The Elongtaing Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand building incorporating long tail economics - my Atticus-winning whitepaper - is now available as a ChangeThis Manifesto.
[Original pic by r1chardm]
Wrote another piece that appeared in agencyfaqs! today.
You can read it by following this link : Social media - just another place to advertise or a new business opportunity?
I have been hard at work the past few months hammering away at extending Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory to the field of brand communication and brand-building. After repeated reading and re-reading of Chris' book and writing and re-writing of my own thoughts, I have finally got myself to hit the 'make pdf' button and have digitally shrink-wrapped copies of the resulting paper for distribution.
In it's 22 pages you'll find the answers all of these questions : What do you get when you apply the first principles of long tail economics to the craft of brand building? Can you create a complex, layered brand image by resorting to simple advertising? What role is user generated content going to play in the future of mainstream advertising? What lessons can space exploration and robotics teach the practitioners of brand-building? What's the evolving science of negative databases and why do we brand custodians need to learn about it? Why is the single-minded brand proposition an anachronism in the contemporary world of marketing?
You can download the paper here : The Elongating Tail of Brand Communication: An approach to brand-building incorporating long tail economics
I would love to hear comments and views.
UPDATE: Chris Anderson has just posted and commented on the paper on his Long Tail blog :)
UPDATE 2: Atticus Award for the 'The Elongating Tail...' paper
UPDATE 3 (20th Aug 2007): A proposal to convert the above paper into a ChangeThis Manifesto is currently up for vote. Please do vote for it by following this link. Voting ends 16th Sept. 2007.
Wrote a piece that appeared in agencyfaqs! today.
You can read it by following this link : Is your brand oversteering or understeering?
Do the controversies of the last year put an end to Wikipedia's rapid rise into prominence? Has the open source model of knowledge gathering and dissemniation been dealt a killer blow? Or is it just a passing storm and is Wikipedia going to emerge stronger? Find out in this column, the second of a continuing series that focuses on the world of the future.
[Before being relocated here, this post and the adjoining piece were originally posted on a now discontinued blog dedicated to my writings.]
Camera technology has improved in leaps and bounds over the last 100 years. But to some it still hasn't progressed enough. The holy grail of photography - great photographs at the mere click of a button - still remains as elusive as ever. But probably not for much longer. A few recent developments on the web point to a rather interesting future for photography. Find out more in this column - the first of a series that aims to unravel the future before it becomes a reality.
Download Thin_Ice_April_06.pdf
[Before being relocated here, this post and the adjoining piece were originally posted on a now discontinued blog dedicated to my writings.]
Can we ever have too much information? This white paper explores the possibility that we might have already reached that stage already and the outcome might not be the utopia we have imagined. It recommends some surprisingly old ways to deal with the information glut - especially within corporate intranets.
Download The_Intranets_Of_Babel.pdf
[Before being relocated here, this post and the whitepaper were originally posted on a now discontinued blog dedicated to my writings.]
"A Preface to
The Age Of Rama
The Age of Rama is a collection of peripatetic essays about India and a distillation of many many years of traveling all around the Indian subcontinent. But to tell you how I came about writing it, I have to begin even further back.
Long ago I wrote a book called The Age Of Kali. Like the book you hold in your hands, that too was a loose collection of essays of my travels in India. I had wandered India on a nomadic basis for over ten years and penned down my observations. Most of the stories I wrote resonated with the feeling most Indians I met seemed to have. That we were facing anarchy on a scale hitherto unknown. That Kali – the goddess of destruction – had the world firmly in her grasp.
The book did well, won me numerous awards and I pretty much forgot about it. But as I discovered in time, that wasn’t quite the end of it. I had set into motion events that sucked me in like a whirling tornado.
It’s been really long, so I don’t remember if it was a dream or if I did actually meet this man. He introduced himself to me as Chiranjeevi. He told me he was the one and only eternal human, the one destined to live through all the 4 ages described in the Indian epics – Sathyayug, Tretayug, Dwarkayug and Kaliyug.
Time has blurred my initial reaction to this revelation and I won’t even attempt to bother you with the details. What I discovered soon enough was that he was indeed speaking the truth. And if you think that was incredible, you’ve got to hear what happened next.
This Chiranjeevi hung around with me – popping in and out of my life – whenever he felt like. He had found a copy of my book and had spent some time leafing though it. He dropped by whenever he felt like and elucidated on what he thought about it. He disagreed with much of it. And he didn’t hide that fact.
So what did he disagree about? He thought I had the age of Kali thing all wrong. He explained to me the cyclic nature of things in Hinduism. That for a Golden Age to exist there also has to be a Dark Age. That for good to exist there has to be the bad. And that you can’t talk about any age as if it’s for eternity. Nothing is. I think it was Buddha he quoted when he said, “Everything that’s born will die.”
We argued the point. And I, in my infinite ignorance, may have stepped too far. Because he got furious and to prove his position, he recommended to the Gods that I too be made immortal like him. That I join him (I suspect he was looking for companionship) in his unending journey as punishment for having made that elementary mistake in my book.
That was about 9,573 years ago. The age of Kali (I mean the age not the book) ended soon after. Followed by the rebirth of the entire world in the Sathayug. This age lasts for only an instant but seems like eternity.
And then came the new age of Rama – an age that’s supposed to last 10,000 years. The age in which this book is set. The book mirrors and is closely parallel to the Ramayana, an epic which details the lives and times in the same age of the previous cycle. There wasn’t much that was different in the new cycle. There was untold prosperity wherever you went…but hey, you’ll find out more about that soon enough.
Looking back, I think The Age Of Kali might have benefited with a question mark strategically placed at the end of the title. And if I had done that, I might not have ended up writing this book and you probably won’t be reading it now.
William Dalrymple
June 11,578 AD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chiranjeevi aka Hanuman"
"I am a creative planner/ brand and social media consultant based in Bangalore, India. This blog is a scribbling pad for my thots and ideas - on brands, social media and planning.
I am a winner of the WPP Atticus Award for my paper on the long tail of brand building. My whitepapers, articles and thot pieces on advertising, new media and the probable future are available here.
You can get in touch with me via Facebook or email. Thanks for dropping by." ~~ blaiq
Recent Comments