Fixating on the idea that the ONLY solution your brand needs is a viral video can cause you to miss out on even greater opportunities that might be readily available to you that you just can’t yet see.
You have two kinds of trends – Classic trends and Prospective trends:
Observing everyday people in the street, talking with the younger generations, and surfing Youtube are perfect for identifying classic trends.
But if you’re looking for prospective trends, Youtube isn’t the right process because once you go to Youtube it’s already too late; you have to look elsewhere.
Most of the time prospective trends are in technology and, I know it sounds kind of crazy, but I think prospective can also be found in science fiction books.
E-reputation dictates that if a person discovers and shares something interesting, then that person feels like a god on the internet.
Further, if that person’s social network likes what that person shared, it’s social proof and means that that person has good taste and is somebody who finds and identifies interesting things, which means that that person will receive more followers.
As you progress in the advertising industry, you do more strategic work, so you really have to understand how a brand works and how society works, and which levers you have to pull to get people to understand your brands message.
One reason people share videos is because they already know and like the brand, and therefore have a natural proclivity towards sharing what they like.
Most of the time, within the first few video frames they’ve already decided whether or not they will share your video.
You really need to provoke an emotional response very quickly.
As a small start-up, identify your niche community, and identify things and ideas that your niche community all have in common.
Then work on permeating your brand and logo into their everyday life by attaching them to something in their everyday life and communicating around it.
Being useful to people is a great door opener.
The more the brand becomes iconic, the harder it has to work to avoid becoming a commodity.
Advertising of yesteryear favored people with literary backgrounds. Literary is still important, but so is philosophy and psychology – being able to understand how people think and rationalize.
Advertising agencies are trend searchers, and we have to understand before everyone else which trends are going to exist tomorrow and use them to make sure that once a trend is born a brand can use them to communicate with their consumers.
Learn from your mistakes, adapt, and move on.
You’ll find that your followers and consumers will be more lenient with you than you realize.
You might even find that what you thought was a mistake, and what statistics told you was a mistake, turns out to be a huge success!
There are no rules!