Listen to these quotes (from Ad Age):
“Brands are the solution, not the problem…..Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired….It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
Interesting. I wonder, does that mean there’s an algorithm for brand affinity? Hmmmm.
“Brand affinity is clearly hard wired….It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
Interesting. I wonder, does that mean there’s an algorithm for brand affinity? Hmmmm.
Of course there is an algorithm. But only if you have enough training data.
And if there is a genetic component to that algorithm, what better way to obtain that genetic training data than by.. oh.. say.. starting a company that collects genetic samples. 23andme, anyone?
It all makes sense now. Everything that Google does, every single thing, is geared toward advertising. Even their gene tests.
What a brave new world we’re creating, here. Anyone else as excited as I am?
Great comment JG. Very scary!
The about face of Schmidt is ironic as Google has gotten rich off of supporting and growing the non-branded cesspool.
Brands are hard wired for the same reason that the “fight or flight” mechanism is- we need quick ways to make decisions. They serve as proxies for collections of attributes, so that we can distill the infinite number of attribute combinations to a smaller number that represent the variety space. With cars, we divide the car universe into archetypes like “good value”-Toyota, “luxury”-Lexus, etc.
The limitations of brands occur when the overlap between brands is too great, or when the variety afforded by various attribute combinations is so large that brands end up contradicting themselves.
StylePath has taken a different approach. We believe that what is truly hard-wired are the attribute-combination preferences, and that people then try to make the best match between those preferences and the closet brand. Our system uses AI to create unique preference profiles (essentially individual brands) for each user. This enables users to find products that match their taste, without trying to a)describe their preferences in words, or b)trying to match their preferences to an existing brand.
“The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance” — Google is not very relevant to me, because I do not care much about 1×10^100.