Wall Street Journal covered some underhanded tactics employed by the organizers of the SXSW music festival against other organizations that try to take advantage of their investment in brand. For example - according to the article, free and heavily sponsored parties that aren’t sanctioned by SXSW were ratted out to fire marshals to be shut down. The article lists other unfriendly responses towards anyone that tries to leverage SXSW’s investment in branding.
There has been an inverse relationship between the friendliness of a brand and the size of the owning company’s pugilistic legal team when it comes to traditional marketing. Great examples of this are Mattel’s Barbie and anything created or acquired by Disney.
What I find particularly interesting about the SXSW revelation isn’t the tactics that they employ, or that they employ them. It is that some members of the press are either blind to modern marketing methods or just like to play along and smile.