Branding

What is branding?

Brands:

BRAND: A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name 

Before technological convergence brands would be one sided - they would have focus groups but not much else.
Now the brands are two sided because we are now prosumers, for example, we can now leave company reviews on social media and the company will contact you back

• A brand today isn't about a product but the idea behind a product 

Examples of what can be branded are:

• Products 
• People 
• Places 
• Religion

Now being a celebrity isn't just about the music but about the person, what they we at, what they do, how they interact with their fans. 

How big companies distribute media:

• Horizontal Integration: When a company has many subsidiaries in many different areas
• Cross Media Convergence: When the company owns different subsidiaries in the nine media forms. When this happens companies like to keep the money 'in house' this means that the money will keep going back to them.                                For example, if they are making a movie they will get an artist from the companies music label to sing the theme, a good example of this is the movie 'Sky fall' where Adele sings the theme also names 'Sky fall'. This means that they get exposure through other platforms. 
• Vertical Integration: The idea that a company also owns different production companies as well different media companies which means that they don't need to pay for production routes. For example, when a company owns booth the recording studio and a music label.

Web 2.0:

This is only possible because of Web 2.0 which allows you to be prosumer - we can contribute to the internets collective intelligence (when we are smarter together) through user generated context. The more users ask the more published content there is. Before web 2.0 there was Web 1.0 and there would have been more published content than user generated.

Henry Jenkins Media Convergence Theory:

Jenkins' theory is that new media happens when consumers ask companies for a product, they also watch what we do and they come up new media because other wise people will get it illegally and the can lose money - a good example of this is music streaming. 

How does this apply to real life:

when active users (prosumers) wanted to share information they made social media websites such as whats app which was the first app which allowed you to have group chats. Another exhale is that active users wanted to see their photos so they made the digital camera.

Conglomerate: 

• In a conglomerate, one company owns stakes in many other smaller companies which do business separately.
• If this is the case you have to think about if the news could be biased as it is one company which owns many news outlets.

Advertising and Marketing:

Branding: A product message, the way that you want the product to be seen - what it is.

Advertising: The product selling itself - this will not always be in the interest of the public.

Public Relations: The way that people respond to the product.

There are many ways of advertising such as: posters, trailers, billboards, blimp, celebrity endorsement, websites, social media and many more.

A technique that companies will often use is SYNERGY this is when separate companies work together to advertise products to get more consumers to buy it. 

A common way of doing this is using celebrities because they can get each others fanbase/clients by working together and sell more.

There also is product placement when the company puts there product into movies/videos and example of this are Beats headphones in music videos 

Below I have made a moodpboard of how a brand advertises itself - I have chosen the brand Dior:

This is the moodpboard annotated to explain the different the different way that the company advertises itself: