Dream Branding: Technology, Experiences & Dream Society

Dr Matt Frew & Jenny Flinn

Lecture Structure:

Locating the Business of Cultural Consumption Brand Wars: power, meaning & identity Technological Times & New Brand Worlds Experience Economy & Dream Society Technology Spectacles & Stories: the

experiential brand matrix

Dream Branding: Technology, Experiences & Dream Society

First we need to remind ourselves of where the global importance and demand for cultural consumption comes from

Why? – locate the past to track the future Post-war phenomenon where primary producers, were

transformed into the key consumers by an affluent capitalist society:

High employment, wage increases, more leisure time, cultural intermediaries encouraging consumer desires

From the 1950s, the ‘ideological position’ (Procter, 2004: 18) of the consumer is embedded in our consciousness - an increasingly affluent society of individual consumers with endless freedom of choice

Technology is a key characteristic in modern consumer societies

‘Consumer societies foster change by fostering positive images of ‘progress’, by valuing advanced technology’ (Green, 2002: 32)

Locating the Business of Cultural Consumption

Locating the Business of Cultural Consumption

This consumer age echoes with the ‘Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (Bell, 1973)

Time of economic, social and cultural change Globalization process through the ‘intensification of worldwide

social relations’ where ‘distant localities’ are linked to and shape ‘local happenings’ (Giddens, 1991: 64)

Globalised consumer culture is big business – its what we do: ‘We encounter globalization in the form of global brands, global

cuisines, global alcohol, global clothes and fashion, global electronic and global cars. Our everyday experience of globalization is therefore arguably, more than anything,

cultural in nature.’ (Miles, 2001: 146)

The global consumer age is dominated by brand wars

We live in a time where brands and the process of branding is a core foci of lifestyle consumption

However, when thinking what ‘brand’ is its just as important to think what it is not - its NOT a name; NOT a logo; NOT a place or series of images or even advertising

Brand imparts perceptions of quality, added or status value. It reinvigorates and reanimates memories, sparks emotions and experiences (will come back to this)

‘a brand is more than the place, name or logo; it refers to the overall impression in the minds of potential tourists,

including its functional and symbolic elements. The brand encompasses…physical attributes, services, attractions,

name, logo, reputation, and the benefits that those provide’ (Chalip & Costa, 2005)

Brand Wars: power, meaning & identity

Brands speak to and about us - they provide us with meaning and identity

‘Think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation and advertising as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world’

(Klein, 2001: 5)

Through brand we create particular lifestyle aspirations – ‘brand development is a purposeful attempt to shape new consumer identities’ (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003: 41)

We are in a game of brand wars – we are saturated by them! The modern consumer lifestyle is a branded one characterised by a

reliance upon the production, circulation and consumption of meaning However we are witnessing shift where the matrix of technology,

experiences and demand for dreams must be built into brands

Brand Wars: power, meaning & identity

Technological Times & New Brand Worlds

Living in a time of ‘technocapitalism’ – unprecedented time of technological revolution of dizzying pace, change and challenge

Technological often heralded as a new panacea for life’s ills Some commentators argue moving towards an automatism of

the self - ‘authority of electronic automatism reducing our will to zero' (Virilio, 1991: 104)

Others argue cyberspace offers freedom from the physical, corporeal constraints and limitations of the lived body, offering up the opportunity for ‘identity play’, for reinventing the self (Bell, 2001: 173)

Regardless, technology is integrated into every aspect of social life and consciousness (e.g. internet, iPones, iPads, TV, video, computer and, domestic appliances, planes, trains and automobiles) – we are saturated by it and just expect it

Technological Times & New Brand Worlds

Technology is transformational in who we are, what we are and what we expect:

‘The entire thrust of modern technology has been to move us away from solid objects and into informational space (or cyberspace).

Man the farmer and man the industrial worker are quickly being replaced by man the information worker…we are less and less creatures of flesh, bone and blood; we are more and

more creatures of bits and bytes moving around at the speed of light” (Terranova, 2000: 271)

Internet opens host of new spaces and sites of consumption via

chat rooms, newsgroups, e-zines, blogs and wiki Opening new ways of communication/being and new brand

worlds.

Now ‘business and fun fuse’ where brands need the ‘E-factor’ - ‘entertainmentization’ is a ‘$480 billion industry’ (Wolf, cited in Kellner, 2005:4)

Moreover, given ‘four billion people on the planet have a mobile phone’ (Bignall, 2009: 12) the portability to recreate/produce personal narratives via mobile technologies appears unstoppable

Branded lifestyles now demand vicarious possibilities – live online MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, Second Life, Twitter

Importantly brands have tapped into this world where we are ‘hyperconnected through technological prosthetics’ (Barnett, 2009: 200)

However, our branded lifestyles have shifted. We yearn for a dynamic emotive interactivity - one where that is experiential!

Technological Times & New Brand Worlds

Pine and Gilmore (1998, 1999, 2005) argue that in a time of Progression of Economic Value ‘experiences’ are the new economic offering

Experience Economy & Dream Society

COMMODITIES

Extract

GOODS

Make

SERVICES

Deliver

EXPERIENCES

Stage

TRANSFORMATIONS

Guide

Developed economies have moved from ‘extracting’ to ‘making’ to ‘delivering’ to ‘staging’

Beyond services (post-service), experiences are ‘staged’ to be memorable, personal, revealed over time and dealing with a range of sensations – they are ‘experiential’:

Companies stage an experience whenever they engage customers, connecting with them in a

personal, memorable way (Pine & Gilmore, 1999: p3

Experience Economy & Dream Society

We are in the game of adding value Organizations need to ‘ing’ their brand – they need

to create experiences in order to produce ‘memory moments’ (tokens)

Memory is the ‘product’ - goods, products or services) merely support or facilitate the experience economy

Magical Memerobilia – that speaks to us, lives with us and differentiates us

Looking for the ‘experiential sweet spot’ – designed across four realms

Experience Economy & Dream Society

Passive Participation

Absorption

Immersion

ActiveParticipation

Entertainment

Educational

Esthetic Escapist

PassiveAbsorption

Edutainment

Passive experiences Affecting

performance

The experience realmsPine and Gilmore (1999) four key experience realms

Sweet

Spot

Although ‘experiences’ are everywhere they are not left to chance – the THEME is essential

Experience Economy & Dream Society

T Theme the

Experience

H Harmonize the impressions

with positive cues

E Eliminate negative

cues

M Mix in memorabilia

E Engage all five

senses

So the ‘themed experience’ is intentionally created, capitalised, promoted, maintained and evolved

Designed to capture attention, stimulate a mass audience in an agreeable way in exchange for money

Easily located, accessed and consumed Lived, live or mediated – must be Aesthetic,

Attractive, Stimulating, Sensory, Social to a mass audience

Touches and triggers feelings - emotion!

Experience Economy & Dream Society

Technology Spectacles & Stories: the experiential brand matrix

The emotional triggers, positive cues and active immersion that hit the ‘sweet spot’ resonate with the Dream Society (Jensen, 1999)

Superfluid information society is a taken-for-granted ‘collective wisdom’ – but being overtaken by Dream Society

Emphasis on the spectacular – ‘look and feel matter more than ever’ (Postel, 2003: 39)

Matrix of images, icons and stories that merge to convey meaning Coolhunting brands – layer experiential memorabilia with emotive

stories In the ‘materially abundant marketplace’ it appears that

businesses are realizing the only way to differentiate their goods is to make their offerings transcendent - physically beautiful and emotionally compelling’ (Pink, 2004: 2)

Experience is the themed settings and stage the Dream is the sugar-coated story

Brand is Spectacle (De Bord, 1969) – techno-mediated social relationship consumers

New World Wide Web – one that demands/desires symbols, themed experience and powerful stories

Technology maximise effectiveness – lived/on-site; live/off-site; re-lived/on-line

Circulate brand – relive and retell the experience/story/the dream! Consumer is primed to perform the experience – ‘book is writing in the

head’ setting in motion quest for brand ‘hyper-experiences’ (Frew and McGillivray, 2008)

Truly in a ‘dreaming of brands’ – they know how to experience it before they access it

All about Joy!

Technology Spectacles & Stories: the experiential brand matrix

Lecture references Jensen, R. (1999) Dream Society; the coming shift from information to imagination,

New York, McGraw-Hill Lechte, J. (1994) Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From structuralism to

postmodernity, London, Routledge Lincoln, Y. S. (2001). 'Engaging Sympathies: Relationships between Action

Research and Social Constructivism'. Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. P. Reason and H. Bradbury. London, Sage: 124-132.

Miles, S. (2001). Social Theory in the Real World. London, Sage. Park, P. (2001). 'Knowledge and Participatory Research'. Handbook of Action

Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. P. Reason and H. Bradbury. London, Sage: 81-90.

Reason, P. and H. Bradbury (2001). 'Introduction: Inquiry and Participation in Search of a World Worthy of Human Aspiration'. Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. P. Reason and H. Bradbury. London, Sage: 1-14.

Rowan, J. (2001). 'The Humanistic Approach to Action Research'. Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. P. Reason and H. Bradbury. London, Sage: 114-123.

Procter, J (2004) Stuart Hall, London, Routledge Bourdieu, P (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London,

Routledge and Kegan Paul Pine, B.J & Gilmore, J.H. (1998) Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard

Business Review, 74 (4), 97-105 Pine, B.J & Gilmore, J.H. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every

Business a Stage, Harvard, Harvard Business School Press

Experience and ‘attention’As the speed of life accelerates, and mass affluence

satisfies the consumer’s desire for material possession, so the importance of ‘meaningful’ experiences rises

But, consumers are subject to panoply of ‘attention-seeking’ advertisements and their span of attention is limited

Experiences resemble services, albeit with an additional ‘theatrical’ or ‘spectacular’ component – they grab attention in a crowded leisure economy

In an increasingly homogenous (and disenchanted?) leisure marketplace, consumers are willing to pay for the engagement and theatre being offered

The most effective experiences are designed to place the consumer (the ‘experientialist’) as a key performer, engaging his/her senses (esp emotions) to create enchanting experiences which benefit producer and consumer alike

Display and DifferentationThe very act of display is becoming ever more central to

attempts to create differentation and distinction from others through consumption

The routinisation of material possessions (what we own) and of standardised (or productised) service offerings (think McDonalds, Wetherspoons etc) means that in order to create distinction consumers need to do more

This is where the accumulation of more memorable experiences comes in

Commercial (and many not-for-profit) events also exploit the desire for experience by providing ample opportunities to purchase experience-verifying mementos:◦ Souvenir merchandise (DVDs, videos, programmes, T-

shirts)These strategies act to reinforce the sense of worth for the

experientialist as well as maximising profit for the experience-stager

Display and DifferentationHowever, just as we become accustomed to

purchasing services as a matter of routine, so there exists a danger that ‘experiences’ also become ‘matter of fact’ or routinised - the McExperiences

In this case, merely partaking is no longer satisfactory (i.e. it’s not memorable, or fulfilling enough) so consumption choices move to a concern with what you did, how you did it, how adventurous it was and how you capture and control your experience – creating opportunities to relive and accentuate your differentiated consumption identities

The events industries provide experiences that facilitate such differentation as they touch us on a number of levels (some more niche markets than others)

Layers of experienceAs we save on goods and services, so PDI can be

switched to the accumulation of more extravagant, memorable and enchanting experiences which possess different layers:◦ Emotional (excitement, fear, guilt)◦ Physical (active, fitness) ◦ Intellectual (cultural events) ◦ Spiritual (enchantment, sublime)

The diversity of international events on offer provides the consumer with endless opportunities to satisfy the desires generated by the cultural industries

A key facet of the experience economy is the extraction of maximum spend from the ‘experiential’ (or immersed) consumer

ENTERTAINMENT: ESCAPE ATTEMPTS

Activity performed for its own sake, apart from work and a function of social class◦ Has roots in play (a universal like music?)◦ Recreation – satisfaction, pleasure, creative

enrichment◦ Amusement – pleasant diversion – e.g.

game or spectacle; esp. individual satisfaction derived from play

◦ Entertainment – diverting performance, incl. pleasure received from comedy or magic

◦ Entertainment - inter (among) & tenere (to hold) meaning ‘to hold the attention of’ or ‘agreeably diverting’ (Sayre and King, 2003: 1)

Postmodern Fantasy Cities & Beyond

Postmodern Fantasty City: ◦ Theme-o-centric◦ Brands are everything & everywhere◦ 24hrs - servicing a quest for sociability & entertainment◦ Postmodern Cathedrals of Consumption - modular

configurations of sameness◦ Solipsistic - self-seeking sensation juxtaposed within a

metropolis of misery◦ Postmodern Spectacle - a distracting imagineered

hyperreality where the politics of performativity and possibility are played out

So with youth and extended youthful identities founded on spectacular entertainment and cities of division what lies ahead for the postmodern metropolis?

Key readings

Pine, B.J & Gilmore, J.H. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Harvard, Harvard Business School Press (Chapter 1)

Norton, D.W (2003) ‘Towards Meaningful Brand Experiences, Design Management Journal, 14 (1): 19-25

Negus, K & Pickering, M (2004) Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, London, Sage (Chapter 2)

Youth Entertainment and the City