Startup Idea #12: Branding 2.0

Updated: 4 March 2008

Will unite the startup idea#12 and startup ideas#16 under the umbrella of branding 2.0 since they are different possibilities of dominant design

Branding is this age of cheap interaction and coordination, is about enabling true conversations to take place between companies and users. It is about making advertising more useful to the users. In this prosumer generation, brands must engage consumers by giving them a playground for them to remix, to recreate, to build upon, to improve, to personalise the products as how they see it. It is letting consumers decide what is important to them and what they would like the companies to do to serve them better.

The opportunity here is to create a dominant design of how such interaction/coordination will look and feel. Below are several ideas:

Blog aggregation for remixed brands:
A mix of squidoo/wikipedia et al where each brand has its own page, filled with examples of how users have remix the brand. It is a form of blog aggregation, but focusing on collecting content about brands being remixed. See this blog, Counterfeit Chic, for great examples. We will then take the outside.in approach of bundling each brands under a category like fashion and send them as RSS feeds.

There are a couple of revenue models. One is to develop a marketplace for these consumer generated brands like etsy.
The other is have an aggregated 'industry' page, filled with individual brands of the same industry. Companies then compete, in an auction like marketplace, for the rights to communicate at the 'industry' page level.

Brand sponsored widgets: (See startup idea #16; link above)

Conversation tracker:
Develop an application that allows companies to track conversations in the blogosphere that relates to the company's products. These conversations can be converted into emails, sms et al that allows managers to respond and have a true conversation with the users.




References
An useful article talking about the market for 'self-made' items.

Posted in: advertising,network,startup business ideas