The Brave New World of Online Brand Communication
There’s no doubt new technology and accelerating the range of possibilities for brand communication online at a far greater rate than we are able to explore them. When the print medium took hold as the major brand channel, all papers were pretty much the same and the variables around what you could do with an ad were more or less identical. That just aint the case for online – as this remarkable case study for search engine Bing and the launch of rap artist Jay-Z’s autobiography; ‘Decode’ demonstrates.

When Microsoft’s search engine Bing approached the guys at Droga5 with the brief to increase their relevance with a younger audience and show-off their mapping technology, Droga% saw the perfect opportunity creative collaboration with the launch of Jay-Z’s bio hitting the same market. By creating a seriously impressive integrated communication campaign for the launch of Decode, they connected Bing to a new demographic and gave millions of people a reason to use the search engine.

The concept took every page of Jay-Z’s book, and posted it across thirteen cities in the US and abroad. Each location was inspired by the content on the page, literally putting the entire biography into context, allowing fans to walk through Jay-Z’s life right where it happened. Using Bing they tied every page together with an integrated online challenge that directed fans to the pages through facebook, Twitter and radio, allowed them to upload them as they found them and compile the book online before it was officially published.

The results:
• Jay-Z’s Facebook followers grew by one million
• Decode launched onto the best seller list and stayed there for 19 weeks
• Decode was covered by every major news outlet and major cultural influencer
• Bing became part of the pop culture conversation and in the process saw an 11.7% increase in visits in one month.
• Bing gained 1.1 billion media impressions

Check the case-study clip for details:

Click here to view the embedded video.

… and here’s the link to the guys at Droga5 who put it all together: http://www.droga5.com/casestudies/bingcs

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Integrated & Inspired Brand Designer.
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

A Lesson in Building Brand Fans
Last week I cam across an interesting account on the web of a wonderful brand gesture from European Airline KLM. KLM have created the ‘KLM Surprise Team’ who monitor social media channels to discover travelers commuting to, from and through Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. They make contact, arrange to meet and then surprise the traveler with a gift. As John Bell on his blog, ‘The Digital Influence Mapping Project‘ says; “This is an example of a large brand ‘reaching out’ in a very intimate and personal way to individual customers, yet at the same time enjoying a resonating effect from their efforts – thanks to the power of social media’.

We came across this first hand account from Tim van Waard, who titled his blog post, “How KLM made me feel like a popstar”:
“I announced through my @klmfan Twitter that I would be on Schiphol airport on Tuesday morning 2nd of November. Suddenly I got a reply from a new KLM account named @KLMsurprise to ask me if we could meet up somewhere on Schiphol that morning. Uuh, sure why not?When I arrived that morning at Schiphol airport to catch my flight to Copenhagen… I tweeted @KLMsurprise that I was ready for a meetup, unaware of the intentions. We set a place and a time through Twitter and when I arrived there I saw two guys with a big piece of paper with my name on it. This was pretty cool. In some way, people standing with a paper with your name on it makes you feel very important (popstar-like). Or maybey that’s just me. These guys handed me a present: a great aviation watch (limited edition) of KLM’s 90th anniversary and hope that I would remember them next time I would fly.
This is of course a genius form of marketing. When I arrived at the conference I have told this story over twenty times to different people and also when I returned I talked about this alot.”

The genius of this brand experience is that KLM engage people who are already active in social media, almost guaranteeing that the gesture will become an immediate piece of positive brand communication, broadcast around the world through the social media. The power of simple brand gestures like this is their ability to create a “ripple effect” for the brand as the person involved becomes an active brand ambassador. The team then tracks the “ripple” effect as the delighted passenger tells theirs friends. It’s a brilliant way to create rich brand stories for people to share – and they willingly share them because the stories are loaded with personal meaning.

If brands are genuinely committed to finding ways to surprise and delight their customers, there’s something here to be learnt from KLM.

// Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brand Gestures that Surprise & Delight

Spotted on the blog of our talented mates at Emotive Brand: emotivebrand.com
Read Tim’s full blog post here: http://tiny.cc/moocc

Related articles

• #KLMsurprise – KLM launches unmoderated hashtag feed. Surprise! (malcolmcoles.co.uk)
• Sarah Perez: KLM is the First Airline on Foursquare, and They’re Giving Away Free Stuff (jaunted.com)
• KLM Airlines: When social media goes awry (gadling.com)
• KLM gets a surprise of their own [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)
• Royal Dutch Airline gives passengers a surprise [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)

On the site of a thousand years of violent history, AC/DC were pitted against Iron Man in an impressive architectural projection mapping project. The facade of the Great Keep at Rochester Castle was brought to life using the latest in 3D animation techniques. This onslaught of the senses, saw the castle warp, morph, and collapse before the audiences eyes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Iron Man 2 is an album by Australian hard rock band AC/DC, released April 19, 2010 as the soundtrack to Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2. The album was announced on January 26, 2010. The album features fifteen tracks from ten different albums, ranging from 1975 to 2008. Only two songs (“Shoot to Thrill” and “Highway to Hell“) were used completely in the film, while one song (“Back in Black“) was actually featured in the previous film. As of May 6, 2010, the album has sold 370,000 copies worldwide.

Everything we do from the clothing we wear, our appearance, our attitudes, the car we drive, the watch we wear, in fact each of the brands we choose to associate with ourselves all blend in to project the image we wish to the outside world to see. Some time ago our founder and creative director David Ansett wrote about personal brand association with two articles on brand mapping – one back in August last year and the other, a more recent one created in December. This is the way we work and in many ways this is the very essence of how brands work.

But as with all things, there are those who take personal branding to the extreme. Feeding that obsession is a German firm called Style Your Garage that creates skins for garage doors that turns the humble garage into a head-turning showcase of personal brand. There’s a door for almost every shape of over-sized ego – the question is, which one best suits yours?

If you’d like to find out how a strategically crafted personal branding strategy can increase your industry exposure, competitive differentiation and opportunities talk to us today.

Dominic Guthrie
Client Account Director

Here’s my brand map for Christmas Day 2009.

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.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.
Graphic Design / Brand Agency Melbourne

Egonomics, Satsficing and other Freaks of  the New Brand Speak

Allodoxaphobia. Fear of opinions. Brands suffering this phobia will wither and die on the vine.

Baked-in brands. Those with an intrinsic value to their customers which as a result don’t require traditional advertising

Beamvertising. Guerrilla projections – brand messages and ads projected onto buildings in urban areas, usually from a moving vehicle. A powerful new brand design canvas from Santiago, Chile.

Blank Brand Canvas. Previously unidentified and un-utilized brand communication opportunity, ie. ‘Your out of office reply is a blank brand canvas – if i ran a juice co. mine would say: “out picking berries for our new summer berry smoothie.”’

Brand Acceleration. The Starbucks brand is 13 years old, Maxwell House is 108 – enough said.

Bold Brand Gesture. A brand communication or experience driven from your brand DNA making a particularly memorable impression through a combination of brand relevance, originality and uniqueness.

Brand decode. Breaking the visual code of brand design that sits beneath all categories and markets in order to successfully position a brand’s corporate image relative to its competitors.

Brand Mapping. Visualisation of the brands an individual consciously or subconsciously chooses to reflect themselves.

Brandthropology. The study of the laws of nature applied to brand extensions, especially for FMCG products.

Disruptive Branding. Paradigm busting mind-set providing a competitive advantage to any business not locked-into a straight jacket corporate mindset.

Egonomics. ‘Me branding’ – a fading trend in many ways the opposite to the growing trend of Ethonomics; ‘We branding.’

Emotionomics. The use of emotional connection through brand strategy and brand image to build commercially successful brands.

Farmwashing. Derisive term for big food companies who attempt to give the brand image of their mass-produced fare a dollop of fresh-farmed, country authenticity

Fameball. C-grade celeb with zero redeeming talents, no conscience and a shameless, unquenchable desire for fame.

Flashmob. Seemingly random but usually choreographed guerrilla experiential marketing performances that pop-up in public spaces to create memorable brand gestures.

Food Insecurity. Trend driving consumers to grow more of their own vegies, herbs, fowl, etc.

Fighter Brands. High risk, high reward brand strategy to knock-out cut-price competition and protect a premium market positioning.

Frugal Fatigue. People tired of saving their money due to the recession begin to loosen the purse strings.

Green graffiti. where street art and the environment collide, a new canvas for brand communication appears:

Greenwashing. Re-branding old, often inferior products as environmentally friendly.

Hackintosh. Apple fanatics hacking a cheap notebook and muscling it-up into mac a clone.

Hyperfoods. Superfoods, health drinks, added-value foods that improve well-being, prevent disease & the effects of ageing.

Hyperlocal. Brands of any size that customise their offer & tailor their communications to individual & unique markets.

Joywashing. Brands highlighting the positive and optimistic dimensions of their offer to appeal in the face of the recession.

Luxury Shame. Reflecting a conservatism towards outward displays of luxury consumerism.

Masterchef Effect. The popularity of foodie TV programs is positively impacting the health of food brands across the spectrum.

Mom & Popism. Individual micro retail that creates a unique collective community

Microsizing. Backlash to supersizing trend; TGI Fridays in the us has ‘right portion, right price’ menu – dishes 1/3 smaller and 30% cheaper.

Multiplicity. Describes the many layers and dimension of meaning brands need to connect. Also totally forgettable Michael Keaton film.

Nudevertising. When supermodels take it all off for a cause.

Review Revolution. Social media provides a real-time snapshot of what people are thinking, feeling & reviewing around the world becoming a new and powerful influencer of consumer behavior.

Satisficing. Sacrificing brand richness to get broad stakeholder approval – the quickest way to bland your brand and corporate image.

Simplexity. The answer to the challenges of Multiplicity – Simple solutions to complex brand problems.

Staycation. Recession-driven trend in which consumers are opting to stay-in rather than go out.

Toyobaru. Subaru announces a new hybrid sports car to be built in conjunction with Toyota.

Tryvertising. New breed of product placement in the real world, introducing your goods and services into the daily lives of potential customers in a relevant way.

Womenomics. The economic/brand/design/market/political power of women – you get the picture.

If you have more Brand Speak examples I’d love you to email them to me.
If you’d like some help unraveling the complexities of brand speak and figuring out what it all means for your brand, why not get in touch.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
Graphic Design Melbourne.
If you’d like daily updates of our brand thinking, you can follow me on Twitter here.

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