Rise of the Pop Up Brands

Seems quaint! Trying to shop for even the most banal of things today results in a soul searching mission of epic proportions. “Do I identify with this aspirin? What does it say about me? Is this women’s or men’s aspirin? Wait a minute…there’s no difference.” 

Our options have come a long way from the Model T: Cars now come in a spectrum of colors with a bevy of choices. You can choose gas, hybrid or self-driving. Our phones have an even larger array varieties. The famously minimalistic Apple allows you 40 different ways to buy an iPhone. There are an infinite amount of ways to buy or build an Android phone. Or, you can buy a phone that looks like a gold racing car and is also a cigarette lighter.

Listen: Black Sheep doesn’t support smoking but we do support looking like a badass, so we have no idea why everyone in America doesn’t have this phone.

And just as our market for products has expanded, so has our media. On average, people get 189 cable channels in their homes. That number is from 2013, so it is likely to be higher and more meaningless since people are getting media—regularly—from more sources: Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Roku, Apple TV, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram. There are only so many ways for an eyeball to go in a day. Right now it’s Facebook and Pokémon GO. Tomorrow? Who knows.

There’s no mass media anymore. There’s no such thing as mainstream or underground. Everyone is operating on the same mediums. Some people have a larger budget, but it’s not a guarantee of larger efficacy.

A fun game is to go on YouTube and look up videos from musicians that you’ve never heard of with a ridiculous amounts views. Like, millions and millions. For research, The Black Sheep Agency asked our youngest worker who recently graduated from college and is up on musical trends if he’s ever heard of the group Galantis.

“No.”

Interesting. Galantis has close to 100,000,000 views of a single video since May 11th. To put that in some perspective, Beyoncé’s “Sorry” has 79 million views and was posted on June 22nd. Who the f is Galantis?!

You can do an endless spiral on these “huge” groups. A related clip to the group gnash (the lowercase is intentional; very emo) has almost 61 million views since March. Small potatoes. Pitchfork has zero results for both Galantis and gnash. You could say, “Nobody reads Pitchfork. They’re out of it.” But in 2015 Condé Nast bought Pitchfork for, presumably, millions of dollars because a lot of people who like music read the site.

What this means—not just for music but for news, for culture, for politics, for everything—is that there are galaxies upon earth operating independently and in no relation to each other. Everyone gets their own feed; everyone gets their own world.

Strange bouillabaisses form.

The 2 Versions of the Pop Up Brand

The Charette
Combined with instant manufacturing, marketers will be able to leverage the power of these numerous personalities and worlds for instant brands. The increasingly short memories and constant streams of something popping up will bring a harsh, or possibly comforting, truth to executives: No one cares about your brand. Right now, thirty percent of the U.S. changes brands currently out of novelty. Sixty percent say they’d switch for a coupon.

Brands will be formed and executed like a charrette. Identities formed rapidly, logos freelanced on 99Designs or created by in house teams and marketed quickly with targeted campaigns.

Someone on stage at Coachella will say, “I’m loving this Yateezy Vodka!” On-demand merchandise will be fulfilled by Printful and a private label distillery will handle orders. A social media team will monitor sentiment at the festival and interact with people creating the “vibe” and story of the brand on the fly. At the conclusion of the weekend, based on response, the brand will continue or be shelved—available to be brought back as a throwback brand at a later date when its limited-date cache has reached an apex.

For consumers, these brands will, at times, take on attributes of costume jewelry. They can feel fancy one day, casual the next.

This is the logical conclusion to a bootleg culture that has already become branded: the reverse will happen.

Brand You
Google and Facebook have been using algorithms based on our interests and previous search history to serve ads for years. As we noted a few weeks ago, Twitter is now targeting people via emoji. But the next extension is for whole brands to be created algorithmically.

With more advanced on-demand printing and algorithms, ads for a customized swimsuit will pop up based on your recent search history of punk, Picasso, and “vacation.” It will be just what you had in mind. You’ll pose for a (highly stylized) photo to post to Instagram while on holiday and then sell that swimsuit.

Or, you’ll make a meal on Facebook Live and it’ll be instantaneously available for sale through a partnership with Blue Apron to your network.

You are the consumer, the model, the advertiser and part owner. You are the entire ecosystem, because everyone gets their own world.

So much attention has been paid to maintaining your personal brand and value placed on curation of taste that we are all guaranteed to become Kim Kardashians: not super wealthy, but consumer brands. We’ll sell makeup lines like baseball cards and do co-marketing at family events. This is what Keeping Up with the Kardashians is because they’re already living in the future.* Current brands that thrive in this new atmosphere will become—or strengthen—platforms, invest in logistics and utilize technology to make it easy for consumers to become business partners. Facebook, Google, Nike, SodaStream and other companies with a boatload of patents and customizable products: Congrats!   

This is just one more facet of our changing world. With Election Season happening, there will be a lot of talk about the economy—how bad it is, how good it is, etc. The fact of the matter is, the economy is changing in ways so fundamental and at a such a rapid rate, that things are messy no matter who’s in charge**. There are multiple companies trying to make cars drive themselves while at the same time 8.7 million jobs are involved in the trucking industry alone: foundations are shifting. On multiple fronts, people are little freaked out. So, in addition to everyone getting their own stream of information, this is probably why you’re getting so many email forwards from your aunt.

While we’re living in a time of change, the smart bet is to not panic whether you’re a marketer or an individual (or the future/present mix of both). There might not be any hard and fast rules about how to proceed but that means you can try things out, learn new skills, make some money, lose not that much money, leverage technologies from other companies (e.g., Amazon Cloud Services), collaborate, create and fail. You can even fail huge! Do you remember what happened in the news three weeks ago?

Just think about what that means for your brand.

The question is: Are you ready to buy from yourself? Are you ready to buy from your friends?

——-

* Never watched an episode, but they seem savvy.
** Caveat: If fascism or a nuclear war happens, all bets are off.