Tag: Target market

Curated Brands

Curated Brands

Image
The Getty

When is a post not a post? Hah. This post popped up on Twitter, but has yet to drop here.  It’s a mystery. Here it is today in my blog, and I hope it’s not a repeat for my followers.

Until now,  I did not tend to think of “brands” as being curated.  I think of museum pieces being curated. I think of a curator as in the Wikipedia sense:   “…from Latin, curare meaning “take care”). A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g. gallery, museum, library) is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material. The object of a traditional curator’s concern necessarily involves tangible objects of some sort, whether it be artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections.”

More things are being curated these days:  I see in the business world the brand manager as curator, in that he or she is responsible for how that brand enters the marketplace and where it is placed relative to other brands. In the same way a museum only shows a selection of its collection, the brand manager strives to show the finest assets of the brand. Or they may choose to carefully and thoughtfully promote their brand to certain demographics, focused on a narrowly defined customer experience.

The curated brands in a recent USA Today article included Gilt, Target, and Apple. The piece was about AC Hotels by Marriott, and the journalist described the AC Hotel target audience as younger travelers, that the experience would essentially be more “tech-y” and hip. [my words]

Another place to look for curated material is at TED.com.  Nowadays, you can find someone you respect/love/would like to know/never heard of/ and see which TED talks they have in their curated collection.  It tells you a lot about that person by seeing how they would curate the thousands of TED talks.

My goal: to curate my own brand. Not there yet, but it is food for thought. Besides, it sounds so cool.

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Mismatched Socks and Marketing

It might have started with Helena Bonham Carter (HBC) at the 2011 Golden Globes. OR before. HBC rocked the fashion world by wearing OMG mismatched shoes!  Clearly on purpose, she chose one gray, and one red.  Not to be confused with the time I went to work with one navy blue, and one black leather pump, having dressed in the winter dark morning, only to be mortified the WHOLE DAY LONG by my style gaffe.

I received my first on purpose mismatched pair from a friend in February of this year. Cute, I thought, and I love them. At a local high school last week, I sidled up to a student, and kidded her, asking if she was aware that her socks didn’t match. “Oh,” she said. “Mismatched socks are good luck.”socks

With that, three other girls in the classroom pulled up pant legs to reveal, very seriously, that they too had opted for good luck.  Their socks did not match, and whoever added the “luck” factor deserves the you’re-an-awesome-marketer-good-for-you award.

Don’t know about you, but not only does this appeal to the environmental side of the universe, because we have plenty of sock orphans at our house, but also, it pays huge homage to the marketing theory of finding a new use for an old product. Adding the magic of “good luck” (wish I had thought of that), and you have a sock-it-to-you business that actually precedes HBC.  Come to find out that one company alone (Little MissMatched) sells $5 million a year of mismatched stuff to a very rich target of “tweens” and teens.

Meanwhile, I look to the future of being daring enough to wear mismatched anything.  My conservative self grew up wanting (because ours didn’t) for all the pieces of a place setting to match. Ask my mom.

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