Additional Essays due 10/26

Valuing Fans: This essay talks about the rise in popularity of “engagement” a few years ago, a tactic to sell advertisers audiences whose enthusiasm is believed to translate to more awareness of and receptivity to product placement and commercials.The author proposes the building blocks of a more holistic methodology for valuing a fan community, with the goal of helping producers, creators, and advertisers assess how to increase the effectiveness of their investments of time, money, talent, and reputation. For fans, having a model that moves toward quantifying their contribution to the bottom line will help foster a better understanding of how they can function effectively in the media ecology and may ultimately help to better align the interests of the media industry’s decision-makers with theirs. Many of the activities within the broad spectrum of fan behaviors that contribute economic value fit into four categories. These are watching, listening, or attending; purchasing primary and secondary products; endorsing; and sharing and recommending. The first two sources of economic value are “direct” and are thus generally easier to quantify and track than the latter two. Direct sources are already components of how we measure and value audiences.The two “indirect” sources of economic value listed above are so called because, although some of their dimensions can be measured and even quantified, they focus not on existing sources of value but on nurturing and creating new audiences and markets. In terms of economic value, the payoff of indirect sources of value is in the recruitment of new fans who will contribute to the two direct sources. These types of expression, while more difficult to quantify and sometimes to measure, are immensely valuable because of the social elements that help to both retain and recruit audiences. It is also an instance when interests among fans, creators, and producers are aligned. For fans, expanding the community and forming or strengthening social relationships through the media property provides an extra incentive to participate further and to contribute both direct and indirect sources of value. For creators and producers, this type of behavior increases the audience, enhancing both the short- and long-term value, and thus the sustainability, of their projects.One of the biggest misconceptions about the value of a fan community is that it has to be large and locked into particular consumption behaviors to be meaningful. However, without mass-market-size audiences, the property needs a dedicated core of fans who will contribute enough economic value to achieve sustainability through primary sources and who will recruit more people like them to help grow the market or at least compensate for attrition. The author argues that fans have always gone beyond the consumption behaviors that advertisers and producers have used as the predictor of the ultimate value of the audience. But, by broadening the framework and digging deeper into how people actually show their affinity for a media property and what drives them to do so, we can gain a more thorough understanding of which communities are fast and fleeting and which are here to stay.

Retro Brands and Retro Marketing: This short essay discusses and analyzes a form of brand extension strategy that has gained prominence, in which tired or even abandoned brands have been reanimated and successfully relaunched. When these big brands, who are routed in the past, extend and use their existing brand name to introduce a new product or service, the past meanings and images that it invokes become an important element to be managed, understood, wielded, and shaped by managers.  Management will deliberately reach into the past and consciously seek to gain new value from old brands and the meaningful relationships they convey. Stephen Brown, John Sherry, and the author define retrobranding as “the revival or relaunch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which is usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning, or taste,” seeing retro goods as “brand-new, old-fashioned offerings” (2003b, 20). Old brands retain value simply by being old: the value of nostalgia, the so-called retro appeal. There is also value in the communal or cultural relationships that the brand has built over its lifetime. Finally, there are values on an individual level that relate to the former two other values.This investigative work on retro-branding bridged Brown’s (2001) theorizing and retro-marketing case studies with my ethnographic research on longstanding entertainment brands, their ongoing extensions, and the role of consumer culture and subculture in this process (Kozinets 2001). As well, the investigation sought to bring together research on popular culture with research on consumer and marketplace cultures. It deepened an exploration into the sources and implications of the convergence of fan communities with brand cultures.Brown, Sherry, and the author argue that powerful brands possess their own detailed story structure. They say that aura (brand essence), allegory (brand stories), and arcadia (idealized community) are the character, plot, and the setting, respectively, of brand meaning. Retro-branding research thus builds on the idea that brand allegories are stories, narratives, or extended metaphors in symbolic form. Successful branding is successful world-building, and the world it builds can be a window into the brand’s own past. Successful brand narratives will possess an almost utopian evocation of past worlds and past or present communities.The propose that there are six key characteristics that create value in sleeping brands and other properties. They are dormancy, iconicity, evocativeness, utopianism, solidarity and perfectibility. After these six characteristic elements are met, the conditions for revival and the revaluation—as well as the addition of value by the efforts of the community—are met. Yet, behind these elements, there is also an inspiration: a motivation to find, to share, to dream, and to build on.Buried within the stories and histories must be something mysterious and strange, something that powers the connection and motivates the chase.A strong brand will combine the opposing elements of a deeply meaningful product. The brand that can tap into these insoluble puzzles offers lasting engagement and meaningful connection that can persist through the decade.The author uses the example of Health Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight (2008) to show how Hollywood remakes and refreshes old franchises just as old brands are continually extended and renewed.

“Consumer” or “Multiplier”: This short essay is about the difference between the terms consumer and multiplier. The term consumer is a fixture of the marketing, media, and cultural worlds. It evoked the distinction between producer and consumer, reminding the corporation that capitalism is not about the art of the possible but the art of the desirable. It doesn't matter what the corporation does. It will sell only what the consumer wants.On the other hand, not everyone likes the term consumer. Some think consumers sound like ravening beasts who must destroy what they buy instead of renting it from the recycler. Others dislike the term because it suggests that the consumer always destroys value and can’t actually ever participate in its creation. Another objection is because in what sense can we be said to consume digital goods, when they are not scarce in any conventional sense, and they are not diminished by the act of consumption? The author's preferred term is multiplier. A multiplier is someone who will treat the good, service, or experience as a starting point. Multipliers will build in some of their own intelligence and imagination. They will take possession of a cultural artifact and make it more detailed, more contextually responsive, more culturally nuanced, and more valuable. Multipliers will add value by involving others. They will multiply the value in collective acts of construction. Furthermore, the multiplier will use his or her instruments and networks to publicize the innovation.

“In Defense of Memes”:
The author agrees that the terms viral and meme often connote passive transmission by mindless consumers, but she takes issue with the claim that meme always precludes active engagement or that the term has a universal, static meaning. As understood by trolls, memes are not passive and do not follow the model of biological infection. Instead, trolls see memes as microcosmic nests of evolving content. Memes spread because something about a given image or phrase or video or whatever lines up with an already-established set of linguistic and cultural norms. In recognizing this connection, a troll is able to assert his or her cultural literacy and to bolster the scaffolding on which trolling as a whole is based, framing every act of reception as an act of cultural production. She uses the example of Insane Clown Posse, which performs in full-face clown makeup, always being a target for trolling humor. Especially with the 2010 release of the group’s single Miracles and its video.Within a few days of the video’s release, dozens of remixed images and .gifs were posted to 4chan’s infamous /b/ board, many of which merged with existing memetic content. Most significantly, memes in the trolling world emerge organically, with absolutely no consideration for or loyalty to the supply side of the equation. Capital, in other words, rarely enters the picture. Trolls don’t benefit from the largess of media producers, and media producers don’t benefit financially from the engagement of trolls. Trolls may appropriate media content, but there is no interest in either camp for symbiosis, preempting any possibility for moral/economic relations between trolls and media producers.

Reaction: These four essays read rather quickly because of how familiar I was with the content. I think that the most powerful part to me was in Retro-branding. Writing that aura, allegory, and arcadia are the character, plot, and the setting of brand meaning, makes so much sense to me as a media major but also as someone who grew up watching this at work. Nostalgia is one of the best ways to promote anything because it is such a strong emotion. I also very much agree with the switch from the term consumer to multiplier, it makes more sense in this modern time of mass technology. I generally agree with the majority of what these short essays said. However, I didn't completely understand the last essays point.