I'm going to quote the whole section because holy motherfucking fuck.
II. FACEBOOK OVERALLS
Hitt: Let me give you a scenario. I’m the somewhat desperate C.E.O. of a company called Jack’s Overalls. We manufacture functional clothes, and in the era of corporate farming, our market is fading. My younger vice presidents are telling me that we need to try new media. So I’m turning to you: Why should I even consider these emerging media? Can’t I just spend my money on old-school, 30-second spots on prime-time television?
Bastholm: Well, we do have a ton of different new media and new ways to use them. But before we get there, I would suggest that first, you take a step backward and ask yourself, How do I make my brand relevant? Overalls are a staple of Americana, a cultural icon. The question is, How can you make overalls relevant to people today, and how can you use these different media channels to accomplish that?
Palmer: Your customers in the past have been farmers. Overalls are a commodity.
Rasmussen: Very functional. And your market is shrinking.
Palmer: So you have to create a new market. Farming may be going away, but what’s on the rise? Right now your overalls are made with special pockets and holders for farming tools. Maybe we retool them for urban farmers, as it were, and their specialized gear. You have special pockets for your iPhone and your BlackBerry, and a pocket for your headphones, another for your wallet, your subway card, your keys.
Bastholm: Let’s really take the brand into the 21st century, shall we? Why don’t we put a ShotCode on the front of every single pair of overalls. A ShotCode is like a bar code. You scan it with the camera in your cellphone. And then something comes out the other end. With bar codes, it’s a price. But with a ShotCode, it could be a song, it could be a picture, it could be a link to a Web site.
Hitt: People would come up and shoot me with a cellphone?
Bastholm: Yes, with a phone camera. So you’d be wearing a pair of overalls, and you have your own personal ShotCode on the front. The ShotCode might take people online to a new Web site you’ve selected. Or a picture you took that day or your favorite song. All of a sudden you have a uniquely personalizable pair of overalls that can say something different about you on a daily basis. You’d utilize a whole bunch of screens that we haven’t really seen used in clothes before, and this loop of screens is creating something completely unique.
Rasmussen: Maybe that’s something you do in partnership with Facebook or MySpace.
Palmer: But you don’t want to suddenly be seen as, like, this newfangled Internet overall company. If you’re talking to somebody who’s over 40, that’s going to freak them out, you know? So this becomes your special-edition ShotCode overalls. You place ads only on social networks, like MySpace or Flickr. Facebook users can buy the Facebook edition of these overalls. They come precoded with your Facebook page embedded as your ShotCode. But if you’re not a Facebook person, you’re never going to know about this unique brand.
Rasmussen: You can market 100 different kinds of overalls and sell those to different target groups.
Palmer: It’s self-selecting, actually. The more narrowly you talk to your audience through these new screens, the more people and products will gravitate toward one another. And nobody else will necessarily know or care that that’s happening. Take Vans, for instance. They do all sorts of special customized editions. Like they’ll do an Iron Maiden edition of Vans. But if you’re not into Iron Maiden, you might never see that. You see it only if you gravitate toward it through these screens.
Rasmussen: I would recommend a Web presence built around a utility that engages consumers and allows them to take your brand and own it. Maybe you give customers the ability to mix and match your overalls with other clothes. Maybe you create a widget that lets you drag your overalls and drop them onto an existing image. And the program blends the overalls with the outfit, so you can say, “Boom, that’s how it would look if I wore a pair of cord overalls with a blue jean jacket.”
Bastholm: Yeah, create a little viral engine called You Need Overalls, where you can take current events and just drag a pair of overalls onto whoever’s in the news.
Rasmussen: We could also create a small card — like a business card — with your overalls and a logo and a URL on it. The overalls are perforated and can be punched out of the card. People can then hold the cutout in front of somebody cool and take a picture with their digital camera: there’s Barack Obama wearing his jacket and a pair of overalls, giving a speech. Click, I send it in to your Web page. Maybe you have samples of these user-generated images playing on digital screens in stores, on television screens in cabs and on digital billboards.
Bastholm: My company developed this mobile application called Nike Photo ID, where you take a picture with your cellphone of anything and it sends you back a pair of sneakers in the two dominant colors in that picture. So maybe we create a site called Overall This. Send in a picture of somebody and get them back in overalls.
Rasmussen: Then you can post the images on your Web site. Create a gallery that shows how overalls can mesh with many styles, from metro to hip-hop to blue collar. People can comment and vote on their favorites.
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