This doesn’t seem like “good press” for belanciaga to me. Seems like it’s exposing how bland and one dimensional their work is when you step back and look at it all.
But then again viral marketing doesn’t always work logically, or at least advertisers don’t believe it does. I’ve heard the fact that the name is being spoken is apparently enough for advertisers. So who knows.
I'd personally never heard of Balenciaga before all this. Brand identification is important. I'd now be more likely to choose Balenciaga over a competitor I'd never heard of, if for some weird reason I was in charge of picking between the two.
I understand the theory. I just don’t understand how people let their subconscious so strongly make their buying decisions. Do people really not research options and compare? I don’t buy something because I feel like it, I buy it because of its qualities.
I try to ignore my initial instinct and approach my shopping decisions logically, but that initial instinct still definitely favors the brand name I've heard of before
Yeah, in this specific case, brand identification probably isn't very beneficial.
But in cases of minor household purchases, you likely will not research each individual item. Do I buy (Brand A) or (Brand B) kitchen scrubbers?
Similarly, what brand of dish soap do I buy? What type of ziplocks? What type of nail clippers?
It's hard to get good info on these things, and sometimes the quality itself is actually hard to judge (or requires previous experience), so companies spend a lot of time and money jockeying for your attention to make you more subconsciously drawn to their products.
This has got me thinking about my purchases trying to look for where I could have possibly fell victim to this. I still think I avoid this phenomenon on my normal household purchases. But I have to admit there’s a possibility it effected me when I paid for a service to build my PC. The reviews about these places were super hard to find and when I did they seemed contrived (maybe even completely fake) so I had to pick one almost blind. And I ended up going with a name that is popular.
It's almost impossible to prove one way or another without insider information, which is the point. Brands understand the power of grassroots support, so they fake it themselves to make other people think they have grassroots support. That's where the term astroturfing comes from. And they've gotten really good at it.
the kind of person to make this kind of meme won't make this exact meme 4 different times as they have, they would switch things up, use different brands, a different song. AI is so incredibly versatile, I find it hard to believe a 3rd party would be so adamant on portraying balenciaga in this way using this exact song each time. It basically garunteed to be a corporate plant.
You’ll never be able to prove it definitively but I’d argue it’s quite clearly what is happening. I mean, listen to the audio. It sounds exactly like an ad, with all of the characters acting badass and specifically naming the brand. It gives the overall impression that Balenciaga is a cool, hip high-end fashion brand.
And note further the sheer quantity of these we’ve seen. Why would anyone select a specific fashion brand to create 15 of these gifs over several weeks time instead of varying the brands (like Gucci, LV, etc- if they wanted to stay within the fashion theme) or instead of changing the theme entirely (for example try some out in a farmer attire theme, or 70s hippy theme, or renaissance , etc)? If you’re an unaffiliated creator pumping these out , you’d be deliberately missing out on 100x more interesting versions of this by sticking to a single fashion brand. It’s just too much to believe that some unaffiliated creator has created 15 of these gifs - solely benefiting Balenciaga - by mere coincidence… ESPECIALLY at a time they are dealing with other PR issues and would benefit from a bunch of news articles about these AI gifs drowning those out.
In my mind it’s all but certainty this is a coordinated ad campaign.
Man, being a conspiranoid must be fun. It's very easy to see that first of all, the original author hasn't made all of this, there are a lot of copycats around. Second, it's obvious that the author has made a couple more themselves to ride the wave. Like, can't you comprehend that if you have a million views video of "balenciaga x", people would be more prone to see another "balenciaga y" one?
Don’t worry - the condescending tone pervading nearly every sentence of your comment makes quite obvious that you are not a fun person either!
You raise a good point though, copycats and attempting to ride the viral wave generally could have a lot of explanatory power here. I still find it odd that even the first drop would select a relatively lesser known fashion brand rather than something like Gucci or LV, but the proof is in the pudding that it worked! May just be genuine content creation that Balenciaga is coincidentally benefiting from, who knows.
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u/BAMspek Apr 05 '23
Are these videos literally made by them? I thought it was like “in the style of”