Post originally written for TREND.
Everyone – from Adelaide to Hong Kong, Istanbul to Stockholm, Tallahassee to Zürich – is dancing ‘Gangnam’ style. A handful of brands have embraced the music track, or its dance moves, in a bid to capitalise on the instant recognition they spark in consumers of all ages, and from all cultures.
But for how long? Read more…
WPP’s Added Value Conducts Groundbreaking Cultural Traction™ Study That Ranks Brands According to the Depth of Their Vibrancy in Culture
LOS ANGELES, Calif., May 17, 2012 – Added Value this week revealed the results of its second-annual Cultural Traction™ survey, which measures cultural relevance as an early indicator of brand success.
In the study, Apple led the way as the brand most vibrant in culture, followed closely by tech brands Google, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and Microsoft.
The most culturally vibrant brands include: Read more…
Added Value South Africa’s anthropologist and cultural insight specialist, Dr Inka Crosswaite, shares the trends shaping the South African market for 2012.
‘Autonomy’, ‘recognition’, ‘freedom and discovery’, ‘belonging’, ‘more global, more local’, ‘identity blur’, ‘new consciousness’, ‘vitality’, ‘wired world’ and ‘take a stand’ – 10 phrases that South African brand owners should pay attention to as they hold the key to current shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviours. Read more…
Nick Bilton’s new book (title above) is well-written with lots of examples and scientific research. Nick is the lead tech blogger for the New York Times. But he doesn’t subscribe to the paper because he gets his news filtered through his social feeds (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, his local Brooklyn neighborhood blog). For those of you who already live in this new digital world, there won’t be much new here, except good examples to explain it to your friends. As with most books, by the time they’re published, the contents aren’t new, but here’s some of the topics he treats:
1) Traditional media sources have made the publisher the trusted brand – Wall Street Journal, People. But online these stories are being filtered to you through any number of delivery channels, as original information may have been forwarded several times. We develop specific areas in which we trust info forwarded by our friends, family, peers, and specific “experts”. (Mine is Louis Gray for digital technology and its use in social media.) So Nick looks specifically for media coverage by the columnist David Carr or simple recipes from Mark Bittman or Gary Vaynerchuk who developed Wine Library TV, his own online network of wine reviews with 80,000 viewers.
2) If you’re having orthoscopic surgery, the most relevant question for you to ask may be how many hours per week he/she plays videogames. Research shows a strong correlation between operation success and video game playing. Read more…
Chevrolet, H-P and Yongjiu Forever Bicycles Tap Into Nostalgia Trend: Oracle Added Value’s Jerry Clode writes for AdAge Global.
Growing nostalgia shared by China’s post-1980s generation provides the opportunity for brands to leverage retro marketing to strongly engage these newly affluent consumers. Read more…
Kids these days… they adopt new tastes and tech apps as easily as they ink a new tattoo. Along with deciding which friends to follow, they also face the same harsh economic challenges as the rest of us (though social media may give them an edge).
If you’re already focused on youth culture, you know the challenge of keeping up. If you don’t think that youth is your target, you may want to reconsider. Read our latest Fresh Perspectives newsletter on Youth Culture and find out why.
We do lots of work with youth at Cheskin Added Value, and much of it focuses on youth trends. We are repeatedly bemused by “trendspotters” who breathlessly promote the “next big thing” that they saw the “cool kids” doing. Surprisingly, we’ve seen that a lot over the years, and it seems to keep repeating, as different companies come and go, each claiming to understand the mysterious lives of teens.
Teens can appear hard to understand from an adult perspective, but teens, like any subculture, can be easily understood once you dispel some common myths, and apply some useful frameworks. Let’s look at a few of each…
Teen unemployment is up (26%). Teen spending is down. Household net worth is down – by 20% , the lowest since post-WWII – and 40% of jobless adults believe that they are beginning to see behavior change among their children because of their situation. With drastic cuts in education impacting arts, sports and culture and the stimulus money draining from the 1 billion set aside specifically for youth employment, the near future for teens is not looking bright. Is there a silver lining – anywhere?
Background
A leading consumer and enterprise technology company needed to decide on the most viable opportunity for their R&D investment. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a rapidly growing area that many technology companies are currently entering. The company was considering a nascent market in the SaaS landscape that IT Pros were just starting to investigate, which made it difficult to estimate future demand.
