Archives: Branding

Move over 40 Under 40 recipients...(myself, included)!

These up and comers are making waves as Forbes’ 30 Under 30. From advertising to journalism, these young bucks are shaking up their perspective industries while challenging the status quo.

http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/30-under30-12/30-under-30-12_m...

I have been wondering for a while what was going to happen when all the best .com domains were exhausted. First the acronyms went, then the obvious choices like yourcompanyname.com, then the clever ones with taglines or thoughts that stick with your audience.

Apparently the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the governing body of the Internet, has been working on this for years. The next big thing will be to allow customized .brand extensions. Think: .nike or .honda or .nordstroms or .seattle.

Check out http://tinyurl.com/3ctu74p

This is an exciting evolution and will create some interesting new opportunities once they become available. I have 2 concerns:

1. Will it be easier for the public to remember the domains, now that they don't have the common .com at the end, or more difficult?
2. This is going to open up another window for opportunists out there who make a living buying high profile domains and reselling for profit. Companies will need to be careful not to get caught in this trap.

Keep an eye out for their release! Should be interesting to watch this 'trend' spread across the WWW.

So I see AIGA (our design industry association) has just launched a new Web site http://www.aiga.org

They state the new features include:

Enhanced profile pages (exclusive to members)
Ability to share links and write short blog posts (exclusive to members)
Conversations, a place to bring up topics for discussion and ask questions
Tools & Resources, a section that collects all of AIGA’s advice—articles, case studies, publication and more—in one convenient spot
Why Design, an area devoted to design’s capacity to benefit society
Chapter spotlights and featured student portfolios
A more visual experience overall

Just wondering what others think of the new version.

My spouse has recently become a dabbler in what she describes as hard-core couponing. There is a show on TLC devoted to this new activity, aptly titled “Extreme Couponing.” I’ve watched it in passing, and the people profiled will often articulate a shopping goal that underscores the “extreme” angle; they’ll say things like, “My goal is to get $1,500 worth of products while spending less than $15 out of pocket.” Then they go out and do it. Every time. Frankly, it’s amazing. But I can only wonder what the retailers think of this.

I also had a conversation yesterday with an entrepreneur who is launching a new service that dovetails nicely with this trend, with a digital aspect to replace all the scissoring of printed coupons. This, of course, is on the heels of new titans Groupon and Living Social. I’m particularly compelled by Living Social, which taps into the thrill of acquisition to get people to do things they might not otherwise do, like skydive or get a pedicure or try a new restaurant, etc. Wired featured a fantastic piece on all of this as far back as November, which you can read here.

As always, there are dystopian and utopian ways to see this new trend playing out. As a brand strategist, though, I’ll focus on the question that rises to the top for me: What will all of this mean to our traditional perspectives on brand value? A brand is, fundamentally, a means of resisting commoditization, rationalizing a premium, and being “different” in a crowded marketplace. But this couponing trend—which Wired has deemed “retail hacking”—seems almost exclusively focused on acquiring vs. experiencing. In fact, the acquiring is the experience! Who cares if it’s Hunt’s or Heinz, I’m after the best deal on ketchup! This seems like definitively anti-brand behavior. Of course, a strategist with a positive slant on this might optimistically hope that the “stockpile” of ketchup (the coupon aficionados use that term—“stockpile”—a lot) might ultimately create a brand affinity for one brand over another, creating a loyal customer in the process. To which I say: maybe.

Now Google has announced its smartphone pay service, which sounds like it will bring even more coupons and in-the-moment offers to the retail landscape. My prediction is that, in the near term, brands will embrace the trend and advance themselves through more coupons, and focus especially on trying to re-establish emotional connections with customers at the critical moment of purchase. For the long term, though, my prediction is that the best brands will have to find ways to stick to their guns, creating new and inventive ways to stand tall as the only choice even when there’s scores of coupons and offers begging consumers to think otherwise. If not, we’ll have to completely re-frame what brand value even means in some key retail landscapes.

What do you think will happen?

Looking at the larger picture, it’s an amazing accomplishment for one woman to take down the Internet. When Lady Gaga fans caused Amazon to crash on Monday, it made a statement. Look at how powerful the media is, how powerful a brand is, how powerful social media is. Lady Gaga is a brand. That is a huge part of who she is and how her fans relate to her.

Take note. Even if you are a formal institution and Lady Gaga has absolutely nothing to do with your business (highly unlikely, I’d guess), we should all follow her example. Brands are becoming more and more important for your audience to find and indentify with you. We need to make statements that matter, in a medium that matters. Otherwise, who cares?

One of my favorite books is Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands

This was the old thinking if you changed your logo: make a big splash. The reasoning is sound. Use the redesign as a marketing opportunity—a chance to introduce audiences to the sexy new mark and control the story. "Big splash" and "control" were the benefits of this approach.

Now, social media has taken "big splash" to a whole new scale while making "control" a lot harder to achieve. In the last month or so, we've launched two new identities, one for Marylhurst University and the other for Woodland Park Zoo (with help from Betty White). Both have big groups of engaged audiences who are active on social media. While the challenge was the same—introduce audiences to the new identities—the organizations used different approaches to their respective unveilings. Marylhurst University debuted the new mark at well-attended on-campus events and on Facebook as part of a comprehensive brand launch. Woodland Park Zoo unveiled the new mark—without a specific announcement—at Thrive, the Zoo's fund-raising event, and has so far left Facebook out of it. Two very different approaches. And there are pros and cons to each. Here's a high-level overview of these different approaches.

Approach: "Hard" Launch, inclusive of social media.

Pros:
— Transparency. Lets audiences understand exactly what's happening and why.
— Momentum. Builds excitement and signals change.
— Definitive. Creates a pivot point between the past and the future.

Cons:
— Criticism. The reaction to new identities is—almost always—universally negative. See the comments on the Starbucks page for that company's new logo. (Howard Schultz is widely regarded as a marketing genius, but that didn't stop the first commenter from calling him a "bonehead." That's exactly the the kind of illogical, emotional response new identities engender.) This does not mean they aren't great identities. What it means is that we're hardwired to dislike something new that replaces something we're already familiar with. (But fast forward just a few weeks, and most all the dislike is gone.)

Approach: "Soft" Launch, without social media.

Pros:
— No Criticism (or, at least, less criticism). By not overtly calling attention to the new design, the mark is introduced in context, without inviting any debate about whether it's liked or disliked. At its core, social media asks us to "like" or "dislike" something—either by saying so explicitly, or commenting on something shared. If the coming-out party for a new identity doesn't include social media, the platform for this "like" or "dislike" conversation is greatly reduced. But that comes at a cost . . .

Cons:
— No Conversation. While weathering an initial storm of criticism (see: The Gap) can be hard on any organization, most case studies show that this criticism is temporary and, given a chance, new identities eventually win people over. Don't believe me? See any redesigned logo for a professional sports team. Did the new logo initially freak fans out? Almost always. Did people stop coming to the ballpark or, even more tellingly, stop buying merchandise with the logo on it? Not a chance. Besides, criticism is a form of engagement, and engagement is what everyone wants for their brand. In Marylhurst's case, some early negative feedback by students even led to bigger discussions about governance, which in turn inspired the revamping of student government. Change inspires change. And that is healthy.

Both approaches are effective, and it's likely one is more-suited to your organization. It's just important to know the benefits—and costs—of each.

I led another workshop at School of Visual concepts on Wednesday, this time exclusively attended by 17 Starbucks marketers who came in from all around the country to attend (including: New York, Miami, Denver, San Diego, Indianapolis, Chicago), as well as a few from the Seattle HQ.

We were mainly talking about creative briefs, but there were some interesting discussions about how to set up great creative. And one of the themes that resonated throughout the day was about articulating key "tensions" that the creative work is then asked to reconcile. This is certainly true for the brand identity work we recently completed for Woodland Park Zoo, in which we had to create a mark that reconciles the tension between "conservation leader" (read: science-y) and "engaging experience" (read: fun). For us, the concept that reconciles that tension is wonder. And wonder is at the heart of the new identity. That sense of awe you get when you're allowed up-close access to a wild animal.

Here's another one we discussed in the workshop: the celebrated "Swagger Wagon" campaign for Toyota. The tension reconciled here, through humor, is between "embarrassing stigma" and "pure utility."

http://www.youtube.com/user/Sienna

Creative is the silver bullet that can solve what often seems to be unsolvable tensions. And a great creative brief can set that tension up, articulating it in a way that inspires killer ideas.