• We believe in experiencing everything first hand, because it speaks to our credibility and our ability to tell compelling narratives. We pride ourselves on being cultural participants. We want to know everything about everything. The goal is to share the best things the World has to offer with you, our audience. We live to tell stories that excite and inspire. We try to reach those with a discerning taste, and an appreciation for luxury, heritage, and quality. Most importantly, we want to reach individuals who aspire to be great.

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    • Live From The Berry: Marketing To Us

    Dear Brands new and old,

    I hope you are all doing well this morning! I have some thoughts on how you guys market to us and I wanted to share it with you. You might be asking yourself who are we? When I say us, I mean the media; you know the bloggers, online magazines and digital personalities you’ve been reaching out to as of late.

    Times are changing and so are the attitudes about branding and marketing. I hope you’re noticing and paying attention. I believe there are new ways of marketing to us and some of you do it very well and others well you need some help. I strongly believe that there are new ways of marketing your artist, clothing companies, events, products and persons of interest to us bloggers.

    The days of poor qulaity cell phone pics of your products getting blog love seemed to have passed a long time ago. A lot of brands have stepped it up over the past couple years and actually conduct full cast photo or video shoots for their releases. Those practices have become the standard, and it’s all done just to get a post on a few blogs. If you’re not competing at that level it might be time to reevaluate.

    Mass emails of your new artists single or Youtube video doesn’t get the attention it once did. Most of us get hundreds of those a day and it has become impossible to filter out the good and the bad so most of it just gets ignored. I can speak for some of my peers and myself and I know we want unique and exclusive information, we want our own product shots, and we want our own angle on every story. It has become very rare to see people post entire press releases; we all want our information to be different. A lot of bloggers like myself take our own product shots visit the places where the story is happening and develop our own angle around a particular brand or event. (Maybe we are getting spoiled)

    Most of us in this new media game have educated ourselves on your “BRAND” whatever it may be, clothing, music, art, personalities, products or gadgets so it is rather wise to treat us like we already know. Using buzz words like limited edition or endorsed by or talked about by…doesn’t really work anymore at least not on me.

    You can’t forget that you are dealing with cultural participants! We are in the streets, we have our ear to the ground, we attend the events and parties and all the places we need to be, basically we are usually IN THE KNOW and if we are not in the know, we have friends that are. The other thing I’ve noticed about our generation is that we still like to find out about things on our own, when we get forced fed something; we tend to throw it up. As the world and faces of media changes, I feel that brands and the way they market to us also have to change.

    Back in the days it was a lot easier to pitch to suits about a giving product or brand, they would get really excited and the pens and the check books would come out. A lot of these suits have been replaced by boat shoe wearing, jean and chambray shirt sporting 20 something’s who have built their own media empires and have an educated opinion about your brand.

    I’m not saying we are the end all be all but if you’re going to try and market to us, I just have a few suggestions

    Please share your thoughts!

    Further reading