Brands understand much better today the impact of multi-channels strategies. Some of them explore the online possibilities, not because they believe on it but because they might find it cool or trendy or cheaper… Others have a clear strategy behind.
American Apparel was one of the first brands to invest the online new strategies by creating a virtual shop in Second life (do you remember this online game so 20th century?).
Then Dior and Jean-Paul Gaultier arrived with the aim of investing internet and all different complementary tools, as Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone. Today, lots of brands are using the dissimination power of internet and of social networks to develop a 360° action around people.
Today, brands are discovering some online phenomenons like intense micro-blogging, the crowd-sourcing or the live-research.
The first concept, intense micro-bloggind, Twitter is the best example but here we are talking about the use of SMS. Twitter uses 1 billion SMS per year. Now Twitter bought a SMS specialized company, so it will be able to implement and invest more on this area. Of course after the trend Twitter, other websites launched their micro-blogging area, like Jaiku, Moodmil or Pownce. In this case here I would highlight Hictu. It is by far the most uglier of all but Hictu proposes a very interesting fonctionality : the video blogging. And as we know, video is the future of internet. Why read a text, even if 140 characters long if we can have a 30seconds video instead?!!!.
Crowd-sourcing and Live-search are pretty similar. In both cases, experts use the power of many to discover, explore, measure the impact of a phenomenon, a concept, a story or an idea. The french luxury brand Thierry Mugler (who does not know Angel raises a hand) launched on the 8th of April a participative website based on the crowd-sourcing dynamics.
The Brand hopes to gather around the idea of Womanity, all women around the world and these would share their thoughts, aims, desires or dreams. In the 50’s we had the famous tupperware meetings and now we have internet. It is a very interesting project, nice navigation and layout. Sometimes it might be a little confusing but it is part of the game (being not so structured). Some say that there will be a perfume launch in september, others say this is just an observatory for the brand. The future will tell even if I might guess the answer… See here: http://www.womanity.com.
LA
