glenmorangie. Promoted on eye-catching bottles with fluid, earthy hand-drawn art by the Williams Murray Hamm packaging developer is a journey through three batches from simple to complex blends.

• Irreverent, yet Practical. Forgoing convention may be part of this trend. A concept under development to help men buy bras for their wives and girlfriends is a wall of silicon bubbles that represent cup sizes. The concept also would group bras by size rather than style and present it all in a sleek, masculine store environment.

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