Henry Jenkins Responds To Planners

For those of you following the lively debate around the newly minted concept of transmedia planning, Henry Jenkins just published his response in two parts (part 1, part 2).

There's a secondary strain running through the conversation about who's in charge of creating brand meanings. Brand managers must be thinking it's them (is "brand manager" an overstatement?), otherwise we wouldn't have "repositioning" and "rebranding" campaigns that are nothing but efforts to replace the old meaning of a brand with a new one. But you can't just swap one meaning for another. See, it's more like a cocktail. You have something in the glass that's your customer's head, then you pour something else, then add ice, and the resulting drink is never what you've just poured. In other words, new meanings don't replace old ones, they blend together into something that we haven't yet been able to measure.