Brands are behaving like organized religions

29 Feb 2016 | Vlad Mehakovic

1. Brands are behaving like organized religions

Brand

Scholars have found that every organized religion offers three key benefits to its followers, a) a set of core beliefs and values, b) symbols, myths, and rituals, and c) relationships with members of a like-minded community. Given its influence on human behaviour, it's not surprising that savvy marketers have adapted some of the fundamental principals behind religions to sell influence people.

2. Every company needs a growth manager

Growth

The Growth Manager role remains poorly understood, especially outside Silicon Valley. As part of an entrepreneurial research effort, Harvard Business School interviewed more than a dozen Growth Managers at fast-growing startups and explored what they are doing to design a growth function within an organization.

3. Instagram ads: too much?

Trends

Instagram is starting to feel less authentic and instead more like a giant marketing platform, where the very atom of a social network — a person — is the last thing to factor into experience and other decisions. The latest onslaught of ads is a far cry from the seamless and high-quality native-advertising experience promised by co-founder Kevin Systrom when the company launched its initial advertising experiments.

4. What’s next in computing?

Trends

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. Regardless, the future is coming: markets go up and down, and excitement ebbs and flows, but computing technology marches steadily forward.

5. The new web typography

Design

Typography might be a science but it has no guiding light, no Principia Mathematica, no Origin of Species—there are simply too many variables, and too many problems, to list the answers themselves. In this essay the author explores celebrating a new form of typography where we strive to navigate the instability between reader and text. The fitting analogy used is building castles out of sand.

6. Blockchain is going to hit the media industry hard, just like the Internet

Trends

The blockchain enables new ways to think about the value exchange between creators, middlemen and consumers. And it seems that media companies are sleepwalking into this next technology maelstrom, without knowing what’s going to hit them. Just like with the Internet.

7. How to write good

Copy

Keep it close. Top five:

Avoid Alliteration. Always.
Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
Avoid cliches like the plague. (Theyre old hat.)
Employ the vernacular.
Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

8. The Super Bowl Ads that got people to shop

Channel

The biggest winner? Hyundai, who's four ads saw their dealership visits increase by 5% post Super Bowl, when the market was down 2%.

9. How to find your brand's disruptive opportunity

Content strategy

Good food for thought, how to apply Clayton Christensen's disruption theory to content strategy.

10. Pulpix

Tool of the week

Beautiful content discovery inside video. Offer the best video experience, increase traffic and revenue.