Antipreneur
I love adbusters for what they do. I rarely agree with their logic. Here’s another case. The Blackspot program is an attempt to compete against corporations with… drumroll please… a different logo. In fact it’s more than just a different logo, it’s a completely unattractive albeit “rebelious” logo. As usual, adbusters sort has the right idea but this isn’t the way to go about it. The logo is synomous with impersonal manufacturing. Even small businesses that have gotten away from their clientele on a face-to-face, day-to-day basis can suffer from the effects of a cooling off in terms of a customer’s love for them. What adbusters really wants to accomplish is a disolution of the power of logos and brands. The best way to do that is not to give folks a logo to use, but give them the tools to create their own personal logos and make their own stuff.
Personalization on this level is the true threat to the Nike’s and Mircosoft’s of the world. Microsoft? Yes. The open source movement and its myriad of projects and haxt0r names is what is giving Microsoft a run for its money. Nike has had the brains to let anyone do this sort of thing to their products. They damn near had me snared until I saw the $100 price tag. Sorry. I don’t pay $100 for shoes. Those kinds of prices are a direct result of corporatism and a lack of competition. Besides it doesn’t take a lot of research