Who's Got Next?

Brand Next , a Wolff Olins point of view, describes how brands of the future will be very different from brands of the past. Taking an aspect of the Brand Next thinking, The Store for Tomorrow explores the idea of brands as platforms for action, helping people do more and do better.

Brand Next

DIY ... Design It Yourself

In making their personalized crests, Scion owners can choose from among hundreds of symbols, all designed by a professional graffiti artist. The symbols range from an eagle, a jester, a king’s crown and a worker’s fist to Japanese anime-style flowers, a three-person family and a yin-yang circle. Customers can download their designs and have them made into window decals or take them to an auto airbrushing shop to have them professionally painted onto their cars.

Do-It-Yourself Logos for Proud Scion Owners

Burst.

7. Synthetic Authenticity

In Authenticity (Harvard Business School Press), they argue that the virtualization of life (friends aren't friends unless you "confirm" them on Facebook; reporters are now all bloggers, and vice versa) has led to a deep consumer yearning for the authentic. America has "toxic levels of inauthenticity," Gilmore and Pine argue: most of the e-mail we get is fake. It's so difficult to reach a real person via an 800 number that we had to invent a heretofore unnecessary locution—real person—to describe the entity we are trying to reach. People live fake lives in Second Life. Corporate deceit reached epidemic levels after the dotcom bust. Depending on your politics, you might add that there were no WMD.

10 Ideas That are Changing the World

New Smokes

The Camel's New Clothes

Cheap Interaction = Advantage

Brands are perhaps the most intuitive example of cheap interaction’s atomizing hand. Yesterday, they were a potent source of advantage. Today, the game has changed: investing in traditional brands is yielding fast diminishing returns, and leading more and more players directly into value destruction. That’s why it’s not just revolutionaries like Google, but also mass-market giants like Nike and P&G, who are rethinking orthodox branding.

The Shrinking Advantage of Brands
How to Build a Brand on the Web? Ask Unilever

How Do We Do It? Volume.

In his pensive, reedy voice, Gotlieb will typically lay out his vision of the future: billions of consumers in a global bazaar of digital media, advertisers seeking them out with hyper-targeted ads, can't-miss analytics. And he will inevitably explain why his media-buying company, GroupM (WPPGY), will remain central even as the world moves online.

An Ad Man Tests the Limits

Fight for Kisses