Opening the Pandora’s box: marketing and branding strategies at the beat of Network Analysis

Network analysis is a strategic approach to marketing and branding, stemming from a well-established method called Actor Network Theory. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is extensively used in Sociology, Economics and a wide range of social sciences to understand and predict human behavior. Its specially advantageous because it takes distance from explanations that focus, either on social rules or individual beliefs as exclusive determinants of behavior: group or social explanations tend to argue that cultural, political or other environmental factors determine individual behavior, while individualistic explanations argue that individual belief systems or values override cultural factors in explaining behavior. Both approaches tend to fail, because instead of explaining why individuals behave the way they do, they too often end up presenting assumptions about individual behavior as causes of that same behavior—a situation not dissimilar from the chicken and the egg dilemma. Empirical studies on human behavior tell us almost unanimously that humans tend to behave differently, depending on contextual cues and individual perceptions and expectations. The lesson, simply put, is that human behavior can be influenced by the right factors, but not predicted—at least not in the way we can predict that the sun will come out again tomorrow.

Traditional marketing and branding strategic analysis, surprisingly enough, tends to adhere to either individualistic or cultural explanations of behavior. Yet, as digital media became the dominant sphere for marketing professionals in the 21^st century, the traditional tools have begun revealing their serious limitations.

“Not entirely convinced?” Let me explain, by focusing on three specific cases: 1) Interaction with consumers, 2) Content Marketing and 3) Branding.

Interaction with consumers has gone from being all about human-to-human interaction to being about a myriad of different kinds of interactions: consumers interact with companies across a variety of channels, which still include face-to-face contact, but where it is the mediated interactions (mediated by different forms of media, from landing pages to social media or email) that have become pervasive. Consumers behave differently, depending on the kind of mediated interaction, and traditional forms of analysis fail to explain the role that each media plays in the formation of consumer preferences, aspirations and expectations.

Content Marketing has become systematized: content systems or content grids are today the most structured ways in which companies can manage their content marketing activities, thanks to their promise of increased control and greater responsiveness. From a strategic perspective there is to this day no clear approach to content systems, that is, there is no consensus about the right way to ensure that companies reach their most common content marketing objectives: streamlining of content, identifying factors influencing engagement or optimizing the process of content creation.

Branding has become all about identity, connectivity and shareability: brand building used to focus exclusively on increasing brand equity and, as such, could be safely ignored by small and medium size companies. This has completely changed with the dawn of digital marketing. Today, digital marketing activities require higher engagement, better communications targeting and to put an emphasis on customer nurturing and lifetime value. Traditional strategic approaches to branding tend to focus on psychological profiling as the preferred way to identify those values that companies share with their customers. Such methodologies tend to carry strong presuppositions that confuse aspiration with expectation and brand identity with group-identity.

Want to know more about Network Analysis? Checkout also in the factish:

What is Network Analysis?

Do you want to know more about how you can apply Network Analysis to your company’s strategic branding? Then make sure to stay connected to the factish: subscribing is free and I promise no email blasts coming your way.

Want a more personalized approach? No problem, I can help. Just send a few lines to my email or get in touch with me through LinkedIn.

2 reasons why innovators should pay more attention to Digital Art

So, Why art?

There two main reasons why artists are essential to anyone wanting to innovate:

First: artists are the quintessential experimenters of contemporary society

Second:  contemporary artists work creatively with the tools that digital agencies use to make their own offerings

Saying that artists are innovators may not be a surprising statement—and it shouldn’t be. Yet, if your interest is experiential marketing then your focus should be on the work digital artists—also labelled often as Relational or Inter-medial artists.

‘Wait, digital art? ...what is that exactly?’

Digital art refers to the work of contemporary artists, who work with any one kind of digital media platform or who are interested in creating inter-medial experiences, that is, experiences that come as a result of the combination of different elements in their work (for instance, video and performance, projections and sculpture, or robots and lights). These artists are constantly experimenting with one sole aim in mind: creating new experiences for spectators.

These experiences can be, for instance, full blown multi-media spectacles, as in the case of renowned performer Marie-Claude Pietragalla and her ‘3D immersive spectacle’: Mr et Mme Reve.

An even more impressive sample of innovation, way beyond his time, can be found in the work of artist Nam June Paik. His 1969 Electronic Opera, made through a combination of negative video images, dancers, a background of music—where a fourteenth century clavichord sets the mood—and vectorial movements—similar to the popular screensavers in the 90s—work all in complete synchrony to deliver a powerful experience of the senses and the mind: a topless dancer and three hippies have their images manipulated distorted, and saturated with additional color; Richard Nixon and other well-known figures are twisted up; Voiceovers issue commands to the audience: "This is participation TV."—this is an incomparably compelling experience with a clear message (albeit critical) to it!

Artists working with computers can be traced all the way back to John Whitney, who worked with outdated military computers in the 1950s and 1960s. His innovative work was pivotal in making the amazing credits sequences in Alfred Hitchock’s Vertigo, Northwest and Psycho! As reported on Rhizome ‘Whitney was hired to complete the seemingly impossible task of turning Bass’s complicated designs for Vertigo into moving pictures’.

Other, perhaps less known, although not a bit less interesting artists are Frederik Heyman and Keren Cytter just two name two guys that always come to my mind.  Heyman works with a combination of photography, graphic design, and video. 

Wonderful samples of his work can be found in his website or while

Keren Cytter 2011 Avalanche series of short films is a work that I truly enjoyed—it makes you laugh, think and reflect on many aspects of filmmaking and storytelling. The films play with time perception, with character roles and traits which appear as bizarrely inconsistent, there is no clear story line, and the atmosphere is purposefully sabotaged through the use of wrong props and incoherent settings, etc. Take a look at one Cytter’s wonderful short films here.

Written by Daniel Vargas Gómez