BALENCIAGA'S NEW DIGITAL HERITAGE

The most inscrutable, impenetrable and uncompromising of heritage houses finds itself knocking about on the digital mob scene.

Have you seen the new Balencaiga Facebook page? Did you like it ? No, I mean literally "like" it, as a "like" is now being counted in certain corporate quarters as a certain kind of new marketing currency.

And when I say "certain", I mean certain, as in "assured, guaranteed, known for sure. " Think transparency of return on marketing investment. Think of the "like" as the quantitative reflection of brand social marketing penetration. Did that just sound like Latin? Well that's the kind of dirty talk that gets advertisers hot and open to a cross-marketing "relationship" these days.

But what's life without the challenge of a new language. As the world gets older it seems we should need new lingo to summarize these strange new business frontiers we are crashing through.

Going back to that Balenciaga Facebook page, I live for the comments, on the order of:

"looks quite matronly"
"too complicated"
"WITH THIS EUROPEAN CRISE.....THIS IS A JOKE !!!!!!!!!!!!!

VS

"Genius as usual"
"Balenciaga forever!"
"Hi! Can you ship to Hawai? if I have anything to purchase from you?"

Balenciaga should probably revel in the schism of that reaction, as the most inscrutable, impenetrable and uncompromising of heritage houses finds itself knocking about on the digital mob scene. And perhaps beyond the "like", the name of the game is the "embed".