NORTHERN PLANNER

Someone who spends all day thinking about brands shouldn’t fall for marketing should he?

Yet I couldn’t stop myself buying these vintage Nike Cross Trainers from Ebay. They remind me what it felt like be a rebellious junior tennis player refusing to wear white at the my local club. I totally bought into the rebellious Andre Agassi thing and nothing that Nike has done since has made me feel anything differently.

This thing about having fans instead of customers will become ever more important as more people become able to filter out more marketing with things like PVR’s, not to mention using search engines and blogs to find stuff for themselves. More brands are resorting to Urban Spam, a phrase coined by Russell Davies. But instead of more int eruption,shouldn’t they be creating communication people want to find and, dare I say it, pass on instead? Honda’s ‘Choir’ ad had been downloaded over 3 million times for example.