Branding by Association

In Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marsha Kinder first described her concept of Transmedia Storytelling with the phrase, “transmedia intertextuality works to position consumers as powerful players while disavowing commercial manipulation,” setting the tone for a conversation still ongoing nearly 20 years later.

While we’ve talked the transmedia part to death, we haven’t yet spent much time on the intertexuality bit. As in, a lot about distribution and not enough about what is distributed.

Intertexuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by other texts. This strikes me as a much more fertile place to play when building brand meaning, particularly given the struggle to find a human brand when we adapt them to more social spaces.

Imagine if you saw a facebook page of someone you’d never met. You can know what they like and what they don’t, what’s important to them and what’s not, we can see past conversations, what people have said about them and what those people look like. More than enough information to let you take some fairly informed guesses about their worldview.

These things are within the purview of a brand in our environment. In other words, a brand can’t be your friend, but it can get an inside joke.

It’s obvious when Nike+ associates with OkGo or when the NBA co-opts the Noah Kalina video for Where Amazing Happens.

It becomes clear when remixes mash a brand and an audience, blurring the associated meanings that lie within both.

Intertextuality places a brand in the cultural zeitgeist. It’s branding by association, cultural sponsorship, and it’s in this space – trading on the language of communities, that brands find their context.

photo via yeliR<>