Anything launched on April Fool’s Day is, by default, suspect which is why Brand-mates, a site on which people can share the brand they love with others, just doesn’t seem quite right. A site where brand lovers can create relationships with the brands others love? Sounds like an MBA’d account planner got together with some Web 2.0 type to create this thing. Oh wait, that’s exactly what happened!
Marketing/idea company Mental Images put this thing, Brand-Mates, together. But that’s the end of our jest. The guy behind Mental Images is the guy behind MyPetFat and Dormant Forces magazine. Around here at Adrants, we’ve known him for years. He’s a passionate guy and he believes people can be passionate about brands.
The genesis for Brand-Mates came out of a conversation Jay had with his sister a year ago who lamented, “All I want is to meet a man who likes getting up early in the morning for a Starbucks and joining me at Barnes & Noble.” While most people don’t talk like that, some, indeed, do and brands are every intertwined with their every day life.
Jay think Brand Mates is a new kind of dating site. A site where “likes attract” is celebrated and, materialistic as it may sound, the love for similar brands is the engine the site uses to match people with compatible others.
It may sound like an odd way to hook people up but a company called Airtroductions hooks people up based on who they will be sitting next to on their next airplane flight. Apparently, nobody meets at church dinners or school committee meeting anymore so someon’s gotta step in and help. Stranger things have hooked people up. Why not brands?
