Brands that identify large-scale social disruptions and then position themselves within the disruption as the brand of choice reap great financial rewards.
For example, brands such as Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Apple and Ben & Jerry’s have all exploited some disruption.
I will spend the next few minutes outlining several current disruptions and then how you might approach them.
Andrew Davis, while speaking at Content Marketing World, used the phrase “harnessing the power of participation creation” to describe leveraging someone else’s audience to bolster your own brand (thank you Arjun Basu of Sparksheet for your coverage of the event). Davis then used Tony Bennett, whose career was going down the drain, and his duet with the Muppets as an example. The Muppets, a very positive brand, lent some branding juice to Bennett by performing with him. That juice helped revive Bennett’s career.
This is the exact reason that advertisers seek well-known faces, such as athletes and movie stars, to star in commercials. When we see an entity that we trust/like/admire/emulate endorsing someone else, we have a tendency to extend that credibility.