Mindplay

In the old days, espresso was usually prepared in one single shot by pressing hot water through ground coffee. The Flintstones used to brew it solely with steam pressure, but that’s a different thing. Nowadays, drumroll please, we do have an option: it’s called iperEspresso and is brought to you by those fine folks at illycaffè. Ok, strictly speaking this is no fresh news for anyone, however it looks like a huge step forward in my typical coffee driven creative process, so I just want to make sure everyone knows about it.

Illy has spent nearly 70 years perfecting the espresso coffee process. So, if I were to ask someone about how to brew an excellent coffe, I’m sure I’d ask Illy himself, which incidentally is also much much easier for me, proivided there are alternatives and considering that I live in Trieste, as Illy does… curious, huh? Over time, I continue to be impressed—blown away is more like it—by the focus of illycaffè on excellence. It’s innovative iperEspresso method, in particular, leads to a far smoother and intensely aromatic coffee than regular approaches. Yet because drinking an iperEspresso is so different, the potential for misunderstanding is high. So the question is: “how the hell do they achieve such a terrific taste, why an iperEspresso shot is so different from a standard espresso, and why don’t I just put Andrea Illy through such a third degree, since he lives in Trieste as I do too? Yep, the answer to the last question is nice and short: I work hard all day long for International Talent Support, which is worth the investment of time. Everything after however is me enjoying some family time.

So, if you want to know any more, if you are an espresso addicted and want to try something new and different, I’m not very well able to tell you: follow the white rabbit instead, to claim your highest pleasure…

Generally speaking, in and out of academic circles, people agree that brands play a central role in marketing. Introduced during XVIII century as symbols standing for quality and tradition, brands suddenly became a pervasive socio-economic phenomenon. Due to the astonishing variety of effects revealed by their impact on emerging cultures, brands stimulated a lot of excitement and interest among marketing practitioners for over a century. Researchers analyzed the subject by many different perspectives, focusing on both psychological and sociological concerns, as well as economical… how could you doubt it? Today, most of authors and practitioners agree to the following brand definition:

A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. —AMA

Of course, this is just the beginning, as further levels of investigation and understanding involved discussion on various dimensions like personality, equity, image, value system… Nonetheless, it looks like the brand notion is rather an empty shell that is used to sum up many things, but is meaningless in itself. So branding builds upon the idea of differentiation. Uniqueness of names, terms, signs and symbols are the means by which they get recognized in a crowded, competitive and complex marketplace.

Brands are closely linked to products, in general. They actually embody the promise to satisfy a specific mix of properties, services and benefits. You’ll notice this phenomenon whenever hearing something like: “Hey man, you bought an Apple”, or similar. However, literature typically conceptualizes brands in a different manner from that of products, even if they are, more often than not, treated as synonyms in real life. In fact, it usually happens to hear someone say: «I wear brand-name » or «I only buy brand-name». That’s because owner companies are able to attribute value to their brands over time in such a way that they become products by themselves. The substance of values accrued to the brand, hopefully as an outcome of a clever marketing strategy, is generally referred to as the brand equity. Despite the efforts spent in transforming and measuring such a value in economic terms, I’d like to point out that brands are fundamentally symbolic relations to meanings, which are negotiated during the social discourse and, as such, they only get relevance in a social contest. So you can rightfully question about the opportunity of such a conversion.

Considering that brands are becoming instrumental for a variety of social purposes in complex contemporary societies (as resources for developing personal identity projects or establishing communities, just to name a few), actual distinctions operated between products, logos, messages, etc., look obsolete… at best…