Original Post:
For the discussion post on branding, I would suggest focusing on how brands are responding to the rise of crowd culture and social media, as discussed in the HBR article “Branding in the Age of Social Media” by Douglas Holt. Social media and crowd culture significantly alter the nature of branding processes, and it is impossible not to mention it. Relevant to the article by Holt, social crowds are culture makers, and the current approaches to branded content and celebrity sponsorships are fading with the new technologies. These contemporaneous crowd cultures, with their shared ideologies and interests, are not only actively participating in cultural discourses but also dictating the terms of Entertainment like never before.
However, one particular brand that has managed to embrace the new age appropriately is Chipotle. By aligning itself with the increasingly popular and preindustrial food movement, Chipotle was able to brand itself as the embodiment of this culture’s principles. This strategic approach hit the nerve of this social-media-broadcasted movement through its challenging films, namely “Back to the Start” or “The Scarecrow,” which criticized the industrial approach to producing food.
By analyzing the success of Chipotle, I have pinpointed specific aspects pointed out by Holt in relation to cultural branding. The brand associated industrial food with the status quo and discovered that the public is gradually waking up to the fact that industrial food is not all good; it targeted the right culture for this new idea, retransmitted the message through engaging content, and reinvented itself now and then by focusing on new cultural hot buttons (such GMOs).
In this context, crowd cultures require engagement rather than branded content, and brands must actively align themselves with the right ideologies. Thus, achieving cultural relevance and communication breakthroughs in the context of social media overload is possible with the help of positioning that is in harmony with the dominating values and beliefs of the identified digital crowds.
Works Cited:
Holt, Douglas. “Branding in the Age of Social Media.” Harvard Business Review, vol. 94, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 40-50. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.