Applying branding frameworks to politicians and political parties is a very much established practice. In fact, some may even argue that politics is increasingly about symbolism as opposed to policy implementation, image rather than content. A little harsh perhaps, but certainly in Australia we are seeing our major political parties trying to position themselves on populist mandates over political ideology. They are trying something we strongly advise our clients against, and that is to try and be all things to all people. It never works in commercial settings and it is of highly dubious value in politics – it simply gives strength to the brand positioning of minor parties (eg. the Greens) and independents.

However, one would never suggest that political party strategists simply enroll in a ‘Branding 101′ course. Politics is in a league of its own when it comes to branding, as is being witnessed in the current Australian Federal Government election campaign. I have read a lot of branding books in my time and some are pretty good at advising on strategies to combat competitors. But none offer advice on how to combat dissenters (read leaks to the media), from within your own brand team, deliberately attempting to give your competitors a leg up.

But on the upside what I did find interesting is that when the Prime Minster, Julia Gillard, was forced to defend her position from the damaging leaks she seized upon an important brand attribute, that is she reclaimed a degree of authenticity. The daily newspaper ‘The Age’ (Michael Gordon) suggested that ….’it was the first time in the campaign she appeared unscripted and, tellingly, it was her most authentic and convincing performance.’

Another article (Michelle Grattan) said …’we saw the old Gillard in her press conference, not the more polished, slightly confected lady of the campaign. Most people thought this return to feistiness an improvement. Blood-pumping, anger showing, but strictly on script.’

Will the real Julia Gillard please stand up. We need you.

Authenticity what a novel concept. All the best brands demonstrate it, yet when it comes to the branding of politicians it regularly gets lost. In the current campaign Julia Gillard’s brand minders have created such a contrived image that her true personality has not had a chance to shine through at all. The very brand attributes that got her to PM – the wit, the candor, the on-the-feet smarts have all been stymied. The branding of individual politicians (particularly party leaders), is indeed a tough gig when you factor in the need to appease the party machine. Think Peter Garrett, phew!

The other dimension that makes the branding of pollies and their political parties such a rare breed is the media frenzy that surrounds them. Every word, every move analysed. Imagine having the same level of media scrutiny applied to the major brands of the world. BP has recently experienced a little of what it feels like to be under the minute by minute gaze of the media, and it did not cope well. In fact the CEO is no longer there, and partly because he uttered (along with some other clangers) those rather infamous words about wanting to get his life back (well now he certainly does)!

The more I reflect on the challenges of branding in the political arena the more I am feel grateful of the space we play in every day – which is essentially branding within every conceivable product and service category except politics. When it comes to politics I am happy to simply be a paying customer – now taxes that is entirely a different topic!

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

Have you ever played the old parlour game of ‘Whispers’ where one person whispers a phrase to you and you pass it on, by whisper, to the next person. After 6 or 7 rounds ‘I have a square’ becomes  ’a star’. It’s a demonstration of how the intent behind a message can be lost in transition if there is not someone standing between the individual whisperers correcting them.

Early in my marketing career it struck me that the same distortion of message happens when we are trying to take our customers from one end of the purchase process to the other – from a vague interest or need  for our product to purchase. At each stage the customer makes decisions about your brand and product that determine whether you make it to the next stage. Trusting to luck and leaving  your message to find its own way through the purchase process is fraught with danger.

The savvy marketer knows you need to manage every aspect – the brand message and voice, the value proposition and communication content – at every stage to ensure you get the best bang for your marketing buck. You need to look at each stage, at every touchpoint and identify which aspects of your message need dialing up and which down, in order that you can remain in the process.

As a next step you then need to design communications that best deliver the appropriate message at each stage, perhaps a phone follow-up to sales enquiry, an e-mail campaign to people who have asked for a quote, a leaflet explaining jargon at the point they are exploring products…the fun is in identifying the communication gaps and finding ways to fill them.

Reviewing your purchase process might seem arduous but you could be missing a simple fix that could really impact your bottom line sales – imagine if your conversion rate went from 1 to 2%.

As an marketer I have found this approach incredibly powerful . Simply put, this is how I view the communications process.

Knowing the process is only part of the answer, you then have to work with other talented people to make it work.
Here at Truly Deeply we are devoted to ensuring our clients stay true to their brand strategy, brand essence and core message in everything they do. If you would like to talk to us about how we can fool-proof your purchase process why not give us a call.

Malcolm Harvey
Client Experiences Director and Direct Marketing go-to guy.

A Stylishly Designed Creative Idea
During Paris Fashion Week, fashion mag Grazia was seeking a way to stand-out from the pack of fashion related brands who were jamming the broadcast, web, blog, and twitter airwaves with their messages. In a stylish act of brand-zag, Grazia created a brand experience by re-designing the ‘air dog’ – and filling the boulevards of the fashion capital with elegant girls out walking their Grazia inflatable pug dogs. We’ve long described those tiny canine fashion accessories as ‘air dogs’ as a result of the fact they spend more time in the air (and in handbags) than on the ground. It seems the stylish folk at French Grazia have the same idea. This stand-out brand experience packed with brand personality was sure to get the buzz brewing and tongues wagging creating the content for some rich brand storytelling.

The Art of Brand-Zagging
As the brand communication landscape continues to fragment at an ever increasing rate, opportunities exist to take advantage of ‘old school’ channels such as guerrilla marketing that have become old before their time. As many brand seek to surf the crest of the innovation wave, developing the latest iPadvertising campaigns, some very effective ways to communicate with audiences and stand-out from the pack are available to businesses and their creative agencies.

If you’d like some help with designing a stand-out brand gesture for your business, why not get in touch – we’d love to help you on your way.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brand Experiences

The great Muhammad Ali was the inspiration behind this project. We were asked to design an invitation to an open studio night we conducted as part of the AGideas Conference. Projects like these give the studio an opportunity to engage in creative, for creative sake. Our audience was predominately design students who spend a lot of time discovering the discourse of design.

Muhammad Ali has been credited with delivering the shortest poem ever. The story goes that he stood up to address students at Harvard University and simply said the words, “Me… We…” It is amazing how powerful two words can be. We recreated Muhammad Ali’s poem to pay homage to the great man and instill a bit of comraderie between our studio and the students of design. We printed the invitation on reflective stock which revealed the reflection of the holder. “Me…”

As the card is flipped over it reveals the completed poem. “We…”

If you would like get creative with us, get in contact.

Lachlan McDougall
Design Creative, for creative sake.

Following the tradition of tourist towns the world over, Port Douglass in Far North Queensland, Australia has an embarrassment of restaurants and bars – it’s a wonder how they manage to keep business ticking-over during quieter times. Fair to say, competition between the restaurants and cafes for the tourist diner is fierce and unrelenting. So you can imagine our curiosity when I came across one restaurant, seemingly identical to all the others, that was bustling every afternoon. At 5pm each day when most restaurants would be fortunate to have a table of six, why was ‘On the Inlet’ bustling with more than 60 customers.

The answer was George the Giant Groper. Many years ago the staff at On the Inlet began feeding a local Groper. For those without the Chief’s piscatorial sophistication – Gropers are giant, lazy fish that grow to the size of a hippo and do little but lie around eating. As the folks at On the Inlet first fed, then named George he became more giant and more friendly (well in the manner of a big old lazy fish without social skills). Over the years, as word spread, tourists began turning-up to see George get his daily fill of fish head. Now days, around 5pm each and every afternoon of the year, as most restaurant traffic slows to a trickle, On the Inlet has a dozen tables booked and another forty customers standing, eating and drinking as they wait for George the famous groper to show up – a new take on the term Feeding Frenzy. All this has been achieved with little marketing promotion for George.

Which got us thinking of what a great metaphor George was for brand differentiation, and wondering what every business could do if they worked-out what their own George the Giant Groper could be.

We found this great little marketing story on LogoChief.

Improv Everywhere is a New York based collective that organise and execute awesome acts of street theatre. There brand tag line really describes it best, ‘We Cause Scenes’. Whether it’s a complex set up like the Starwars Subway Car above or the Ghostbusters homage, Who You Gonna Call? or something altogether simpler like High Five Escalator.

They’re a great reminder how you can build brand presence by bringing your brand alive with theatre and acting locally, thinking globally. By creating local theatre experience with love and devotion and then using the internet to host it for an international audience, Improv Everywhere have shown a way to accomplish it with limited resources or budget.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who you gonna call for your brand experience

Derek Carroll
Director of Design

With the dust settling from the World Cup, some very clever brand gestures are coming to light – and this one from the Dutch Football federation is one of the best.A Great Visual Brand Experience
The KNVB produced a range of limited edition national football kits for their fans. When a goal was scored and the shirt was pulled over the fan’s head, the face of one of the Dutch football stars was revealed printed on the inside of the shirt – a great surprise, and a great brand gesture.

Love it.

We spotted this little beauty on The Cool Hunter.

We spend much of our lives working with brands of all shapes and sizes across almost every conceivable category to define their differentiated brand proposition and design a rich and unique visual language to position their businesses for success. Occasionally we come across brands who have their differentiated proposition ‘baked-in’ to their products or services (think iPhone’s touch screen and useability / think Webflix DVDs through the mail) – what it is that is unique about them is inherent in what they do or sell. Without doubt, these brands have a distinct advantage over their competitors.

For businesses looking for a handle on how to build a brand with the differentiated proposition baked-in, an often overlooked starting point is design.

One of my favorite examples of such a brand is Japanese paper ware manufacturer Wasara. Elevating the humble paper tableware category with the power of design alone – Wasara’s brand proposition is based around challenging the paper plate paradigm with one simple question: Why can’t paper plates be beautiful?

Paper Ware for Spiritual Enrichment
Wasara’s positioning line of ‘Paper Ware for Spiritual Enrichment’ doesn’t so-much set the tone for the brand as reflect the product beautifully. In their own words, Wasara believe ‘Holding a plate in your hands; its form, texture and ease of use can make the heart skip’. Underlying the Wasara design concept is hundreds of years of Japanese aesthetic and sublime attention to detail.

Eco-Friendly & Beautiful
‘As is the fate of all paper tableware, a Wasara can serve its purpose only once. Yet it is designed to minimize environmental waste.’ Wasara products are made from non-wood materials such as reed, bamboo and baggasse (sugarcane waste) – materials with no danger of depletion.

Differentiated by Design
Whether you are a manufacturer, retailer, food producer, or even a professional services firm, the design of your product provides the real potential for you to create a differentiating and distinctive advantage over your competitors.

• Consider the businesses with whom you compete for customers.
• How many of them have a distinct advantage built right into their product or service?
• How many of your competitors have re-designed their products or services to be as distinctive in the market as Wasara have with their paper tableware?

• If the answer for your business is ‘None’ you’re facing a great opportunity to reposition your business and gain marketshare.
• If the answer ‘Our competition’s already doing this’, you’ve just identified what you need to do to compete with your market’s leaders.

If you’d like some help with getting your head around how you can best leverage design to create competitive advantage for your brand, why not get in touch – we’d love to help you on your way.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brand Differentiation

More and more brands are foregoing the big chest beating advertising campaigns that attempt to broadcast their presence to the world. This is particularly the case for those wishing to position themselves in the  cool end of the market. The onus is on savvy shoppers to find them, particularly when it we are talking fashion and bars. Certainly this was our experience on a recent visit to Berlin.

Berlin appears to have been able to sustain the vibrant design and arts subculture that blossomed out of the highly energised post-reunification period. It is a city that the longer you are there peels back layers and layers of creative magic. There are probably not too many other cities in the world that can boast as many concept, guerilla or clandestine stores as Berlin. But it does make you work a little for the rewards, a big part of its charm is that you have to some scratching.

And scratch we did to find a high end fashion retailer called Apartment. In fact having heard about it (through the power of word of mouth and editorial commentary) it took us three different attempts to locate it. Why so difficult? It is an unmarked empty storefront that occupies the entire ground floor of a lifeless concrete high-rise. Hardly an invitation to passers-by to come in and explore. What you see is not what you get. It is discovery personified. On the ground floor there is no signage, simply a big white empty space. Dare to enter the space you encounter one empty display cabinet, a vase with flowers and the pull of a spiral staircase heading down to a basement.

Take the stairs  and you find clothing, accessories and shoes from hot local and international designers. Very cool gear, big prices and a sense of personal discovery. The hidden nature of the offering is what gives it the marketing clout. It is counter intuitive. It like a secret club, and we all like belonging.

How do you build intrigue into what you have to offer? It is a question worth pondering.

Just for the fun-of-it
There has been plenty of debate over the years (some of it with readers commenting on this site) about the validity and value of brand gestures that do not have an immediate and specific selling proposition. In many ways this represents the difference between the crafts of advertising and branding.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Speed Camera Lottery.
Idea: Rewarding Speed Limit Signs – Submitted by Kevin Richardson (USA).
Can we get more people to obey the speed limit by making it fun to do? The idea here is capture on camera the people who keep to the speed limit. They would have their photos taken and registration numbers recorded and entered into a lottery. Winners would recieve cash prizes and be notified by post. Better still, the winning pot would come from the people who were caught speeding.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a great example of a brand gesture from the folks at Volkswagen. Unlike many brand gestures, where the communication objective of the experience is directly related to the proposition and positioning of the brand, Volkswagen’s funtheory.com plays on the outer margins of brand communication. As Volkswagen describe funtheory.com: ‘This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.’

As we’ve evolved as a society in the way we absorb and interact with brands, the way audiences respond to brand messages has changed. Twenty years ago the extent to which you could build market share was directly related to the budget you had available to invest in your above the line advertising campaign. The world has changed. Traditional advertising techniques and channels have become part of the way brands need to communicate to connect to their markets, but not the only way. The catch-cry is ‘Integration’ – integrating a campaign of brand messaging – some hard, some soft, some using traditional mediums, some using new or fresh mediums. And as the way we connect with our audiences has changed, so-too has the messaging itself.

No-longer can brands focus on the offer – what we want you to do or buy – they must also give people a reason to buy that is non-functional, a reason to want to buy.

The process of creating emotional connections – the truer and deeper the better – requires a subtly, complex and multi-dimensional craft of which attributes such as engage, delight, interact and share are most defining. This brand gesture campaign from Volkswagen is a sweet example of just that craft.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Fast Lane – A Funtheory Follow-up
Following-on from their funtheory campaign – VW have created some more brand-driven frivolity with these great brand experiences dedicated to everyone who enjoys speeding life up a little.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The fast Lane campaign is integrated through VW’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/volkswagen?v=app_122484447791278

If you’d like to chat about creating a reason for your customers to want to buy your products or services, why not give us a call.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brand Gestures