Archive for August, 2009

08.17.09

Mapping Brand Loyalty

The brands we choose reflect how we see our­selves
Each day we make thou­sands of con­scious and sub-concussion deci­sions about the brands we wish to include in our lives. Our choice of which brands we choose to connect-with is often a reflec­tion of how we see our­selves and how we wish the world to see us. Some of these brand asso­ciates are more overt than oth­ers, but when mapped as a whole they cre­ate a sense of per­sonal brand iden­tity. ‘Brand Map­ping’ as we call it forms part of the Insights process we use on our com­mer­cial projects. Brand map­ping helps us to immerse our think­ing into the lives of tar­get mar­kets our clients’ brands wish to con­nect with truly and deeply.

Here’s my brand map for Mon­day 03 August. Try cre­at­ing your own brand map, or have some of your clos­est clients and cus­tomers track theirs — the results are guar­an­teed to be inter­est­ing. Send us your maps, we’d love to see them too.

Dave.

Brand Map 03 August 2009

Brand Map 03 August 2009

08.17.09

Owning a mark – When a bracket is worth fighting for?

Yellow Tail_01

If you can’t beat em’, why not try and join em?

I flipped across this arti­cle from the week­ends paper and found it quite inter­est­ing. Why? Because Casella Wines own­ers of wine label ‘Yel­low Tail’ has found it nec­es­sary to own the square bracket […] in the wine mar­ket and is will­ing to fight for it.

U.S Bronco Wines label ‘Down Under’ while try­ing to posi­tion itself within the cheap wine mar­ket, has repli­cated the visual code of ‘Yel­low Tail’ for its brand­mark. By repli­cat­ing the iconic Aus­tralian ‘Yel­low Tail’ bracket, Bronco Wines ‘Down Under’ label posi­tions itself as being very much Aus­tralian made and attempts to posi­tion itself by visual cues as a Aus­tralian label. The visual cues that ‘Down Under’ has “bor­rowed” to posi­tion itself shoul­der to shoul­der with ‘Yel­low Tail’  are as followed:

1/ Square Brack­ets around wine label name
2/ Iconic Aus­tralian Ani­mal on the label — Yel­low Tail (Kan­ga­roo) vs Down Under (Koala)
3/ Both wines come in high-shouldered bot­tles
4/ Australian-centric word­ing in con­nec­tion with the sale of Aus­tralian wine

yellow vs down

‘Down Under’ sells for about $3, half the price of [yel­low tail]. It is a touch too obvi­ous to see who’s try­ing to under­cut who. Casella Wines is putting its foot down, and so it should.

Tim Wood
Cre­ative Genius

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08.17.09

All Aboard; Great design builds brands & touches the soul

Heed­ing the call of our times for truly inspi­ra­tional design, design that makes your heart skip a beat and that touches you deeply, emblem­atic British  motor brand; Aston Mar­tin and UK super archi­tects; Fos­ter + Part­ners jumped into bed to cre­ate a vision for the future of the iconic Lon­don dou­ble decker bus. Together they cre­ated a bus design that was as inno­v­a­tive func­tion­ally as it was visually.

next-48-hotwheels2

Ren­der­ing by Nigel Young/Foster + Partners

Much more than just a pretty bumper, the new bus is pow­ered by elec­tric motors, which allow for a lower floor and bet­ter wheel­chair acces­si­bil­ity. The motor is designed to be eas­ily removed and replaced as tech­nol­ogy improves in the future, and the glass roof floods the top deck with nat­ural light whilst charg­ing the bat­ter­ies with inte­grated pho­to­voltaics. Whilst we’ve no idea what inte­grated pho­to­voltaics are, if they’re charg­ing the bat­ter­ies with sun­light — we love ‘em.

The design was in response to a com­pe­ti­tion run by Trans­port of Lon­don received around 700 entries. Win­ners are divided into two cat­e­gories — ‘design’ and ‘imagine’

Whilst they shared first prize with bus and truck designer Capoco Design, we’d choose the Aston  Mar­tin / Fos­ters + Part­ner design every day of the week. First pro­to­types for the new Buses could be grac­ing the wind­ing streets of Lon­don as early as 2011.

Dave.

08.15.09

Cotton On’s contentious range creates brand damage

Michael Eis­ner, CEO of Dis­ney once saidCottonOn
“A brand is a liv­ing entity—and it is enriched or under­mined cumu­la­tively over time, the prod­uct of a thou­sand small ges­tures.” Few truer words have ever been spo­ken about brand. What I would add though, is that not all brand ges­tures are born equal. Some ges­tures have the poten­tial to cause far more dam­age to your brand than oth­ers — and these are the ones you should spend your time-on get­ting right.

Brand strat­egy kamikaze
Aus­tralian retailer; Cot­ton On has worked hard to build a good busi­ness with a grow­ing com­mu­nity of loyal cus­tomers who believe in it’s brand. Over the past years Cot­ton On has made many brand deci­sions, big and small, and made them well… until now. Cot­ton On recently launched a new range of babies clothes with con­tentious prints on them with mes­sages like ‘I’m liv­ing proof my mum is easy’, ‘I’m a tits man’ and worst of all ‘they shake me’. I’ll leave the debate on the inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of these mes­sages to oth­ers more elo­quent than I, how­ever, I’m drawn to shake my head is dis­be­lief at the appar­ent absolute dis­re­gard for the impact of this ges­ture on the Cot­ton On brand.

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08.13.09

Annual Report Design Intelligence.

Suc­cinct Reports Impress Investors
A study con­ducted by the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan has found that com­pa­nies with hard to read annual reports have lower earn­ings tyhan com­pa­nies with reports that are eas­ier to read and under­stand. The mar­ket actu­ally fac­tors in to stock price what they con­sider to be poor stake-holder com­mu­ni­ca­tion. As a brand strat­egy agency with a focus on cor­po­rate image and brand design, we have pub­lished a report on the next gen­er­a­tion of annual report­ing and share­holder com­mu­ni­ca­tion called ‘AR:Review’. Our per­spec­tive on the next gen­er­a­tion of share­holder report­ing was repro­duced in a recent issue of BRW busi­ness mag­a­zine.

If you work in the area of stake­holder com­mu­ni­ca­tions and would like a copy of our Annual Report Review, drop us an email.

Dave.
BRW_June 7-11, Editor

08.12.09

Nando Parrado — A Truly Deeply Personal Brand Experience

Why are per­sonal brands, per­sonal attrib­utes and per­sonal goals so important?

I recently had the priv­i­lege of expe­ri­enc­ing one of the most pow­er­ful (if not most pow­er­ful) per­sonal brand moments imag­in­able, a moment that not many of you would have had the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence which makes this a truly, deeply, com­pelling blog to post – amongst 150 other guests I was lucky enough to share first hand in the incred­i­ble story of Nando Par­rado, one of the most deter­mined, prag­matic and gen­tle human beings, Nando Par­rado is a sur­vivor of the Andes plane crash. Many of you will remem­ber the story and may have seen the movie Alive or read the book Mir­a­cle in the Andes which is based on these remark­able events.

Hanger

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08.10.09

5 Steps to building your brand in the new frontier of social media

whale copyLike all new fron­tiers, social media is a law­less place where any­thing goes, espe­cially when it comes to brand. Every­one seems to have moved into these boom towns with a pop­u­la­tion of more than 12 mil­lion peo­ple pro­jected for Twit­ter­ville alone this year. It’s a on-line, com­mu­ni­ca­tions gold-rush, a world of won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity — but exactly what is social media? Is it a tool for social inter­ac­tion or busi­ness com­merce? At the moment it’s both.

So with a poorly defined and mis­un­der­stood pur­pose, how should busi­nesses of one to a thou­sand employ­ees build their brand image on-line? Like all brand build­ing exer­cises, your social media pres­ence should be con­sciously directed by a brand strat­egy; it should be strate­gic first and tac­ti­cal sec­ond. Cur­rently the vast major­ity of busi­ness pres­ence in social media is dri­ven by what we call ‘Scat­egy’, a tac­ti­cally obses­sive approach of try­ing to do a lit­tle bit of every­thing and try­ing to mean a lit­tle bit of some­thing to every­one. The result — your brand ends-up mean­ing noth­ing to anyone.

Here are what I believe to be the cru­cial five steps to build­ing your brand image on social media.

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08.10.09

Brand Promises – What offers say about your Brand

kmart

What makes a great offer, what does it say about your brand, can it dam­age it?

My inter­est was aroused by the recent  Kmart price promise TV ad — it’s set up in a way that has none of the usual retail frenzy of Kmart ads, being more akin to a polit­i­cal party cru­sade. It attracted my atten­tion because it shows every­day peo­ple talk­ing about an impor­tant promise — later it’s revealed this is the Kmart Price Promise — find the same item cheaper else­where and we’ll match the price. Kmart is an impor­tant and iconic brand, it suc­cess­fully pro­vides for the needs of mil­lions of Aus­tralians, I should make it clear I like Kmart.

I saw the ad at least 4 times, which sug­gest a fairly size­able media spend. Inter­est­ingly over the next few days a num­ber of friends also men­tioned the ad. Unfor­tu­nately, for all of us, we were under­whelmed by what the promise actu­ally involved. It seems to me that hav­ing decided to strongly pro­mote this offer Kmart missed a chance to deliver a really strong mes­sage for the brand.

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08.05.09

Brand Strategy – When you own the category

National Foods_small

What do you do when you dom­i­nate the cat­e­gory you com­pete in, what is your strat­egy for growth? It requires you to actu­ally start behav­ing like a leader. It means step­ping up to the mark to grow the cat­e­gory. When you have the bulk of the mar­ket share either with an indi­vid­ual brand or a port­fo­lio of brands you have lit­tle to gain by try­ing to keep steal­ing share from the min­nows in the category.

National Foods in Aus­tralia is a great exam­ple of a com­pany that owns the spe­cialty cheese cat­e­gory. It has over the years acquired all mean­ing­ful com­peti­tors and now has a port­fo­lio of brands that includes King Island Dairy, Tas­man­ian Her­itage, South Cape, Aus­tralian Gold, Tilba, Mersey Val­ley, Heidi Farm and Mil Lel. A great mix of brands that serve dif­fer­ent seg­ment needs or play defen­sive flank­ing roles.

How­ever, when you acquire the com­pe­ti­tion you also remove a legit­i­mate form of stim­u­la­tion from the mar­ket. Com­peti­tors in the cat­e­gory reg­u­larly com­pete on pro­mo­tional offers that serve to stim­u­late demand. But when you own the cat­e­gory you have a dif­fer­ent trade-off equa­tion between price promotion/lower mar­gin and increased sales. There is no fun in hav­ing a pro­mo­tional offer that sim­ply steals share from another brand you own.

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