Surfing brand Billabong International is moving down stream into retail to better control how its products are sold. An increasing trend amongst the large retail chains is to increase the proportion of merchandise they sell under their own brands. Brands like Billabong can either cop it sweet and sit back and let their share of floor space and sales decline or they can take steps to control their own destiny. It is pleasing to see that Billabong has opted for the latter. Billabong is increasingly seeking to make retail acquisitions as a way of gaining greater control to their route to market. Last year they acquired the California based RVCA brand,  the West 49 retail chain in Canada, Surf Dive’n’ Ski  and Jetty Surf in Australia. Likewise Billabong is investing to build its online sales, which currently makes up 3% of their revenue.

Billabong is not alone in needing to re-think its strategic direction in terms of its consumer interface. For a long time brands have been sensitive of creating channel conflict and ever so respectful to the large retailers. But the respect is increasingly not being returned , brands need to seize the initiative back. Brand management needs to in fact be just that, brand management. Online represents the most obvious space to be managing more intensively. Why wouldn’t a big brand like Billabong not wish to offer the most compelling, engaging and intuitive online offering in its market category?

In terms of a retail footprint the investment required is significant, and for many manufacturing and wholesaling brands beyond their financial means or scale to create their own retail chain. For those retailers there is a need to be a little more creative. Why not seek to joint venture in a retail business? Seek out a number of complimentary brands and underwrite a shared dedicated retailing arm. Yes, it is difficult finding partners of the right size and same motivation, but they are there in many categories. When there is so much focus on co-creating with your customers, why not co-create with your peer band owners.

If your key major retailers are losing the spirit of collaboration and pursuing a more intense self interest position, reinvent your market interface, at the very least creatively explore the options.

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

As a creative branding agency, we love it when we come across examples of brands that have grown to mean so much more than their functional proposition. Take children’s toy brand Lego for instance. Sure there are Lego fanatics, Lego Masters and millions of kids whose perfect afternoon is spent building things from the little plastic bricks, but the brand holds an even deeper place in our collective hearts.

Three Lego figurines will be traveling to jupiter, affixed to the space probe ‘Juno’.  The models represent the italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, the roman God Jupiter, and the roman Goddess Juno. I just love this. I mean it’s space travel – I’m guessing every single element of of the project, every screw, nut, bolt and coat of paint would have been carefully scrutinized within an inch of its life to ensure it met every functional criteria from strength to weight to cost. Panel after panel of astrophysicist, NASA experts, political sub-committees would have approved every square millimeter of the project and its budget. You can bet the house there would not be a single, superfluous item on board the space prob Juno… except four three, over-sized Lego figurines.

Created by Lego on a special commission from NASA, the three figures are composed of aluminum, created at a cost of about US$5,000 each. special manufacturing was required to ensure that the figurines do not interfere with the spacecraft’s sensitive measurements and instruments.

I just love this. Is it just me or is anyone else thinking the same question… WHY? And the only explanation I can think of is brand love. Somewhere in the top echelons of NASA (and I suspect throughout the organisation) is a Lego lover, who has tapped into a reservoir of loyalty towards the Lego brand. I mean, just imaging the conversation int the NASA cafe:
• NASA pointy head 01; ‘I’ve just gotta tell you about this idea I had for the Juno probe – I’m so excited I didn’t sleep a wink last night’
• NASA pointy head 02; ‘This isn’t another one of your brilliant ideas like the Pepsi and Mentos powered satellite?’
• NASA pointy head 01; ‘No this one’s much better, what if we build some Lego figures to drive the probe to Jupiter?’
• NASA pointy head 02; ‘That’s a ripper – I’m sure the funding sub-committee’s going to go for that’

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Juno is scheduled to launch aboard the unmanned ‘atlas V’ rocket at 11:40 AM EDT on august 5th. The probe is expected to arrive on Jupiter in july of 2016, where the solar-powered probe will collect information about the planet, its moons, and atmosphere over the course of one year. The exact role and KPIs for the three legonaughts is unclear at this stage.

Regular readers will already be familiar with the recent innovations taking place in the world of pop-up retail/brand experiences, from the beautifully evocative Cognac brand Martell, to the brand with balls Beatbox Burgers. A recent commission by appliance specialists Electrolux is about to be launched – a portable dining experience. The Cube restaurants will be popping up on a series of landmark sites across Europe over the course of 2011, starting with a placement on top of the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, Belgium. The aim is to create a brand experience that surprises and inspires guests with fantastic tastes and never-before-seen views, ultimately stimulating them to explore their own creative boundaries next time they entertain friends or family at home.

The Cube is an ephemeral restaurant, an exceptional place, a unique opportunity to experience “dining with a view”.
It is outstanding as far as cuisine is concerned, an ideal demonstration of Electrolux’s know-how. The Cube is a unique architectural performance. Not only due to the place where it is set up, but also through its design: an organic and translucent place, a digest of technology.

“The Cube by Electrolux will offer guests wonderful, exclusive cooking and food experiences.” says Neil Gannon, Director of Marketing expertise at Electrolux “Whilst guests enjoy the evening, we also want to give them the opportunity to interact and learn from the professionals we work with being the trusted supplier of many top-chefs
and fashion specialists. Showing their professional shortcuts we want to show people it doesn’t have to be difficult
or expensive to create great experiences as long as you have the right tools.”

The Cube will feature a different hand-picked resident chef, with an audacious technique and unlimited inventiveness,
at each venue and will offer tailor-made recipes using locally sourced ingredients and all prepared on state-of-the-art Electrolux appliances. When guests first arrive the 140sqm space will be open for entertaining and some great sight seeing, especially from the external platform. When dinner is served the concealed dining table will drop from the
ceiling so as to sit the 18 guests before being raised again for after dinner drinks and mingling.

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.

Wishing you and yours a truly, deeply festive season from all of us.
It is that time of the year when the age old question is asked by children all over the world, do you believe in Santa?

Santa is an amazing brand in many ways. It heavily relies on a vast number of brand ambassadors from parents to department store Father Christmases to deliver the brand, whilst at the same time lacking authenticity as most of the world doesn’t actually believe in it.

Despite all this the Santa brand has brilliant storytelling, an instantly recognizable brand visual language, creates a powerful sense of brandticipation and consistency of brand experience – I don’t know about you but my December 25ths have a definite groundhog day feel to them.

The Santa brand continues to capture the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people – perhaps making it the most powerful brand in the world. And with a share of the wallet estimated $450 billion plus of Christmas spending in the US alone each year, I’d love to see Interbrand calculate a value for Santa’s brand equity.

For those interested in the exercise of brand thinking with a touch of Ho Ho Ho, take a look at the Santa Brand Book from Quietroom we came across this week:

Here is an online presentation of the Santa Brand Book or you can also download the complete PDF.
Thank you to the Quietroom for bringing a little brand joy to the world.

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.

Following on from our post ‘Coffee Avenue – A Great Brand Experience on Wheels’, Kelvin Natural Slush Co., the brainchild of yet another corporate refugee turned foodie entrepreneur, just recently hit the streets
in NYC, offering a more sophisticated version of a childhood favorite — the slushie.

In an effort to adultify the slushie experience, this premium, all natural brand offers “more sophisticated,
less sweet” flavours like Spicy Ginger, Tangy Citrus, and Green & Black Tea, to which you add any number of fresh-fruit purées…and to really take it to a dessert-worthy beverage add a scoop of ice cream for a slushie float.
They also apparently make good mixers, but you’ll have to supply your own booze.

Everything about Kelvin (the name comes from the Kelvin temperature scale, in which absolute zero is the coldest
you can get) is a great example of how small brands can be big on personality – Are all your Kelvin employees really trained ninjas who have traded in their ninja masks and killer ways for a life of peace, safety and slushies?
Yes. This is absolutely true.

Kelvin is currently making its way around Manhattan so for more information and for truck location updates,
visit Kelvin on Facebook and follow them onTwitter.

Brain freeze just got a little more fun.

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

Cassandra Gill
Director of Design.

When it comes to brand loyalty, few expressions are more powerful than customer testimonials. These days customers express their feelings towards brands through a multitude of on-line forums that are not only more prolific, but require such little effort as to encourage a king-tide of sentiment, positive and negative. Occasionally we come cross an expression of brand loyalty so passionate it leaps from the flood of customer opinion – this brief customer review is one of those. The authenticity of this brand rant by Chris from Waltham, MA in the States is so rich with natural passion and verve I can almost taste it. Pity the girls working the friers weren’t on the same bus.

Which gets me to wondering:
• How many brand set their customer loyalty expectations this high?
• How much brand leverage could any organization get off-the-back of this level of passionate brand endorsement? and
• What are they doing (if anything) to create such remarkable brand experiences for their customers and clients?

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brands that transform Customers into Passionate Loyalists

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

Last month the latest Nike Stadium location opened its doors – the Bowery Stadium in New York City.
Nike Stadiums reflect the trend of many brands (especially those in retail) towards what we call soft brand messaging. Unlike traditional advertising whose function is to deliver a sharp proposition that communicates a specific offer, soft brand messaging is all about giving people a brand experience to create a positive emotional bond with a brand. Brands we care about, brands we believe are a reflection of the way we wish ourselves to be seen own a distinctly unfair advantage when it comers to making conscious and unconsidered buying decisions. Whether buying a $5 burger to a $500k sports car, when it comes to the heart ruling the head, those brands we love hold the whip hand.

The Nike Stadiums serve as ‘creative salons’,  where art, sports and customer community experiences sing together in harmony with the Nike brand voice. The first installation in the Bowery Stadium is called ‘Order and Progress’. Order and Progress is a celebration of Brazilian soccer through the eyes of the NYC creative community. Opening night featured the premier of a multi-media piece entitled ‘Everything is Practice’, a short film with Spike Lee directed by Jake Sumner and photography by Nabil Elderkin, as well as a piece by Brazilian born, NYC raised creative Allen Benedikt. With the ‘Stadium’ concept, Nike have created a community forum, rich in brand personality, and perfect for brand storytelling.

The basement serves as another creative salon but with a more functional purpose in mind, with a real locker room stacked along an entire wall. The space was created as a hub for New Yorkers involved in local sports programs. Serving as an inspiring meeting place, the traditional locker room is flipped on its head with an explosion of paints created by artist Jack Greer. Along the other wall are illustrations by Gianluigi Toccafondo titled ‘Heroes of Speed’.

At an all important functional level, the space will be the new home of the Bowery Stadium sports programs, including the NYC Bridge Runners, Goodtimes FC soccer league, NRF, and the WNW – don’t you just love those sports acronyms. At the heart of this Nike brand experience the emotional benefit intersects with the functional benefit, which is where the strongest emotional bonds are created.

Nike’s Bowery Stadium opens to the public Thursday to Sundays from 12 to 7pm, at 276 Bowery in Manhattan. Check it out if you’re in town – BYO gym gear.

If you look after brand spaces that could do with a good dose of emotional connection, get in touch – the conversation will be as valuable as it is enlightening.

David Ansett, Brandamentalist
For daily updates of our brand thinking, follow me on Twitter
Brand Designer

We found-out about this on a cool little web site called High Snobiety.

Recently on a trip to Europe I had the pleasure of hearing a presentation by American author and strategy consultant Joseph Pine on authenticity in branding. Pine has co-authored several books in the brand space. Namely the ‘Experience Economy’ and his more recent offering simply titled ‘Authenticity’.

Pine believes that people increasingly evaluate the world in terms of real and fake, based on their own views of what is and is not authentic. ‘Real’ is important for many consumers because of the role brands play in confirming their desired or perceived self-image.

But distinguishing between real and fake is not always easy. At a recent brand workshop we were conducting with a regional wine and food group in country Victoria one of the participants, a successful micro-brewery operator, was bemoaning the fact that the very large commercial breweries attempt to position some of their brands as artisan inspired boutique beers. It makes it tough for the ‘real’ artisans when the big commercial brands mimic their boutique cues.

Joseph Pine raised a few axioms that he thinks is relevant to authenticity. Firstly, he believes if you are authentic, then you don’t have to say you’re authentic. Related  to this is it’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic. Secondly, if you say you are authentic, then you better be authentic. Thirdly, and interestingly, he believes it’s easier to render offerings authentic, if you acknowledge they are inauthentic.

Heritage and years since having been established is frequently used as a way of claiming some sense of authenticity. It for this reason the I loved the two retail offerings pictured above, I came across in Berlin. To a large extent they apply Pine’s third axiom and claim their authenticity by poking fun at their years of establishment.

Peter Singline
(Real or Fake….?)