Categories: Articles

Consumer Generated Content In The Real World

I was boarding a plane earlier today and right before the door they have a batch of signs – you know the standard warning signs.
There was one in particular that I could not understand until I realized that someone had moved the sticky graphics around. The stick figure seated in the wheelchair now had an enormous protuberance – you can imagine the rest.
What amazed me was not the fact that someone played around with image, but rather that no one else seemed to notice or care. I smirked. It was funny… in a high school kind of way. It also made me realize that whoever did that broke the law, or did something wrong.
When someone takes a brand and does what they want to it online, we call it consumer generated content – whether the adaptation is good or bad.
Can someone be sued, fined or sent to jail for changing a sign in an airport? What are the consequences of doing the same thing to a company’s brand online?
People really hated Metallica for taking on Napster. How do we feel, as a society, about people adapting signs in airports? Especially considering the accolades we give to others for creating their own iPod commercial.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.