Lately I have been thinking a lot about retail brand loyalty and what it means to brand owners, employees and retailers. Brand loyalty is a strange thing, you can’t hold it or visibly see it, but the value that should be placed on it, for any brand, is paramount.

Brand Loyalty. Have you got it?

Brand loyalty is a emotional response and attachment to the value of a product or service. Most successful brand owners realise if you can create an environment where brand loyalty creates brand tribes or trends, brand loyalty can be that powerful it can even influence cultural change.

Brand loyalty begins within
People are the most important retail brand asset any business can have. By creating a family or community environment that is mentoring, empowering and most importantly rewarding, it fosters the relevant elements that provide brands with excellent, experienced and most importantly happy, brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors champion a brand, and by actions of their own, show proof that who they work is worth investing in.

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Brand loyalty must be earned
You earn what you keep. Retail brand loyalty must be earned and reinforced continually by any brand or businesses. Satisfying a consumer need, and satisfying it well – is all well and good, but doing it over and over again, working honestly in the good times and bad with a customer, that’s where the real value comes from. Brand loyalty has potential to be change, it has potential to touch the heart, but in the end, any brand needs to earn their stripes.

Does your brand provide brand stiction?
Stiction is a delicate dance that brand and consumer do when they interact. It is an important to get this balance right. To much forced interaction and engagement can seriously put the consumer on the back foot, not enough engagement and the emotional connection with the consumer is lost, and participation in the brand is minimal.

In such trying times for retail, with online shopping on the increase, can I ask you, what is your retail brand doing to create an environment that nurtures and rewards brand loyalty?

The best kind of loyalty is when both parties are benefiting. — Scott Brooks, Gantz Wiley Research

Tim Wood
Design Creative

In memory of a true visionary Steve Jobs.

Giving kudos to brand messaging and communications!

All clients want their advertising to make an enormous impact, generate an increase in sales (ideally far greater than the amount invested for a particular campaign) and create plenty of conversation and hype not only within the consumer market but also (and sometimes as importantly) between the competitor brands.

Every brand, product and service is trying to outwit, outplay and outsell the other and what I like about the collection of ads below is not just the creativity but more so the simplicity of a few that create the right brand messaging.

Whether print, outdoor, interactive or guerilla marketing each campaign needs to deliver a unique and memorable message that engages the consumer on all levels ultimately ensuing product purchase.

Enjoy the various brand campaigns!

Above: A clever way to find out how Hoover‘s vacuum cleaners really work.

Above: Apple’s MacBook Pro – Ultra Thin product advertising.

Above: A great piece of communication that’s direct and to the point.

Above: You can’t smoke in Germany’s train stations except inside the yellow squares so this creative team made
these squares to make a maze so you can find your way to the ashtray.

Above: Mini Cooper subway entrance, how big is this car?

Above: What low budget yet creative campaign for the Sony Cyber Shot T1

Below: This campaign needs no explanation – life’s too short for the wrong job!

Want to make your company generate an increase in sales and create plenty of conversation in more markets than your competitors, then give us a call now.

Dominic Guthrie
Client Account Director

In case you haven’t heard the screams from Bourke Street, one of the biggest fashion retail names has opened its doors in Melbourne. Following its successful launch in Sydney, Spanish brand Zara, now has flagship stores in Australia’s two biggest markets. It has been publicised as one of the most exciting and eagerly anticipated launches this year. For some, it is as exciting as a new Apple product launch.

So what is it that makes Zara such an impressive and highly sought after brand? Is it just a new fad that will fade within a few months or will it really change the way fashion savvy Melburnians and indeed Australians shop? Is it just the cultural cringe biting again or is the brand truly special?

The timing of the launch is bold, if not risky. We are told it is one of the toughest periods in retail, with many brands struggling for survival. As a new kid on the Aussie block, Zara needs to fight against the establishment, when many are struggling for survival. Zara have either picked a bad time, or they see a real opportunity other Australian brands haven’t realised.

Louis Vuitton’s Fashion Director Daniel Pietter has described the brand as “the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world”.  Zara has a reputation of disrupting the market wherever it goes. A clear brand proposition has been crucial in the brand’s success. This is a great example of a brand built on a simple idea that is delivered ruthlessly.

Zara is all about instant ‘runway’ fashion made accessible for everyone. The brand is consistently delivered by controlling most of supply chain and the customer experience. This enables incredibly quick product development, distribution and low prices. In Australia, they are promising twice weekly clothing drops freighted directly from Europe to ensure the product has a high turnover. Presumably this encourages people to visit the stores more frequently and avoids everyone looking the same.

They also own most of their stores, which ensures they control the brand buying experience. Zara is famous for snubbing expensive glossy ad campaigns and celebrity endorsements. They strategically open stores in heavily trafficked, high-end retail destinations and rely on their shop windows, store experience and customer service to build the brand. It is all about what they do, not what they say.

Zara has now successfully expanded into 78 countries and their policy of ‘glocalisation’ has also helped them avoid the generic ‘chain’ badge. Apparently, each location is highly researched and receives individualised product drops.

The Melbourne Zara branch is also one of their ‘eco stores’. Essentially this means they are reducing emissions through the use of renewable energy sources. While this in itself is commendable, most if not all of the clothes are being produced overseas and air freighted in. This ventures in to potentially dangerous territory and the brand needs to be careful not to over claim their green credentials.

Once the novelty of being ‘new’ wears off, it will be interesting to how the brand is tracking here. Time will tell whether Australians adopt the brand and if they feel they can’t live without it. It will also be interesting to see what impact, if any, it has on the retail market and whether it influences Australian brands to reconsider their approach to pricing, product, retail experience, marketing and how they engage with their customers.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you visited one of the Zara stores here or overseas? How do you feel about the brand? What was your brand experience?

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy

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I was reading with interest recently that Samsung Electronics has taken the wraps off a new, larger version of its popular iPad rival, the Galaxy Tab. The Australian Financial Review was suggesting that many see it as the biggest challenge yet to Apple’s dominance in tablet computers. It was this comment that really got my attention, because it was suggesting to me that for the Galaxy Tab to be competitive it must have some real ‘functional smarts’ about it.

So I read on, to get a sense of it. Slightly slimmer and lighter, dual surround sound speakers and bigger screen. Throw in the fact that is is likely to be the first tablet in Australia to run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, Honeycomb – all suggesting the product was loaded with valuable functional attributes.

There was lots of other seemingly exciting features and then the big downer! The one little fact that totally destroyed any sense of needing to ever purchase one. That being, that it will only be available through the Vodafone network. Speak to any one using Vodafone’s network, and you will find a seriously underwhelmed customer. Even Vodafone’s own CEO, Nigel Dews has come out an apologised to customers for letting them down. Amongst other things he said: ‘The issues some customers have experienced include dropped calls, delayed SMS and voicemails, slow data speeds, inconsistent coverage, and long wait calls when you call us. We are truly sorry for this.’ (The Age February 23, 2011).

If a brand wishes to take on the might of a brand like Apple, it needs to be an absolute winner on all the functional dimensions, because it will always struggle on the emotional, image charged attributes. Apple is so strong on emotional attributes with such cool aesthetics and image, that competitors need to have a far, far superior functional offering to make customers even contemplate a different brand. It is also a great reminder that many brands depend on partners within their value chain to play an important role. In the case of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Vodafone as its network partner in Australia essentially destroys a big hunk of the consumer value proposition. Finally as a case study, the global alignment of Samsung Electronics and Vodafone means that little outpost markets like Australia can suffer when the partner, in this case Vodafone, struggles. There is very little the team in Samsung’s Australian business can do. It simply means that poor 3G network coverage through Vodafone delivers a real Samsunk.

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

The Evolution of the English Language

After a meeting earlier this week with the executive team at Melbourne University’s Ormond College, I found myself thinking about two things.  One, why I didn’t attend the college myself, and two, how many brand specific words I use in every day language.

The topic of brand language is always a prominent feature of discussion in our studio as we work with our clients to bring their brands to life, but during the discussions on Tuesday a comment was made about the evolutionary nature of the English language. And specifically, how it is constantly evolving as new words and phrases are adopted en masse, often inspired by new brand specific language.  A classic example is Google.  Founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, aka the ‘Google Guys’ in 1998, Google’s mission was to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.  Google is so synonymous with online searching that ordinary people around the world are saying they will just ‘Google it’.  Google is also now a featured verb in the world’s dictionaries, with the Oxford dictionary describing it as the ‘search for information about (someone or something) on the Internet, typically using the search engine Google.’

Out of curiosity, this inspired me to go on my own little Google adventure to search for other words that have become commonplace as a direct result of a brand.  Here are five for you to ponder:

Hoover:

Originally a trademark product from the Hoover Company in Ohio, its popularity has led to vacuum cleaners all over the world being referred to as Hoovers, and the actual act of vacuuming becoming known as ‘Hoovering’.

Band-aid:

Johnson & Johnsons trademark adhesive bandage product has taken on a life of its own, and is not only a term used when describing the physical product but also when individuals or businesses are creating their own ‘band-aid’ solutions for just about everything.

IPod:

Apple was bound to make the cut with its innovative and excessively popular technology, and the IPod is just one example.  The term ‘IPod’ has been used to describe all manner of digital audio and MP3 players, not just the Apple product.

Kleenex:

In the U.S., France, Canada, and to a lesser degree in Australia, Kimberly-Clark’s brand, Kleenex, is now a term regularly used to describe any brand of facial tissues.

Xerox:

Xerox is one brand, which actually tried to prevent itself from becoming a generic noun or verb with advertisements with statements like ‘You can’t make a Xerox’. Ironically, Xerox too made it into the Oxford dictionary as a noun and a verb.

If you would like to know how you can try and have your brand language added to the Oxford Dictionary, or just want to tell us a few more brands that you use in common language, why not give us a call.

Nikki Williams
Client Account Manager

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An Insight into the Future of this Brand Leader
Last year Apple was granted 563 patents. Apple’s track record as a genuine industry leader suggests some of these ideas will flow through to influence the consumer technology landscape in the same way the iPod, iPhone, App Store and the iPad have.

Mashable.com has taken a look at some of Apple’s recent patent applications to see what exciting developments might be in store for the future. Apple patent expert Jack Purcher summs-them-up: “Jobs’s vision for the digital lifestyle a decade ago is still on a roll. It’s innovation at its finest. But it began with a vision – and that’s the difference.”

1. iBike

Apple’s smart bike concept is like the Nike+ running system, but for those on two wheels. In addition to seeing pertinent data from you (heart rate, etc.) and the bike (speed, distance, etc.) on your iPod or iPhone, the system could be used as a tool for group communication when biking with others.

2. Wand remote

Is gesture control the next big thing to follow touch? It seems Apple might think so with this patent for the Apple TV that sees the home entertainment gadget shipped with a Wiimote-like motion controller. Besides managing the on-screen cursor via movement, the “remote wand” could be used to browse through and control media.

3. Solar-powered iPhone

Apple has come up with a way – in theory anyway – of adding solar tech to its portable devices without spoiling the all-important aesthetics. By integrating the photocells into the touchscreen, future iPods, iPads and iPhones could soak up the power of the sun via their displays, making for greener gadgetry.

4. Touchscreen iMac

This clever concept gives the desktop PC iPad-esque functionality. While the monitor is upright, it’s a common iMac running Apple’s full operating system controlled with a mouse, but flip it horizontally and it switches to the iOS and the touch controls take over.

5. iKey

Chances are your iPhone has already replaced your compact camera, MP3 player and handheld gaming console, but Apple could take the convergence a step further and replace your keys. The Cupertino company has patented the idea that your iPhone could unlock your car and home with a proximity-based PIN code system.

6. iHeadset

This is one patent we could definitely see coming to market. Apple has designed a Bluetooth headset with standalone media playback functionality. This could well be a future version of the iPod Shuffle – small, wearable and, thanks to the Bluetooth features, multi-tasking.

7. Shareable apps

How would you like to be able to beam your latest App Store download to a buddy? Apple has come up with the idea of an “application seed” system whereby developers could choose to make their apps shareable via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. It’s a fantastic concept for content providers who are looking to spread the word as far and wide as possible. Additionally, trial version options could be a great word-of-mouth money maker.

8. Video game comic books

9. Magnetic lenses

iPhotography is hot, and its potential is limited only by hardware restrictions. Although Apple has steadily improved the iPhone’s camera, it’s still just a point-and-shooter. This patent describes a way of enhancing a portable device’s camera functionality with a magnetic zoom or macro lens attachments.

10. MacBooks with built-in projectors

This exciting idea could see future Apple laptops coming with built-in projectors. Just think how handy it would be to be able to share what’s on your laptop screen – whether that’s a movie or a presentation – with a group of others at the click of a mouse.

This post was originally published on Mashable.com
Mashable.com is the world’s largest (and most inspiring) blog focused exclusively on social media news.

Image of Steve Jobs by Mark Wilson, [Gizmodo]

Related articles

• iPod Touch Now Accounts for Half of iPod Sales (mashable.com)
• Apple Sells 7 Million iPads in Record-Breaking Quarter (mashable.com)
• Apple Q1 2011: Apple Wins Christmas (nytimes.com)

Today it’s more critical than ever for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors and make memorable connections with their consumers by creating unique, recognisable brands. Every touch point of a brand plays a vital role in brand recall, but the brandmark is the heart and soul of a brand’s image. As awareness of branding grows and more businesses invest in their brand’s identity, colour is becoming more important for companies looking to differentiate themselves visually. In today’s tech-savvy society a website is a main touch point for a brand.

In the world of brand design, choice and use of colour provides the potential for a wealth of carefully crafted and powerfully communicated messages about your brand. As a brand designer in Melbourne I am constantly surfing
the net and it is easy to see the dominant colours used by brands. What is the most popular and dominant color
online? Creative community blog COLOURlovers has researched the brand colour of the top 100 sites in the world
to see if they could paint a more colorful picture.

COLOURlovers discovered that the web landscape is dominated by a large number of blue brands, however red does occupy a large amount of space. What’s driving this? You would expect that companies organise extensive branding research and market tests to select the colour/s that project the correct message to entice the consumer to the brand. Unfortunately many of the brands that have grown to be global web powerhouses started as small web startups, while large corporate giants with branding departments spend quite a lot on market research, branding, etc.

Lots of the sites listed above got started with brands created by the founders themselves with little to no research
into the impact their color choice would have. I once asked Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook why he
chose blue for his site design… “I’m color blind, it’s the only color I can see.” …and now 500 Million people around
the world stare at a mostly blue website for hours each week. (COLOURlovers)

While the initial rational for the brand colours may be trivial, the impact that these dominant brands now have in the
web landscape will no doubt influence smaller companies wishing to share the positive color associations they created. Therefore the colours Blue and Red will most likely continue to dominate, but we can hope that new brands entering
the market take a different perspective and decide to push the colour boundaries of their brand.

If you’d like to talk to some people who spend way too much of their life eating, sleeping, thinking about brand
give us a call.

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

There are Orangutan ads, and there are Orangutan ads. They can help to create connection with your brand or they can make you feel….. well weird. I find the two ads on TV at present polarising.

The Optus Orangutan ad is charming and beautifully simple in its concept. It makes me smile and it makes me like Optus that little bit more. It tells me they want to make me happy. It connects and enhances their brand. In the sense that it builds on a lot of investment in ‘animals’ it is on-brand.

Then there is  the ING Direct Orangutan

I dislike this ad. It makes me feel uncomfortable. Yes its orange and that’s always been ING’s colour, but why the extra from Planet of the Apes.

At its most damaging it makes me question the effectiveness of ING’s thinking and leaves their credibility diminished. It also leaves me struggling to comprehend the thought process (other than ‘ find me something orange’ ) that links to all the work ING Direct has done in the past.

At Truly Deeply we have strong opinions on brands, and we engage in robust conversations about communications that are good, or bad, for our client brands. If you’d like to engage in conversation about you brand, why not contact us.

Malcolm Harvey  - fake Orangutangaphobic

The Most Comprehensive Trend Report on the Visual Language of Brand Identity
Trends in the visual language of brand identity are driven by many factors from the ‘me-too-ism’ of designers and their clients mimicking the visual language of market leaders, to new and emerging trends such as ‘sustainability’ that draw a similar and en-mass visual response from designers all over the world. Over the past 12 months we have collected more than five thousand different brand expressions spanning almost every major industry and category of the western world.

Our 2010 Trend Report has been picked-up and re-published in blogs and marketing publications around the world – so by request we’re providing the report as one, complete pdf download (even if it is a whopping 6.8mb in size).

The brand expressions we tracked included existing, new and refined brand identities, product packaging, newspaper, magazine and billboard ads. The scale and breadth of these brand expressions allowed us to identify the major brand visual language trends of a broad range of market leaders for the last year. Whilst the majority of the examples presented in this report are recent, many trends are not in themselves new. It is our interpretation of the groundswell of take-up of a trend and the influence exerted within their market by the brands involved, that leads us to define the most compelling and influential trends.

What’s the value of a Trend Report?
All brands project an image through their visual language. It is up to each brand to make conscious and informed decisions about exactly what they wish their visual language to communicate relative to the competition and to their market’s perceptions.The report includes hundreds of examples of brands and their visual language to illustrate examples of brands who leverage trends to their advantage, as well as examples of those who follow trends to their disadvantage. The examples cross industries from fashion to food, from transport to telecommunications and everything in between, as well as markets from Australia to Asia, from Europe to the Middle East and the U.S.

Valuable Insights for all Owners and managers of Brands
An understanding and mastery of the trends in brand visual language will allow business to ‘tune’ their brand’s image to ensure they’re consistently communicating the right messages to the right people. For every organisation seeking to best manage their brand identity, these trends must be part of the consideration process. For each brand there will be advantages and disadvantages to leveraging the cues and meaning inherent in these trends. The big question you should be considering is this; ‘does the trend provide an opportunity to leverage a set of visual cues to communicate the perfect brand messages to your market, or has the trend become so widely adopted as to compromise the uniqueness of the brands who follow it?’

Click here to download a complete version of our 2010 Brand Visual Language Trend Report (6.8mb pdf file)

© 2010 Truly Deeply. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. We’re delighted for you to share, blog or publish extracts of our articles, on the condition that Storm Design & Brand DNA are properly credited (and linked to) as the source, and that you include either our URL: trulydeeply.com.au or the link to this source.

For further information, questions and enquires, feel free to contact us directly.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Brand Designer and Trend Spotter.

The very best brands are those that have their differentiation – the thing that grabs the hearts of their customers and wont let go – built right into the product. Apple is a brand renowned for its ability to do just that, with the result being fiercely loyal brand advocates – not just customers. Another brand who take the same approach is Mini. Owned by BMW, Mini understand that the emotional pull in their products is as much in the styling and what’s under the bonnet as it is in the brand messages it builds around its products. Sounds simple – but few brands really live by this credo.

When brands ‘bake’ their differentiation into their products, the release of each new model or innovation can build to what we call ‘brandticipation’. Brandticipation is the heightened sense of anticipation some brands command (create) around the launch of their products. Car makers have released photos of prototype concept vehicles for years in an attempt to build this very sense of excitement about new model releases. Mini is no different in their ‘concept car’ strategy – except that they have the edge in brandticipation, and their new Coupé Concept is a case in point:

“The body design of the MINI Coupé Concept also bridges the gap from the earliest days of the Mini’s history all the way to the more distant future of the brand, emphasising the unique nature of the concept as well as its full membership in the MINI family. At the same time the individual and emotional design language arouses the expectation of a particularly thrilling experience on the road.” – likecool.com

Nice one.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
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Brand Designer