Symposium "15 years SWOCC"

On September 13 2011, the Foundation for Scientific Research on Commercial Communication (Stichting Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Commercieele Communicatie SWOCC) celebrated its 15th anniversary in style, by organizing a symposium.  Its stated goal was to flood the participants coming from academia, advertising agencies and marketing departments with scientific insights from communication science. Unusual for a scientific meeting, it was held in Dutch, except for one apologetic (German) speaker who spoke in English. In practice this meant that the line-up of speakers was exclusively recruited from the ranks of Dutch universities, several of them still working on their PhD. It was organized in the debate centre “de Rode Hoed”, beautifully situated on the imperial canal (Keizersgracht) in Amsterdam. 

Tagged with: swocc, conference, branding, Marketing, social media,

Audio branding: sensory or sensual branding?

Last weekend i attended the first international audio-branding conference held in Hamburg. It was exiting to meet the pioneers in this relatively new market. At the HU I have developed a new course in audio branding as a part of our minor digital audio design. It's one of the first courses fully focusing on this specific topic and I'm very pleased our program reflects the points of view I met there. As an eye opener (or ear opener) for all those who are unfamiliar with audio branding I'd like to point you to the TED talk by Julian Treasure:

Tagged with: audio branding, branding, experience,

The fun begins

The research on mentality has lasted for a year now. After reading lots of papers, trying to find out what mentality really is and trying to determine six basic mentalities to come up with a segmentation tool to name one’s mentality, for me the fun part really begins now. We’re going to do some experiments. The gut feeling we have is that the mentality of a person is kind of similar to the mentality of the brand he or she prefers. So now we’re going to put that gut feeling to the test with a few experiments.

Tagged with: mentalities, research, branding,

Youth congress: H2O and acronyms but no crossmedia

I visited the congress on trends in youth marketing (www.kidsenjongeren.nl) last week in Nemo, Amsterdam. Quit interesting. The congress took two days but I only visited the second day because the topic of the second day, youngsters (teens), has my interest, more so than the very young kids. As usual, a score of presentations and workshops overloaded the day. So, what have I learned? Well, again like almost always, if you are critical, not that much. The topics dealt with during the day were ‘as usual’ and not a word was spoken about crossmedia, apart from the numerous citations that teens are multi-tasking. And again, generation Einstein was not just mentioned as the capturing of our crossmedia savvy younger generations, it still seems to be a sort of religion for youth marketers. Hmmm.

Tagged with: congress, young people, youngsters, branding, levi's, crossmedia, Marketing,