Tag Archives: branding
Happy New Year! Our teams are back from holiday time with their families and ready for an exciting year ahead. But before we welcome 2012, we thought it might be fun to look back on some of our favorite stories of 2011. It seemed fitting to pick 11.
Here you have a list of eleven posts from across our offices, spanning topics from customer experience and branding to measurement and mobile. It’s a great overview of trends and technologies that shaped the past year of digital marketing.
We thank you for continuing to read Experience Matters and are looking forward to bringing you another year of timely and compelling points of view.
Photo Credit: Richard Tseng
No one argues that games are a huge part of our culture (especially here, btw), but I’ve been hearing something you don’t often hear; we as marketers ought to be integrating the principles and qualities that make games enjoyable into our brand experience.
In yesterday’s keynote, Seth Prietbatsch showed how the mechanics of game play are being used successfully in some unexpected places. From the classroom to loyalty marketing programs, game mechanics can improve poorly designed systems. For example, “Grades are a naïve implementation of a status mechanic,” Prietbasch said.
After a few other examples, he used a crowd participation exercise to illustrate the power of a large group to achieve surprising results. Each of the 2,500+ members of the audience was given a card with different colors on each side. There were 5 or 6 different colors in all. He issued a challenge to the audience; organize each row into holding up the same color, by trading cards with neighbors in front or back if needed, within 90 seconds.He said that he’d only tested the exercise on a group of about 25 prior to this, and in the end it worked. Through cooperation, we were able to self-organize without the benefit of a leader and without being able to communicate to people beyond just a few feet from us. This exercise was used to show how large unorganized groups could overcome complex challenges.
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Where did the idea of consistency come from? What does it mean to digital? You could say that it means the we should be following the ebb and flow of traditional advertising, or perhaps we should delineate between the two. To what end does it pay to hold a brand hostage to it’s designated canon? Perhaps to no end. You could propose the canon transends mere colour, image, perhaps even language. What if the canon were an idea? What if the product was the connecting article rather than the message. As long as it all feels the same.
A wildcard talk in my schedule was a talk given by Justin Cox on Brand Consistancy that relished in the idea that a solid brand styleguide that locks down look and messaging can hold back the exact thing that it was created to propel – the brand. Perhaps it’s like green-washing, you gloss everything over with one message to the point it all carries the same meaninglessness. An example Cox put forward was a car grill that could have deposited on it any vehicle brand and look authentic as the auto brands all thrive on slick car shots that are not entirely unique to a specific brand.
Cox rightfully says “An integrated campaign feels nice, is easy: like crack and prostitutes” – it is easy to follow one message and image across all channels, but that doesn’t make it right – or good.
At the beginning of the year, I featured a write-up by Paul Worthington, from Wolff Olins, regarding the evolution of branding. Since then, I feel the increasing adoption of smartphones and other mobile technologies has influenced the continued evolution of branding.
The initial three phases of branding, begin with the introduction of TV advertising and its ability to communicate to mass audiences in a visual manner. This was the ‘product age’ were brands differentiated on a unique product feature – creating the unique selling proposition.
However, product features can be easily duplicated by the competition, eliminating long-term differentiation. So, with the introduction of the PC computer and consumer research, we saw the introduction of the emotional selling proposition. This phase aimed to establish an emotional connection with customers by featuring how the product/service would meet their needs and wants.
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Nicole Armstrong | Critical Mass Calgary
Last week I had the pleasure of attending The Art of Marketing Conference with a few colleagues from Critical Mass. It was a great day for inspiration with an amazing line up of Guest Speakers:
- Chip Heath – author of Made to Stick
- Gary Vaynerchuck – author of Crush It and creator of Wine Library TV (http://tv.winelibrary.com/)
- Sir Ken Robinson – author The Element and internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources
- Mitch Joel – digital marketing expert and author of Six Pixels of Separation
- Sally Hogshead – author of Fascinate
- Max Lenderman – Director of OuterActive at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and author of Brand New World
The key takeaway I took from this conference was how important it is to have a strong, unique & motivating force guiding the organization forward in an open, honest and caring manner, because the digital environment has revolutionized the way consumers & brands interact.
As I’ve written in the past, consumers are more in control of an organization’s brand promise than ever before, since word of mouth (WOM) is on steroids thanks to social media. I think Gary Vaynerchuck described how brands must adapt to this digital environment brilliantly when he said that businesses have to go back to small town business values – where customers are people you interact with directly and shouldn’t be treated like faceless numbers. Under this principle, if you don’t deliver on your promise, consumers won’t give you their business and they will make sure to tell everyone in their community about your shortcomings. However, if you do deliver on your promise and care for your customers, they will be proud to recommend your brand to everyone they come across.
To reap the benefits of creating strong brand advocates with extensive reach, brands must change their perspective on interacting with customers in this highly engaging digital world and focus on their purpose to become open, honest & caring. An organization’s purpose stimulates the brand promise. This promise must be captivating & relevant to customers as the market becomes more competitive to give reasons to select/buy your brand over another-especially as brands become more global increasing the competitive set. Sally Hogshead described this as the need to fascinate in order to captivate & win your customer’s attention. This unique point of fascination & intrigue not only attracts customers who appreciate what the brand is all about, but it also attracts talent to the organization who feel they can contribute & help the organization deliver and even overachieve on its brand promise.
Nicole Armstrong | Critical Mass Calgary
Yesterday, I read the Fast Company article about the new logos Greenpeace followers have created to provide a more accurate visual representation of the brand, considering how out of place the green and yellow sunburst seems when, as the article puts it, “the defining image of the company is a dark blob spreading across the Gulf”.
This article made me immediately think – actions speak louder than words!
On BP’s site, they define themselves as:
Unfortunately, the actions associated with BP (i.e. giant plumes of oil as big as 10 miles, long 3 miles wide and 300 feet deep, including oiled smeared beaches and pelicans dyed with crude) have gone completely against the image Beyond Petroleum was trying to create for themselves. This has seriously impacted consumer perceptions. Especially in instances like this, when actions cut to the quick of consumer’s values, the outcry against brands tends to be far-reaching and irreversible. In this case it has even led to new visual cues – like an oil stained logo at left.
What’s more, this is all consumer generated content. There has even been a fake BP twitter page created: @BPGlobalPR:
This page was created less than a week ago, and it already has over 46,000 followers, nearly 8 times as many followers as BP’s official twitter page. This site is making a farce of the BP brand with tweets like:
- It’s official, the phrase ‘All the tea in china’ has been replaced with ‘All the oil in the gulf” – Can’t wait for the royalties! #bpcares
- If Top Kill doesn’t work, we’re just going to toss a giant ‘Get Well Soon’ card into the Gulf and hope for the best.
- Negative people view the ocean as half empty of oil. We are dedicated to making it half full.
The consumers are beginning to reshape the BP brand – in fact they are making the BP brand as dirty as BP has made the Gulf!
It’s like I alluded to in my Semantic Web post – consumers are in control of defining the brand within the marketplace, based on that brand’s actions. And here we are seeing this happen to BP – going as far as consumers rebranding the organization themselves.
Nikki is an Associate Planner in the CM Calgary office.
