The new role for brands is to be a network of the unacquainted.

MIT convergence culture expert Grant McCracken believes that the new role for brands “is to behave like a network of the unacquainted”. Brands have to connect people who love them and facilitate happy crowds.

With the run-up to the Olympics and Web 2.0 stuff, we’re going to hear more about crowd control and behaviour. It’ll be tied into the pursuit of creating brand communities and concentrated audiences.

There was a great article in the Saturday Guardian the other week about this. It talked about the increasing responsibility brands have to manage crowds and understand their behaviour (think the Primark Oxford Street store opening frenzy – hospitalisation over £2 pieces of unethical tat).

And Mark Earls has blogged about this here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.