Cornerstone Promotion
This week, Business Week had a small feature on NY's own Cornerstone Promotion, a chic lifestyle promoting and brand integration company.
Cornerstone is most famous for being the creator of FADER magazine.
With their penetrative street smarts, Cornerstone has been able to survey the liminal edges of society's underground culture and portend -- with disturbing accuracy -- what's next.
Catering to NYC's ultra-cool crowd and purist ethos is not easy, but Cornerstone knows what buttons to push.
FADER has been able to encapsulate and meld skateboarding's cultural perogatives & niche mentality with fashion and music into a highly branded product.
Here is how Cornerstone describes itself:
Cornerstone Promotion is a lifestyle marketing company that builds brands. Immersed in music, film, technology and fashion, its young staff (average age 25) not only identifies what's next in culture; they are the culture. Cornerstone uses an under-the-radar, non-traditional, viral marketing approach to influence the influencer. Cornerstone provides 360 degree marketing solutions from the initial strategic planning stages to execution.Cornerstone doesn't just know that music defines cultural sensibilities.
Its miraculous success derives from the way in which Cornerstone deploys non-traditional marketing approaches.
One way the firm gets its message across to its primarily 15-to-30 year old key demographic is something called product seeding:
Product seeding is a way to get marketing messages out as traditional ads lose traction, and nowhere are they losing more traction than among peripatetic twentysomethings who hardly stay put for any traditional media experience at all. So companies plant wares in the hands of influential individuals in hopes that their cool or cultural celebrity will lead others to the goods.It won't come as a surprise, then that Cornerstone enlists, for the most part, collegiate urbanites to spread the gospel.
Not only that, their photos kick ass.
I remember when I was back in college and FADER had just hit the shelves.
It was 1997-98.
I told my friend, who was doing some promoting for them at the time, that their photos alone would turn the startup into a highly profitable entity.
Keep an eye out for Cornerstone.
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