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Part one Word count: 349

The brand I have chosen was known as Megaupload, a company recorded to be 4% of the internet traffic on 20 January 2009, shut down by the FBI on 19 January 2012 due to copyright infringement, money laundering and several other assumed crimes (United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, 2012; Peukert e el., 2013), and now rebooting under the name of Mega.

(FBI banner 2012)

(Mega, 2013) (Dropbox, 2013) (Nike, 2013)

I choose this brand because of the unpredictable reaction of users, who were denied subscription and lost their money, but promptly went back to the brand after reopening. Mega recorded 100k registrations in the first reopening hour, which they boasted to be the fastest website growing in history (Dotcom 2013).

Mega operates in the file sharing market, the online storage service for personal use and sharing. To recover from the bad reputation that followed Megaupload prosecution, the name of the market was changed to the friendlier name of ‘Cloud’.

Moving away from the overcrowded file sharing brandscape to the ‘Cloud’ allowed Megaupload to redeem its reputation and to join, with the novel brand name of Mega a new market with fewer but bigger competitors such as Microsoft and Google.

Mega has always tried to surprise its users through an aggressive strategy. They hired an ice cream chef to create a ‘Mega taste’ and randomly hide a ‘golden ticket’ in the bottom of cups for premium lifetime accounts (Day, 2013). Through this guerrilla branding and subversive attitude, Mega created a real internet phenomenon.

In an email interview, Finn Batato, Mega CMO, said that Dropbox, one of the major competitors in the cloud computing brandscape, inspired the re-structuring of services that followed the new launch of the company.

Dropbox provided services are identical to those provided by Mega, thou it has a completely different user perception. Dropbox has been able to establish itself in the “Cloud” market as a fully legal company even though its products don’t differ from what previously offered by old Megaupload.

I decided to compare Mega to the shoe company Nike. Although operating in a completely different brandscape and market, Nike faced a similar situation with the Cambodian scandal (Peretti and Micheletti 2011) and managed to rebuild a positive image and reputation amongst consumers.

Part two Word count: 342

Mega and Megaupload are certainly brands that hit success spot and captured the hearts and minds of people without the use of colours, fancy products or gimmicks. They aimed at engaging people at a deeper level, attracting them by their core values rather than by the product itself.

To analyse the cases I decided to use Lovemarks framework created by Saachi&Saachi (Roberts, 2004).

(Lovemarks framework, 2013)

“There are brands that inspire passion. Brands that inspire devotion. Brands that generate Loyalty BeyondReson. (…) These are brands that would cause riots if they were taken off the market.”

(Roberts, 2004, p.1)

The day after Megaupload was shut down, a worldwide riot exploded (Ha, 2012; Sidenius et al., 2012).

Lovemarks analyse brand identity focusing on users’ perception and on their relationship with the brand in terms of love and respect (Roberts, 2004).

As previously stated, this brand inexplicably attracted users even after one year of inactivity and after causing them a huge amount of money loss. This loyalty and the excitement for the return of Mega can only be described as love.

Another aspect that greatly influenced the history of Mega is respect, in relation to performance, reputation and trust.

People used to respect Megaupload for its eccentric, aggressive and subversive attitude, fighting against questionable rules and calling into question laws as the worldwide copyright policy and digital rights (Fisher, 2013).

Interestingly, people’s respect for the brand decreased as the company was released from prosecution and was forced to come to a compromise with trade regulations, disclaiming its subversive core values. (Tajitsu, 2013)

Lovemarks can help brands to understand what kind of image they are creating in people’s mind and answer the question: why people still love this brand?

With the new CEO who replaced Kim Dotcom (Lomas, 2013), the guru of the Megaupload core values, the company went more into a marketing-led rather than an emotional-led strategy, but as I stated before users are in love with the old subversive values and not with the quality of the service.

Lovemarks could be used to recreate the brand from an emotional point of view, appealing to people love rather than using a marketing and financial approach.

Part three Word count: 621

Lovemarks divide love into three aspects: Mystery, Sensuality and Intimacy (Roberts, 2004)

Mystery is the key of people’s love for Mega, its history, its values, and its image as a company on the threshold between legality and transgression. The riot of the web created the myth of Mega.

Mega is an intangible service. How can an intangible entity transmit sensuality?

Indeed it can, with the messages and values that are conveyed to the users, and seduce their mind. People can experience breaking the taboo of going against the establishment, protected by a community who breaks the same taboo together.

The phenomenon of Megaupload was so powerful that it created new language. After Megaupload shut down, file sharing brandscape became “PostMegaupload” (Falagna, 2012) in the users’ jargon.

(Lovemarks framework, 2013)

The Wired magazine coined the phrase “Long live Mega”. (Graeber, 2013)

This proves how much Megaupload was intimate to people. It was not just a website, it was an icon.

The new, more conformist image of Mega was somewhat perceived as a betrayal. The love for the old, explosive phenomenon was still there, but respect dropped. According to Lovemarks categories, Mega is a fad, where love is high but respect is low.

Within the same framework Dropbox is a brand, a good brand that offers a good service, fast and reliable, that is respected by people, but has no mystery, no sensuality no intimacy. The service is identical, but the emotional perception is diametrically opposite.

Kevin Rogers describe Nike as an example of lovemark (Roberts, 2004, p.79; Lovemarks, n.d.).

Nike always tells a story, about its past and its future, its dreams and inspirations, it is a sensual brand starting from the product, the service and their corporate image (Roberts, 2004, p.96, p.166).

(Wired magazine, 2012)

(Nike advertisement, 2012)

People love sports, Nike loves sports, people love Nike. It is a matter of loving the same things together at a personal level, a matter of intimacy.

Nike had a contradictory, controversial behaviour (Goldman and Papson, 1998) and the Cambodian scandal (Peretti and Micheletti 2011) affected its reputation. However, unlike Mega, Nike managed to reverse this situation by organizing charity and humanitarian campaigns (Nikeresponsibility, 2013) and is now a fully respected brand.

The analysis of the two brands shows two opposite outcomes where Nike gathered and Mega lost respect of users switching from an unethical to an ethical behaviour.

From Nike’s experience and Kevin Robert’s words we learn that “love cannot be taken for granted” (Roberts, 2004, p.189), and respect is essential to the long lasting of true love.

“Without Respect, Love will fade away into spent passion or burned-out infatuation”

(Roberts, 2004)

Mega is a fad, a temporary trend that may disappear over time, and this is what is happening with the company.

The brand has seen people love as a quantitative opportunity - how many people love us? - and not qualitative - why people love us?

They attempted to treat love as numbers changing the core values and this is gradually damaging their strength: people love.

Since we are talking about love, to improve a brand through the Lovemarks philosophy we should go at the heart of the brand. A limitation to the usage of this tool is - as in this case - that if the brand lies to itself the tool will not be effective. To support the analysis using Lovemarks, the brand should be aware of its weaknesses and uncover their biases (Jacoby and Rodriguez, 2007).

Lovemarks can be a starting point to improve Mega strategy, from its identity as core values that need rethinking. From what we have learned during the analysis we can suggest that they do not need to improve their service following Dropbox example, because they already are a step beyond, they already have love. Following Nike’s redeem example they should aim at improving respect for the brand and give more consideration to love.

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