#20 – How to work in marketing, learn from TikTok, follow the money, and not let tales become modern tyrants

Bonjour.

Temporarily back to our regular schedule, Strategy Bites brings you Six Links of Inspiration to entertain you throughout the long weekend (if you happen to live in the UK, that is, which 21% of our subscribers do.)

The reads this week are about how to work in marketing and not be full of 💩, what #BamaRushTok tells us about American consumer trends, how following the money gives you a hint of what’s to come, why differentiation isn’t merely academic, how tales have become modern tyrants, and how a light designer copes with a band that doesn’t do set lists.

Happy clicking!

Six Links of Inspiration:

• How to Work in Marketing (and not be full of 💩). This great compendium of incredibly useful resources for marketers by Dave Kaufman has been flushed into my timeline by Faris. It’s a great list and I don’t think much more needs to be said about it other than click through, dive in. (And then keep clicking through.)

• Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops. I hadn’t heard of Bama Rush before. Or #BamaRushTok. It’s the TikTok version of the lives of (potential) sorority members, an ultimately small group of young women that shouldn’t be telling us much about broader trends. But if you follow Amanda Mull’s logic, much is to be learned from the TikTok displays of outfits-of-the-day of a ver
  ”It’s precisely this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members […] a useful case study in status-seeking, and therefore in modern consumerism. In instances of extreme privilege, broad shopping trends have traditionally not been all that hard to parse: Rich people buy nice things, and a shared understanding of those possessions helps them identify one another as members of the same exclusive class.”

• Follow the Money: Categories of Consumer Spend. Despite a rocky economy, consumer spending is still going strong (in the US), summarises Rex Woodbury, before he dives into the different areas of spending that stand out as interesting (and potentially worth disrupting) – Housing, Experiences and Travel, Pets, and Shopping.

• Differentiation – beyond an academic question. Graham Staplehurst from BrandZ Kantar shares some data points from their longterm study of “the best brands” – and shows how the data supports some differentiation myths that Byron Sharp and John Dawes refute (anecdotally) in a 2001 paper.

  • Differentiation isn’t only on a functional level

  • Differentiation isn’t only to achieve price premium

  • Differentiation isn’t only a function of advertising to sales ratio

• The Tyranny of the Tale. Parul Sehgal takes us on a quick trip through the story of storytelling, how it has evolved and, gradually, taking over our lives beyond what’s good for ourselves: ”Storytelling is what will save the kingdom; we are all Scheherazade now. Among the other entities storytelling has recently been touted to save: wildlife, water, conservatism, your business, our streets, newspapers, medicine, the movies, San Francisco, and meaning itself. Story is our mother tongue, the argument runs. For the sake of comprehension and care, we must be spoken to in story. Story has elbowed out everything else, from the lyric to the logical argument, even the straightforward news dispatch.” It’s a great read about the power of stories, why we tell them, and whether we’re being naive by making it an unquestioned cornerstone of our existance.

• How Phish’s Lighting Designer Jams With the Band. I’m not a Phish fan. I couldn’t even tell you the name of single song. The only reason why I was drawn to this article is that an old colleague of mine is a big fan – and the fact that it sounds like an insane feat to light more than 1,750 shows in real time without a set list: ”There is some method to the madness. Kuroda favors symmetry, though he has been tempted toward its opposite by the moving trusses, a recent addition. He uses stationary lights of varying colors and beam shapes (flared, straight) to create texture. He abjures audience blasters that flash tremendous amounts of light at the crowd. The band members rarely move much, but when they do, their lights do not follow them. Phish’s palette is very distinctive — you can almost smell the colors — with ‘a lot of saturation, a lot of pastel and not much in between.’”

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed the read, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this with three of your friends that enjoy random acts of inspiration.

Enjoy your weekends and read you next week.