Social media allows fans to create rich communities around entertainers, who interact directly with them in a barrage of tweets, pins, and posts. Sports teams now hire social media ambassadors to reach out to fans in real time during games, and once the game is over, the players send along insider photos and hold locker-room chats. Beyond the major platforms, new media sites like Vevo, SoundCloud, and Apple Music are spurring even more direct digital connections.
Of course, entertainers are still more than happy to take sponsors’ money, but the cultural value that’ s supposed to rub off on the brand is fading.
Cultural Branding
While the rise of crowdculture diminishes the impact of branded content and sponsorships, it has greased the wheels for an alternative approach that I call cultural branding. The dramatic breakthrough of the fast-casual Mexican food chain Chipotle from 2011 to 2013( before recent outbreaks of foodborne illness) demonstrates the power of this approach.
Chipotle took advantage of an enormous cultural opportunity created when the oncemarginal movements that had challenged America’ s dominant industrial food culture became a force to be reckoned with on social media. The chain jumped into the fray as a champion of this crowdculture’ s ideology. By applying cultural branding, Chipotle became one of America’ s most compelling and talked-about brands( though recent food-safety difficulties have dented its image). Specifically, Chipotle succeeded by following these five principles:
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