Marketing in the Time of Snapchat

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 08:23:00 -0700

Every once in a while, I look back on old research. For fun. Think of it as Friday night for a nerd like me.

Last night, I re-read James B. Twitchell’s excellent and amusing article, “An English Teacher Looks at Branding.” Published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2004, this short read argues that the power of brands exists because of the path that was paved in the late 19th century. Specifically, Twitchell claims that modern brands work because of the advent of the “pathetic fallacy” and Impressionism. The pathetic fallacy is our willingness to believe something we know is not true, like Frankenstein’s monster or an adventure that unfolds “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” Impressionism, as you probably know, was an artistic movement that relied on the viewer’s capacity to connect the dots, and interpret meaning from a sense of light and movement in rough brush strokes of reality.

Consumer Identity on The Findings Report

Marketing in the Time of Snapchat