Post by account_disabled on Mar 6, 2024 4:10:53 GMT
Summer Zaragoza town of Borja. Full dog days and a certain newsworthy emptiness. There the news emerges of a disastrous restoration of an Ecce Homo that becomes a global event. The protagonist is an octogenarian with no knowledge of restoration who alters a work that is a century old and, from what they say, has little artistic value. According to her family, “she has always had a passion for painting. And she did it so that the church would be more beautiful, to help.” The intervention quickly becomes the object of parody and the basis for a thousand photomontages. branding In times of open and collaborative spaces, I have long wanted to connect this anecdote with brand management. We live in times of collaboration, creation and re-creation processes. They are dynamics of the remix culture (very common in the musical world, but with increasingly more implications on the management of meanings). It is evident that culture is a reality based on mixtures, exchanges, and authorships that overlap to transform the current into the future. Creating involves a lot of remixing. But... Managing a brand in this way is dangerous, although it is increasingly common: they are brands kidnapped by (some) consumers, without clear objectives, adrift... In the brand-environment relationship there is less and less of a pyramidal (unidirectional) relationship and descending). That's true.
The issue is how it is structured. Re-creation should not be like that of that Ecce Homo. It is nothing more than a parody of this approach. The question is how to adopt reticular and distributed models in a network and with more horizontality. There is a lot of cyber-naivety and a certain do-goodism of techno-prophets. Miguel del Fresno explained it with an incisive post a few weeks ago. The result of Borja's Ecce Homo is a symptom of the Industry Email List process. Another result would be a coincidence (and it is naive to think that coincidences occur in series). The bad thing is that we confuse talking, relating, managing co-creation spaces, remixing symbolic elements... with managing a brand with mechanisms typical of that Ecce Homo. Unfortunately, I perceive that many brands are declining their responsibility in the management of their intangibles (shall we make a list?) to leave them completely in the hands of their environment. That's Ecce Homo branding, and it has a grotesque edge to it. What the remix culture teaches us is that there are mechanisms to manage the exchange of intangibles in a more profitable, real and alienated way.
It is not only about creating (that is overrated and sometimes it is noise), but also about exchanging ideas, projects and references in structured and goal-directed environments. Even Pierre Levy is clear about it: «Collective intelligence is an intelligence distributed everywhere, constantly valued, coordinated and mobilized in real time. By transmission, invention or forgetfulness, the common heritage becomes the responsibility of each person. (…) In an intelligent collective, the community explicitly establishes as its objective the permanent negotiation of the order of things, its language, the role of each person, the breakdown and definition of its objects, the reinterpretation of its memory. Nothing is static, but it is not, however, about disorder or absolute relativism since acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time according to a large number of criteria, themselves constantly re-evaluated in context. Something about the brand must define not only the negotiation rules and criteria, but the symbolic glue of this community. Because leaving all the management of the meanings of a brand in the hands of the environment, I think it is an abandonment of responsibilities. An irresponsibility that ends in results like those of many open design contests : with bad ideas, poorly implementable, sometimes of dubious origin, and evaluated by exogenous criteria (it was done by a fan.
The issue is how it is structured. Re-creation should not be like that of that Ecce Homo. It is nothing more than a parody of this approach. The question is how to adopt reticular and distributed models in a network and with more horizontality. There is a lot of cyber-naivety and a certain do-goodism of techno-prophets. Miguel del Fresno explained it with an incisive post a few weeks ago. The result of Borja's Ecce Homo is a symptom of the Industry Email List process. Another result would be a coincidence (and it is naive to think that coincidences occur in series). The bad thing is that we confuse talking, relating, managing co-creation spaces, remixing symbolic elements... with managing a brand with mechanisms typical of that Ecce Homo. Unfortunately, I perceive that many brands are declining their responsibility in the management of their intangibles (shall we make a list?) to leave them completely in the hands of their environment. That's Ecce Homo branding, and it has a grotesque edge to it. What the remix culture teaches us is that there are mechanisms to manage the exchange of intangibles in a more profitable, real and alienated way.
It is not only about creating (that is overrated and sometimes it is noise), but also about exchanging ideas, projects and references in structured and goal-directed environments. Even Pierre Levy is clear about it: «Collective intelligence is an intelligence distributed everywhere, constantly valued, coordinated and mobilized in real time. By transmission, invention or forgetfulness, the common heritage becomes the responsibility of each person. (…) In an intelligent collective, the community explicitly establishes as its objective the permanent negotiation of the order of things, its language, the role of each person, the breakdown and definition of its objects, the reinterpretation of its memory. Nothing is static, but it is not, however, about disorder or absolute relativism since acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time according to a large number of criteria, themselves constantly re-evaluated in context. Something about the brand must define not only the negotiation rules and criteria, but the symbolic glue of this community. Because leaving all the management of the meanings of a brand in the hands of the environment, I think it is an abandonment of responsibilities. An irresponsibility that ends in results like those of many open design contests : with bad ideas, poorly implementable, sometimes of dubious origin, and evaluated by exogenous criteria (it was done by a fan.