Peerset’s lovely Coreen Salamanca – Marketing extraordinaire, who has yet to show up to work in anything less than faaaaabulous – emailed an invitation for an event (no doubt kindly suggesting that I need to stop hiding out in idyllic Mill Valley. I open the attachment and lo and behold I see the wonderful work of Erik Madigan Heck of New York’s Nomenus Quarterly.

Lest I sound like a shameless name-dropper, I should pause to explain that I am not, by anyone’s standards, a woman “in the know.” Granted, I don’t live in a home cluttered with cats and ferns, in front of a loop of America's Next Top Model, but I’m hardly the go-to girl when it comes to fashion, or fashion photographers, or events…and especially events with fashion photographers. But, a happy accident of living in New York for 7 years, I have worked with people like that and one of these people happened to be Erik’s girlfriend. And you know someone is your BFF if you don’t have a Kevin Bacon between you.

Enough with the name-dropping, on with the show.

Scrolling up on the invitation I see that this event is a launch party for the Acura ZDX: 7. Cities. 1 car. 1 Photog. Coincidentally I just concluded some research about Burberry its cohorts and found endless connections to auto. High fashion, sexy cars, and cosmopolitan cities do align themselves. I say this not because I take everything in a P Diddy video as biblical truth, but rather because there are actual statistical correlations between people’s interests in high fashion, auto and location. Peerset operates a software system that calculates these correlations.

These are cognitive correlations divorced from purchase data – i.e. people associate Ferrari and Ferretti (as in, Alberta dummy) even if they don’t own both (and in the case that they are dyslexic or a tragically bad speller, apologies). Some of this happens because of branding but some of it comes from chatter in social media forums – the kind that Peerset analyzes. So I start thinking, why Erik M. Heck and Acura?

Caveat:

Two hazards/awesome side effects of spending your time playing with Peerset technology:

You spend your time playing with Peerset technology and neglect to leave your home (Reader, use imagination here, omitting references to ferns, cats and ANTM).

You start to think critically about all cross-marking efforts and make dorky tables like the one below:

I’m not saying that the table above is how these brands aught to be marketing, but rather pointing out that relationships between brands exist. They can be forged deliberately with marketing, but they can also be imagined collectively, expressed in social media and uncovered with technology.

Acura gets that there are strong organic affinities between these three elements of culture. Furthermore, I am personally impressed that Acura aligned their new model with a photographer versus attempting to pick one single fashion label. Think about it: Acura is saying that they align their cars not with a certain look or income of the end buyer, but rather with the creative driver (Erik).

Congrats to Erik and Acura from your friends @Peerset and thanks for making the stuff that fuels our system.

Allison Light joined Peerset in January 2010. Among Allison’s many interests are Mill Valley, Nomenus Quarterly, and (secretly) America’s Next Top Model… which means she must also like Feist, Bloc Party and the History Channel. She has neither cats nor ferns.

Like Fuel, Fashion or Ferns?

Let us know!