Today we attended Micro-teaching sessions of our tutor-groups. We were required to bring along an ‘object’ which was a loose term for something to build a 20 min presentation around so that observers could watch your teaching style. Seema Aggarwal who develops digital strategies and has worked on The Lion King, delivered a smart session on how certain branding can work.
Seema asked us to think of our favourite brand and the first one that came to mind for me was Oddbox. https://www.oddbox.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw1PSDBhDbARIsAPeTqrcaIDVku_NANQ4S6RDmg1fn0m6NqdTJqtX-ynHLBAKuO9MXpaXpHqUaAoSNEALw_wcB
In lockdown we’ve been ordering food online for the first time ever. I’ve enjoyed the friendly, funny, matey communications that come with Oddbox deliveries. This company were set up during lockdown and deliver a wide range of fruit/veg which might not make it through the supermarkets perfection filter. There’s minimal packaging, it all comes in a big brown cardboard box. They constantly thankyou for ‘saving the veggies from being dumped’, a bit of a stretch but its an effective strategy to make you feel that you are doing your bit. Here are a couple of quotes from their marketing:
‘Fill your belly and save the planet by rescuing fruit & veg straight from the farm, including the odd curvy cucumber.
Food waste is a big issue. If it was a country, it’d rank as the world’s third biggest contributor to greenhouse emissions.
By going directly to farmers, asking what they’ve got too much of and what’s in season, we’re cutting out the supermarkets and reducing the amount of food chucked away. Better for the planet, better for your plate.‘
You get the idea! So this marketing has really appealed to me and has kept inducing me to spend my money on their product.
It was interesting to be led into analysing why marketing is so effective as Seema showed us a letter to Amazon by an ‘extremely satisfied customer’. It was basically a love-letter describing how Amazon was providing wonderful products just when they were needed, tailor made etc. It was chilling that this person really felt a strong emotional/personal bond with the world’s largest online marketplace – the largest Internet company by revenue in the world. They appeared to have no perspective on that and had bought in, literally to notion of Amazon as their saviour. Amazon’s practices have long been questioned and they are accused of masses of examples of – to put it mildly – bad practice including tax avoidance, anti-semitism, opposition to Trade Unions to name but a few. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon
It was also chilling to think that we are being manipulated constantly and that marketing companies train people in how to read trends to influence consumer choice by any means possible. Its clever stuff.
I can also see links with making art in some cases. When an artist has an idea for an artwork, they throw everything they have at it – a way to engage an audience, no holds barred. Jeff Koons, an American Artist who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists exploring the meaning of art and spectacle in a media-saturated era.
To quote from the Gagosian gallery’s site: ‘Koons stated his artistic intention as trying to “communicate with the masses,” and makes use of conceptual constructs—including the ancient, everyday, and the sublime—creating luxurious icons and elaborate tableaux, which, beneath their captivating exteriors, engage the viewer in a metaphysical dialogue with cultural history.
It really made me think and I really enjoyed the session, it prompted some great conversations over the coming days!