Designing for Parody

People have struggled for years to find ways of explaining the product or "brand experience" and how it can be created. It's been explained by Pine and Gilmore as a theater with props (drawing with no doubt from Erving Goffman), as a mindshare, and in many other ways.

My personal constructionist view of brand is that the best brands are a combination of design and emergence in real communities, but i won't take the time right now to explain (perhaps a later post).

Perhaps the best way to analyze one's brand, though, is to gauge its ability to be parodied. For those of you who have a product or a business, unless it can be parodied in a video like this one (apologies in advance for the questionable content), your product probably doesn't have a strong enough brand. Where does your business or design fall on the 0-10 "parody-able index"?

As an example, the current version of BigTreeTop.com (a company i co-founded) achieves around a 1 or 2 on the index (low) - a problem we're working to solve by making much stronger, fearless statements about who we are.