Welcome to the Summarin - your weekly dose of commentary and summaries of the most interesting topics from the world of culture, media and commerce. If you are new around here and like what you read, hit the subscribe button below.
In today’s edition (24.4.22):
Food and Fashion have more in common than you think
A guide on integrating a go-to-community strategy to drive growth
AI-made digital content
*It’s fitting to add this playlist to today’s letter:
Feelings
I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the power of smell and taste to evoke a memory and a feeling. When one realizes the arsenal they have at their disposal, one can nurture the power of these senses in order to make customers feel. And an association with a positive feeling is probably the most important effect a marketer should try to emulate.
People want to feel something. Anything really. It is why we are so in love with storytelling. When doing purchases, online or in a store, we are chasing a feeling. When connecting with people, we are chasing the feeling from that experiences. Feelings rule the world.
There is a widely-circulating misconception that people today have low attention spans. I think this is a byproduct of the “content” we are fed, stripped down of any remarkable elements that makes you feel (that’s why news coverage by cable networks is so appealing - it makes you feel!). Therefore, as operators and creators, our responsibility is to engage our customers’ senses and evoke feelings that build a strong bond with the brand we are working on.
At the merging of fashion and food in Los Angeles (LA Times)
“At Gucci in Beverly Hills, intricate tasting menus are served on the fashion house’s signature Herbarium plates at the store’s freshly minted Michelin-starred osteria. In a Sunset Strip parking garage, fashion brand Kith’s L.A. shop sells cereal-blended milkshakes and soft-serve cups with flavors designed by the likes of rapper and TV host Action Bronson under an arty installation of all-white Air Jordan 6 Retros (and to echo the title of Bronson’s show, “F—, That’s Delicious.”).”
The merging of food and fashion may sound like a bizarre match but if you look closely it reveals a highly symbiotic relationship between communities. Look through the prism of feeling and aspiration, and it quickly starts to make sense. Sensory stimuli such as smell and taste are powerful forces that create long-lasting memories. They can live in your subconscious for decades, unnoticed, until a smell or a taste evokes a memory from the depths of your subconscious and immediately transport you to the moment you experienced them for the first time. To marry food and fashion makes a lot of sense then. Read story
How to Drive Business Growth By Fostering Your Community (Future)
“Community building can positively impact business growth in a number of ways, across any number of different efforts and programs. But managing a community requires real, sustained investment and alignment with your GTM activities.”
I strongly believe that the next must-have element to a modern marketing playbook is community. This has been accelerated in the last couple of years thanks to crypto and web3. New models for community management have emerged with highly-incentivized models of operation at the core. The ability to foster a community and integrated it into the overall business strategy is a skill that operators have to become cost with. In this guide from a16z’s Future publication, we get a breakdown of how a successful go-to-community (GTC) strategy can aid the go-to-market (GTM) approach of a business. If you are thinking of adding a community element to your brand, this is a must-read. Read story
DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content (Stratechery)
“Instead of pulling content from anywhere on the network, GPT and DALL-E and other similar models generate new content from content, at zero marginal cost. This is how the economics of the metaverse will ultimately make sense: virtual worlds needs virtual content created at virtually zero cost, fully customizable to the individual.”
The implications of this are huge. If the barrier to creating digital content is virtually eliminated, we are are going to experience a highly-accessible, liberalized space with an untapped potential for creativity. It is worth revisiting how game development and social media have evolved over the years and moved form text, to images, to video content - decreasing the costs of production at each stage, which in turn allowed them to achieve great scale. With talk of metaverses everywhere, it is reasonable to assume that there may come a time where every brand (individual, community, or corporate) will be able to quickly and in an automated way generate its own worlds. DALL-E can also be a great liberalizing tool for creators who would otherwise lack the skills to produce their own artwork. This can usher in a new creative revolution, similar to what YouTube did for movie makers and documentarists. When everyone has equal access to the tools, the market will become the deciding factor. Read story
Nike and Rtfkt take on digital fashion with first “Cryptokick” sneaker (Vogue Business)
“The sneaker community has enthusiastically embraced digital fashion and become a leader in trends including PFPs, Discord communities and digital collectibles. Fittingly, Adidas and Nike have been in competition to keep communities curious and intrigued about the metaverse.”
The first fruits from Nike’s acquisition of RTFKT Studios came on the market this week in the form of digital sneakers called Cryptokicks. The NFTs are the first Nike X RTFKT collab to emerge from the relationship which late last year signalled Nike’s serious stance in the metaverse. Read story
Tweets
That’s all for this week. Have a good week(end)!
Marin