as tech elites. Owners of Mac computers are associated with creativity more often than their PC-using counterparts.
4. Cultural significance: Perhaps the most critical aspect of a status symbol is that it reflects the social and cultural dynamics of its time and place. For example, the tie-dyed t-shirt held little meaning before becoming popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of the counterculture movements taking place across the country. In the 1980s, a cordless phone signified wealth and early adoption of technology in America, but in 2015 it has become difficult to imagine using anything but a smartphone. Every status symbol is a product of its own time and place in our cultural history.
5. Celebrity endorsement: There is a reason why brands throw down millions of dollars for celebrities to endorse their products – it works. However, as we saw with the hip-hop movement, even when unpaid, the simple association of a product with a celebrity or culturally significant figure can cause it to go flying off of the shelves or lot. There was a 45 percent increase in consumer interest for OMEGA's Seamaster collection after it appeared on James Bond in the 2013 film, Skyfall. While a fictional celebrity, James Bond represents an aspirational lifestyle that has historically held great appeal for men, and OMEGA capitalized on this association to drive sales.
The marketing around Dr. Dre's Beats by Dre brand has always relied on celebrities wearing and using the product. From Lady Gaga to Pharrell to legendary producer Dre himself, who better to recommend a pair of headphones than your favorite musician? When Apple acquired Beats for $3 billion in 2014, they were buying more than just a product but also the all-important aura of “cool” that has resulted from Beat's savvy marketing and celebrity endorsements.
Chapter 2
From Things to Thrills
By 2010, social media had matured from a copy-based platform where status updates were predominantly shared via short-form text to a more visually based platform where status updates increasingly included images or videos. The proliferation of camera-embedded smartphones among America's youth were compelling them to take more and more photos and share what they were seeing and doing and with whomever they wanted. Consequentially, the dialogue, priorities, and the very face, literally, of social currency shifted from the accumulation of stuff to the collection of experiences. YouthNation was moving from status symbols to status updates as a measure of value and success and has never looked back.
As a result of the smartphone explosion, photos would begin to play an increasingly convenient and pervasive role in our consumption of all media. As America's youth shifted to mobile devices as a primary computing and media consumption tool, they craved shorter and shorter forms of content exclusively “designed for the flick.” Since images convey emotions and experiences that short-form copy never could, the levels of engagement around images, especially within social networks, grew exponentially. It wasn't too long before brands took notice and began to build campaigns to take advantage of this new definition of status.
Bing's Summer of Doing Campaign
In 2012 Microsoft came to MRY looking to emphasize Bing's new social features, which made it easier for users to seek the opinions and advice of friends as part of the decision-making process surrounding events, purchases, travel, and more. MRY worked with Microsoft's Bing to develop a critically acclaimed campaign called “The Summer of Doing,” illustrated in Figure 2.1, which focused on distributing bespoke imagery via social media with an eye toward motivating people to go out and do things with the help of Bing.
Figure 2.1 A social media post from the Bing “Summer of Doing” Campaign (Created by MRY)
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