The rudiments of branding

I decided to undertake a small observation project while on a recent trip overseas. The title of the project; ‘Learning from Caribbean branding'. Having visited the area before, I had a fair idea where the exercise was going to take me, but some of the results took me by surprise.

I was expecting to see interesting cultural use of colours, naming strategies and visual identities – all of which I did observe. The vibrant use of colour carries through from architecture, to interior design through to advertising and packaging. Along with this I noticed that local naming strategies are influenced by geography (eg. Piton beer) and people (eg. Aunt Gemima and Grandma’s), nothing very unique in that.

Living in the global world of communications I was also not surprised to see the major advertisers are communications suppliers/operators. In particular Lime and Digicel are very big spenders. The obvious connection of using a fruit as a main mobile operator name is not lost on anyone, and on first glance it seems unoriginal and verging on plagiarism. However if you take a step back and look at it in isolation, it is a clever name. It works. Lime is one of 4 ingredients that are hugely important in the Caribbean; rum, lime, coconut and banana (plantain). So take the concept of importance and dependence into the name of the local mobile operator – and there you have it – genius. However all of this was not too interesting to me, as the parent organisations are large global players, and their identities are clearly cookie cut across the nations, simply taking cultural sensitivities into account.

The small islands of the Caribbean vary in sophistication. Even on the islands that have supermarkets you do not have to walk very far before you

find street stalls, often just tables set up with various goods – mostly fruit and vegetables. One day I walked up to such a street stall to buy some vegetables, and soon realised that it was not one stall but 3, and before I knew it, I was approached by 3 individuals trying to sell me their wares. One seemed desperate and pushy, one was aggressive and one was softer and more personable. You can probably guess which one I bought from. There was not a lot of difference between their products, so in the end it was down to the person selling it. (The stalls in the picture are from another island.) This was a stark reminder to me why branding evolved in the first place. People needed to differentiate their product from the next person's, and with time this became more sophisticated and included logos, names, positioning, proposition etc. Soon you forget that people are behind brands. I have long believed in vision and values based branding, but this was a great example of seeing first hand the origins of the need for branding.

On other occasions we bought wares from the boats buzzing around the harbour (ice, t-shirts, bread etc). They have developed wonderful raw strategies to brand themselves. They call themselves names such as Mr. Quality and Mr. Fabulous. You will actually find them named in guidebooks! The chap in the picture is actually Free Willy (although I am not sure what that proves) . This raw branding brought a smile to my face.

Note to self – remember whatever branding projects I am involved in – people are always the main thing.

Have a drink on us...

I’ve received enough promotional fliers and spoken to more than the required amount of salespeople to learn that ‘a free give away’ is more than likely a manipulative offer tied in so many terms and conditions that it would take an entire summer holiday to plough through them. Such has been my experience that I have lost all faith in ‘free’ offers and the brands that offer them.

At a recent networking event we wanted to offer something better than an embossed pen that didn’t come with the dreaded T’s and Cs. What does a completely free gift look like; a gift free of said T’s and C’s and subversive manipulation?

This is what we came up with...

We dressed contact cards in five pound notes and gave them away. Buy a drink, get a kebab, stash it in your wallet; we don’t care what you do, this is a gift to you from us.

And that was that.

Everyone's a marketer

As I run seminars helping professionals get to grips with how social media* can help build and grow their businesses, a simple truth is becoming very clear to me;

In the new world of social media, everyone's a marketer.

I am not saying this is the end of the need for marketing departments. Of course there will always be the need for them, to co-ordinate and drive activity. However, I do believe there needs to be a mindset change within organisations as to what the role of marketing is. Traditional marketing is about lead generation, brand building and supporting the sales function. This kind of marketing is well defined and often lives quite independently of other departments. I believe that, particularly for professional services companies, marketing is at a challenging place, as it needs to become much more integrated and cohesive with the rest of the organisation.

Most marketers understand that social media has challenged traditional activity, and that the blend of go-to-market activity of any campaign now needs to include social media. That is a given. But what is not so well understood is how this new social world impacts the relationships between departments within an organisation? I am not sure many marketing departments are asking the questions;

1) How do we harness the power of social media, utilising everyone within the organisation?
2) How can marketing bring leadership to the organisation in order to maximise the benefit of social media?
2) What is marketing's role in coordinating this disparate activity?

As with all opportunities before us, we have to embrace the change that goes with the opportunity. Business leaders need to empower their organisations to explore these things.

Our understanding of the power of social media to benefit business has only just begun.
Exciting stuff.

Sandra Bullen

*Social media is complex, but in the main, I simplify it to Linked-in, blogging and micro-blogging.

Why Apple’s ‘unveiling’ of the new iPhone wasn’t a clever marketing ploy

A couple of weeks ago an Apple employee left a prototype iPhone in a New York bar. The phone was discovered by an as of yet unnamed individual who, upon realising what they’d found, sold the phone onto Gizmodo.com, who subsequently dissected it, confirmed it’s legitimacy, and took the story to press.

Gizmodo blogged about everything from the design of the outer shell to the apparent new processing power found within the prototype iPhone. Their verdict was unanimously positive, leaving an apparently red faced apple with a glowing report of their newest tech.

With gadget blogs all over the net reposting the story, sceptics started questioning the legitimacy of the ‘accident’ that led to Gizmodo getting hold of apple’s secret iPhone. Apple refused to release any definitive statement on the blunder and rumours started flying that it had all been part of a pre scripted marketing ploy.

As seemingly positive as this has all been for Apple there are fundamental reasons as to why this definitely wasn’t a clever marketing move and why it’s unlikely to ever happen again.

1) Apple’s current marketing strategy has taken years to refine and is the envy of most, if not all of their competitors. When Apple held a keynote to announce the iPad earlier this year, rumour had already been circulating of a tablet like device that would revolutionise the way we view digital media. With absolutely no word from Apple pre unveiling, the hype built and built culminating in the event itself making international news. The fallout from the keynote led to the selling of 1 million units in the U.S. alone.

2) Even if Apple were developing a new marketing strategy it’s unlikely they would choose a new iPhone as the flagship product. The existing iPhone has been a phenomenal success for apple, selling well in excess of 30 million units. Consider that most of those sales are to contract customers who will inevitably consider a new iPhone as a replacement for their current phone, and you have a product that does not necessitate this style of promotion.

3) And finally, Apple remotely wiped the product after they realised it was missing leaving Gizmodo with an essentially useless prototype. Althugh Gizmodo’s article was a candid review of the product, it was essentially built on speculation.

It will be interesting how Apple handle the promotion of the new iPhone from here on in. With a guestimated release date of later on in the year, all eyes will be on Apple over the next few months. Doubtless they will carry on with their secretive approach until the day the product is officially launched but for the time being gadget lovers all over the world are left to enjoy a once in a lifetime opportunity to salivate over a new Apple product before the unveiling.

By Rory Muldoon

2 sides to every story

Very soon a new LinkedIn App. Is launching – it is called DueDil – short for ‘due diligence’. It comes hot off the heels of a service called Unvarnished that launched in March, with a large amount of US PR noise.

The aim of the APP. is to bring more transparency to social networks.

"We all expect the web to be transparent and objective, yet in closed communities like LinkedIn and Facebook, there is no objectivity," the company explains on its web site.
"As a result it is almost impossible to get a true understanding of a person or a company before going into business with them."
"We invite you to participate and become a part of this community by submitting your own contributions, and thus building your own reputation as a trusted reviewer."
"As difficult as it might be sometimes, honesty is the best policy. We ask you to be sincere, constructive and fair, and to speak without fear of repercussion."

As a director of service providing companies, it raises really interesting sociological issues, that are leaving me feeling very uncomfortable, so I have spent some time thinking through three points of concerns.

Firstly, ‘there are two sides to every story’. Anyone who helps friends through a divorce, arbitrates in their children’s arguments, or runs a service company knows that there are two sides to every story. People see the world very differently. It is a core value at both ABA-design and The Flexible Marketing Co. that we go the extra mile to please our clients. In fact when an independent consultant, Kitty O’Hagan, came to assess our own brand values and proposition, she came up with the expression ‘ you like to delight and surprise your clients’ – and we try to live by this. But in the twenty (or so) years that I have been doing this job there are a handful of times, where I have had to walk away from a client knowing that the client is not happy. I hate it. It really upsets me. But I have to shrug my shoulders and move on, because in the main, it is usually about an expectation gap between us (agency) and the client. With the most rigorous of engagement processes, contract negotiations etc, human nature is that this still sometimes happens. No processes stop human beings misunderstanding each other – from time to time. So in summary I am worried that good people will get bad press.

The theory is that if you are good you will have many good reviews, and the odd bad review will just be ‘noise’ amongst the truth. This leads me to the second concern. Another aspect of human nature, we take the energy to complain, but we will not take time out to praise. I am concerned that only the disgruntled will engage with these sites, and those that are quite content will not even think to enter the debate.

My third point is less of a concern and more of a comment from the company, “As a result it is almost impossible to get a true understanding of a person or a company before going into business with them." That is true if you just choose to use LinkedIn to engage a client, but surely this is were the online and the real world collide? As much as I believe in social networking, once you find a product / service / consultant, you then do your own due diligence in the real world, and get on and get good old fashioned references. The real world and online world have to co-exist, and to try and do everything online in a complex business environment, I just don’t believe in. In our industry we often refer to our first client meeting as a ‘chemistry meeting’ – ie. Did we get on? Could we imagine working together? That will never be achieved from a social network.

So, unless I am proved very wrong, and there is an energy in human beings to take time out to positively comment as well as negatively comment, and I am proved that the voice of the many will overpower the voice of the odd individual, then I probably won’t be taking the application any further.

Sandra Bullen
(if you are interested in using social media for business benefit, check out our social media starter pack)

You'd expect us to say that.....

Interesting piece in the FT Online recently about companies whose response to the recession includes cuts to their marketing budgets - or rather the advantages enjoyed by the companies who don't cut their marketing spends in a recession :

The De Beers "Shadows" campaign, which ran at a time of recession, is estimated to have increased sales by an annual average of 8% over three years. What's more, De Beers profits recovered by 21% in 1993 compared to the previous year.

Renault launched the Clio in 1991, the same year that new car sales in the UK declined by 21%. With advertising awareness of the "Papa and Nicole" campaign peaking at 56%, the Clio delivered increased profit through premium price positioning.

In the 1930s depression, Kellogg's maintained its marketing spend while Post did not. Kellogg then dominated the dry cereal market for the next half-century.

A recent McKinsey study shows how companies who increased their marketing spend through a recession were the only ones whose profit rose substantially coming out of the recession. An interesting paradox seemingly, though we think accounted for in large part by companies maintaining their spend but also demanding a smarter outcome; smarter spend keeps you ahead of the game.

The link below will get you to the FT web page which also hotlinks the McKinsey report.

http://www.ftadmin.co.uk/downturn_web/power.html

Criminal Marketing - the does and don'ts of social media

All social groups have norms and values that govern what is and is not acceptable behaviour. Should an individual step outside of the subtle, yet rigid, boundaries they become a criminal, subject to the group’s justice system and even face permanent and absolute exclusion. The norms and values that govern Social Media groups are no less real than those that stifled my lunch time adventures at school. The problem is that Mrs Russell isn’t at hand to make clear where the boundaries lay. Here are five pieces of advice that I hope will help you form a socially acceptable Social Media identity.

Trespassers will be prosecuted.

Given that Social Media exist to serve a social and not corporate agenda, we’re already on questionable ground. But a quick search for your favourite brand in the Social Media circles will provide evidence that corporates are indeed welcome in some capacity to invade an otherwise peer environment. People appreciate being able to voice their opinions and show their loyalty to particular brands, and of cause have some contact with them but there is a fine balance to tread.

When in the social sphere we need to keep acting socially. This may sound obvious but time and again brands misinterpret appreciation as a signal to begin marketing. Brands need to add value to user experience in the same way that friends do: think invites, offers, news and updates.

Get a life.

It’s awfully hard to be social when you’re operating as a corporate body and speaking directly from the tone of voice guidelines. There are no absolute rules in the Social Media sphere but broadly speaking people like talking to people, not answer machines. We all appreciate natural and open conversation and inherently know when what we’re being offered is contrived and rehearsed. So get a life, grow a personality and give people the sort of information that you would like to receive. We all like humour, gossip, pictures, and videos; none of us communicate with our friends through press releases.

The demise of markets.

Market places are dying. Social Media is all about connecting with people, not demographics and so we should train ourselves to think in terms of conversations not markets. Conversations are an organic way of discovering and responding to people’s needs and the needs of their friends and families. Sometimes there will be a sale at the end but always your brand awareness will grow. When we talk about marketing to a demographic we’re already thinking in outdated terms and denying the individuality of customers and the power of Social Media. To use Social Media effectively you need to be prepared to have personal conversations.

Get Flexible

Get flexible with the relevance of your posts to your product. Appeal to the things that naturally appeal to people not just the things that appeal directly to your brand. If you’re in the business of insurance, post videos and pictures of skateboarding gone bad or bad drivers; YouTube is full of them. If you offer music tuition post the video of the Korean boy sing the Jack Johnson song. You need to learn to make you brand and its personality appeal to people. Post everything that relates to your brand and find a way of making the best of the web fit.

Jump in the deep end.

Jump in and start swimming. There’s little worse than a Social Media site that was set up, posted twice three months ago and has done nothing since. Equally, you should be embarrassed if three hours after a story makes the news you retweet or post the same thing having had it approved by the policy police; the online community expects instant news. And don’t be afraid of failing, Social Media moves so fast that what you perceive as a massive mistake, people will read once and move on. If you’re really unhappy delete the post and apologise for the slip; you’ve just become human.

Behave yourselves.

By Dan Chalke