Branding and leadership

Considering my personal experience, I don’t think I’ve chosen certain brands on purpose to support or follow their ideas, but I think I might have chosen them because of their ideas unconsciously. I sometimes see a brand cool, good, pretty for some reason. The commercial of RedBull we watched in the class made me feel “this is something cool”. So I think these ideas or images affect our feeling anyway.

I think brands can be examples of leaderships. I found one interesting video from TED. This speaker says some people, like Apple, success to lead people, and they approach people by showing not what they have but why or what they believe. I think the speaker is talking about exactly same as branding, “about the idea rather than branding”. He also talks about brain. People use the same part of brain when they do this action as decision making. That’s why I think appealing to people’s feeling has very strong power. As he talks about marketing, there are early adaptor who buy products in early period for proof of what they believe. I think these people might look for something “cool”, something different from others and matches what they believe.

I think what should be admired by people is the interesting point. We probably see something and judge them by some criteria. There might be certain tendency in these criteria that has existed from old days, and also there might be new factors because people seem to be looking for something special, cool.

 

Video Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action

The Xbox One Debacle

When I think of video games, and the reactions people have to them I don’t usually think of the gamer as having very much say in how a console is made. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo (the console giants) want their gamers to be happy, but they also want to make money. A lot of money. This is where there is the occasional conflict and usually the gamers simply have to live with it, however, sometimes, the gamers get their way instead. For example, When Microsoft introduced the Xbox One, they announced that all the games would be direct download in order to make the games cheaper, meaning that no hard copies of any Xbox One games would exist. Fans of the Xbox 360 were outraged. With no hard copies of games, there would be no such thing as sharing a game. Petitions to the company were written, videos went up on YouTube, and seething blogs were written against the Xbox One as gamers across the world rejected this idea.

The Sony PlayStation 4 was lucky enough to give their announcement a few weeks later. They made it very clear that they considered the idea of download-only games, but they decided against it. Sony even created a 30 second ad in which they demonstrate how to share a video game by simply handing the hard copy to a friend. Several months later, Microsoft announced that the Xbox One would revert to hard copies of video games, due to the public outcry.

Biz Stone would be proud. Every form of social media made an appeal to the video game industry in order to conserve the ability to share hard copies of games. I found this to be a great example of social activism which caused a change.

I’m adding a few links.

Sony’s “sharing games” ad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Update from Microsoft announcing the reversion to hard copies.
http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update

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