As with all designers I have a soft spot for info-graphics, something that pares down a topic to the salient points and presents them with great visuals to better explain what could be a comlicated topic. So naturally I love this beauty by Linda Dong. She explains the issues with Fracking, a very poignant topic in Australia at the moment, in such a simple and economic style, it’s beautiful.Check it out here : dangersoffracking.com

It’s a reminder that while our personal and business brands always have a story to tell, finding the perfect format for that story telling is always vital, to quote Marshall McLuan “the medium is the message“. So next time you’ve got a point to get across, stop and think, what’s the best economical format for this. Maybe give us a call, it’s the kind of thing we love to chat about.

Derek Carroll
Design Director

2012 will continue to be a tough environment for retailers. Consumers have no reason to throw off their new found sense of caution and propensity to put saving ahead of spending. If anything 2012 may produce even more reasons for them to retreat with some recent news of the financial services sector spruiking the need to lay off workers, and a sense that flat retail sales is placing huge pressure on retailers to reduce costs.

Retailers will need to re-think everything. At the top of the list will be how they deliver value. This needs to extend beyond simply running sales events. It requires a wider gambit of thinking that includes the sort of retailer experience shoppers are exposed to, product selection and where possible the merchandising of exclusive products, finding the sweet spot at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds etc. It means re-thinking what your value proposition is and why it is or is not compelling. At its heart it is seeking ways that move beyond discounting as the foundation for delivering value. If regular discounting is to be your mantra then it will only make sense if you are positioned at the low end of the market and your operations are geared to deliver a sustainable outcome.

But yes, I agree, nothing new in the above comments. In fact like a lot of things easier said than done. However the retailers who have been inspired to reinvent their value chain are reaping the rewards. Think Ikea (stylish flat pack furniture). Think Zara and Top Shop (fast fashion). Think Bunnings (first mover in box format hardware in Australia). I suggest you at least explore the possibilities by deconstructing your value chain and appraising it against your competitors to determine how it may be reconfigured or amped up to provide yourself with a more differentiated value proposition.

In addition to having a rethink in terms of the value you offer, every brand should also be consciously determining the values it seeks to express. Phillip Kotler in his recent book Marketing 3.0 notes a growing trend in society, whereby consumers are now not only looking for products and services that satisfy their needs but also searching for experiences and business models that touch their spiritual side. Supplying meaning is the future value proposition in marketing. He sees the values-driven business model as the new killer app in Marketing 3.0. Marketers need to identify the anxieties and desires of the consumers to be able to target their minds, hearts, and spirits. In the globalization paradox, the generic anxiety and desire of many consumers is to make their society—and the world at large—a better, perhaps even an ideal place to live. Brands need to share the same dream with consumers and make a difference.

When you consider the Australian retail sector I challenge you to identify a major player who distinguishes themselves by being known for their social conscience. In most categories the competitive dimensions remain entrenched in product, service and other functional attributes. Seeking to build social equity by being a values driven branded organisation represents a fertile territory for retail brands to ponder, particularly if we find 2012 to be a year where economic confidence remains shaky and Governments struggle to craft a reassuring narrative of the future.

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

For those of us playing in the brand space, we have been very well drilled over recent years to the need to create compelling brand narratives. The need to become masters at the art of storytelling. To captivate, enthrall and evocatively strike such  an emotional blow that our target market is left spell bound and connected for ever.

We have for months also been hearing how the current Labour Party in Australia lacks a compelling narrative. Even the former PM Paul Keating has been offering assistance. A complex task for sure and one that will judged in due course at the next election. However, one call for better storytelling that recently caught my attention was the suggestion by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, as reported in Age 8/11/11,  that sermons delivered by Roman Catholic priests are often painfully ‘grey and dull’ and need to be livened up with the ‘scandal’ contained within the Bible. He said, and a great reminder for all, (sorry about this grey, dull, scandalous free blog) that …’the advent of televised and computerised information requires us to be compelling and trenchant, to cut to the heart of the matter, resort to narratives and colour.’

The cardinal’s views were not quite enough for me to find a copy of the bible, but do what every spiritual digital being would do…and google the ‘big bible stories’. It was the top ten categories, the most awkward, and the most bizarre categories that caught my attention. Within those categories, on two different sites, I found some interesting overlap of stories. But the real delight is the different take on the same stories. Foreskins may not be top of mind for you, so I am not sure how you feel about 200 of them.

The inspiration: the Bible 1 Kings 18:25-27

The Awkward Category

Before the handsome, successful, and wildly popular David became Israel’s king, he had to put up with a rather jealous King Saul, who hated his guts and wanted him dead. Chucking spears at David wasn’t working out very well for Saul, so when he discovered that his daughter Michal was in love with David, he had an idea – put David in a situation that would result in his death at the hands of Israel’s enemies, the Philistines.

In order to win Michal’s hand, Saul declared, David would need to bring in the foreskins of one hundred Philistines. In other words, if David wanted to marry Michal, he had to go slaughter a hundred enemy soldiers and bring back proof. Technically, the task was a suicide mission, so when David and his men actually returned (with a surplus), Saul was understandably shocked and had to hand over his daughter.

“What, you’re still alive? And you’ve got 100 – no, 200!? – Philistine trophies with you, too? This is awkward… ‘’(particularly for the Philistines I suspect)

The Bizarre Category

Before Byron, before Casanova, there was David. Young and in love, David desperately wants to marry Saul’s daughter Michal and offers Saul anything he wants to let him marry her. What could Saul possibly want? Money? A vow of love? No. Saul wants foreskins. 100 to be exact. Why? Who cares. If you want my daughter, you’re going to have to find 100 foreskins by tomorrow. David finds this odd, but then again this girl is hot, so he goes out and kills 200 men, and collects their foreskins. It’s only then he remembers that he only needs 100 foreskins. Oops. Oh well, maybe if he hands over twice as many foreskins, Saul will be doubly as impressed. Indeed he is and duly hands over his daughter to David.

The moral of this story? Never be ashamed to do crazy things for love.

Well you be the judge. Perhaps the Catholics have a bit more up their sleeve for storytelling than the Government. Or should in fact the government be looking to the Bible for inspiration?

Yeh, a little obscure I know. Why not!

Peter Singline
Brand Scientist

Deck the Halls with Branded Beach Towels
Australian newspaper ‘The Age’ recently published an article on Corporate Gift Giving in their Executive Style lift-out in time for Christmas. For most companies, this gesture of Christmas giving for staff and for clients tends to follow an age-old path of logos on golf towels. As an expensive exercise, the opportunity to create indelible brand gestures at this time of year is often missed. The Age asked Truly Deeply Founder David Ansett for his perspective on this seasonal sticky question.

You can check the article written by Sylvia Pennington on-line here: Merry Christmas here’s an iPad.

A Tantalizing Brand Challenge
Melbourne is one of the great food cities of the world. Big statement I know – but having traveled through more than two dozen cities in different countries, through Europe and Asia over the last couple of years, I feel I’m well positioned to make the call. What a challenge then to create a brand each year for the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival.

Having worked with a few of both over the years, in my experience Chefs are every bit as creative as designers – so developing a brand communications campaign for the Festival would be a brand brief with great expectations.

The 2012 Melbourne Food & Wine Festival which will run from the 2nd to the 21st of March is celebrating their 20th anniversary next year. So how to recognize and thank the food leaders who have driven the success of the event over the years whilst also creating a buzz for the upcoming festival?

The answer is Love.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With this ‘Love Ambush’, the Festival have created a viral brand property they can leverage into a strong, engaging broader campaign. A tasty piece of branding.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Retail Brand Designer & TV aficionado
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

Visit the Festival site here: Melbourne Food & Wine Festival

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

Leveraging the Brand Magic of Art.
For many brands, especially those who are business to consumer/customer brands, the great challenge is to creatively engage with your audience.

Specialist branding agencies like us at Truly Deeply provide this very skill set of creating memorable and engaging brand expressions for businesses, but not every organization has the budget, imagination in-house, or  a talented bunch of brand folk like us at the end of the phone. For those brands, it’s worth considering whether there are opportunities already in the market just waiting to be leveraged.

‘Unwanted Visitor: Portrait of Wildfire‘ is an art installation created by the very talented Herb Williams.

The notable thing about Herb’s work from a brand communications perspective is that it is made-of hundreds of thousands of crayons. Herb apparently has an account with Crayola (kinda makes alot of sense), his crayon brand of choice.

When creating a piece like this one, Herb orders each colour of crayon necessary from the range, and they come individually packaged, 3,000 crayons to a case. Herb Williams says hes “is interested in identifying objects that society perceives to associate with one role, and reintroduces them into different subtexts”. His most recent work is ‘Unwanted Visitor: Portrait of Wildfire‘, an outdoor installation on display at the National Ranching Heritage Centre in Lubbock, Texas represents five free standing sculptures which emulate fires and flames – reminiscent of a wildfire. Each of the pieces is composed of crayola crayons. because of their wax content, they begin to melt and change shape in the unpredictable outdoor conditions in which they stand. Their transformation is affected by blowing wind and dry conditions, much like those that affect the intensity and duration of real wildfire.

Being someone who sees the world through brand coloured glasses, I don’t see Herb as a great customer for the Crayola company, I see him as a great ambassador for the Crayola brand, providing a great canvas for brand story telling.

Art has always been a great engager. When brands associate with art in a manner that is authentic to the artist and the art form, they can discover a wonderful connector to their target market – unlike anything they are able to achieve in a traditional, commercial brand communication context. Enjoying these wonderful images of Herb and his team at work creating the art piece, I’m left pondering the opportunity here for Crayola to become Herb’s patron, and for Herb to become a wonderful, artistic director of Crayola’s brand expressions. Imagine the media attraction, not to mention social mediability of a National Crayola Sculpture Contest, with Herb as the figurehead, recognized as the for-father of the art form.

Then step back and wonder, is there an artist somewhere in the world, creating magical imagery with your product? This approach holds equal potential for small brands as well as big. Artists by nature are experimental, a quick Google turned-up artists creating in chocolate, butter, cheese, vegetables, fruit, coffee, even toast with Marmite – and that was just some of the food options. What creative gestures may already exist in the world, just waiting for you to connect your products and your brand to their art form?

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Brand Designer, Artist & Huge fan of toast & Marmite art
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

Images courtesy of and ©Ashton Thornhill
Spotted on designboom.com

Retail Branding in Living Colour
McDonald’s in the US is set to launch an in-store TV channel featuring; local school sports, movie previews and heartwarming human interest stories

In the world of entertainment, niche programming is a concept with growing popularity – but when it comes to branding, niche focus is nothing new. What’s fresh here is the combination of the two concepts to create a digital network of exclusive, original content targeted at customers eating in McDonalds’ restaurants.

The real smarts is in the customization of content programming to the specific communities located around the individual store, and will include ‘local news and entertainment features, such as spotlights on upcoming films, albums and TV shows’.

McDonald’s TV is a reflection of brands developing more sophisticated and broader digital strategies Creating one’s own content platform to speak directly with your customers in an environment uncluttered by other media is a real opportunity for brands to forge another level of connection with customers. “People today are using our restaurants differently than they have in the past,” said Danya Proud, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s USA. “They’ve become more of a destination. With McDonald’s restaurants offering Wi-Fi, we’ve become more relevant and contemporary.”

For retailers like McDonald’s, apart of their challenge is to create

McDonalds TV programming will be approached with genuine intent. Word is the brand has signed-up reality TV guru Mark Burnett (Survivor & The Apprentice), BBC America and KABC-TV Eyewitness News are reportedly also on-board to provide content for the new network. The content will be shown in one-hour cycles consisting of installments or “pods” lasting around 20 minutes. Pods will include content such as ‘The McDonald’s Achievers’, profiling local high school and college athletes; ‘Mighty Moms’, focusing on local moms juggling home life with careers; ‘McDonald’s Channel Music News’ featuring content on musical acts, tours and new releases; and a fashion, art, music, night life, lifestyle and culture news program called ‘Vimby’.

Dining areas in each store are to be fitted with high-definition 42- to 46-inch screens visible from 70 percent of eating areas. Audio will be broadcast through the screen and ceiling speakers with quiet zones for those who do not want to see or hear the channel.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Retail Brand Designer & TV aficionado
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

Street art of Continental Europe.
On my recent trip to Europe the rich quality and diversity of the street art caught my eye. In my mind there’s no doubt that stencil, spray and paste-up art has matured to become it’s own credible art form. The visual language of the art I saw was hugely varied in form, style and message. I snapped a stack of what I came across and hope you enjoy it.

The first pic (above) was shot in the canals district of Amsterdam, as were many of the pics below.

These two were in a park on a hill above Prague…

The following beauty was snapped in Italy on the streets of Florence.

Pretty sure this one was from Florence as well…

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Brand Designer & Part Time Street Art Junkie
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

I just experienced a strange case of brand deja-vu on a mini break at Silverwater Resort. I was struck by the similarity of the Silverwater Resort brand to that of Emaar Properties.

The resort is in an idyllic spot overlooking Phillip Island. It has a lot going for it, especially if you have kids. But the similarity of the brand identity made me feel like the whole experience was not authentic.

The Silverwater and Emaar brand marks are very similar in graphic style and elements used. So much so, that without putting the logos side by side, the Silverwater logo seems like the Emaar logo in another colour. I even queried whether they were owned by Emaar, which would have made sense – apparently not!

Of course, there are several possible scenarios. One of the logos could be an imitation of the other, it may have been inspired by an already present design style or it could be just by chance that the designs look similar. Unfortunately, with brand identity design, there is a thin line between plagiarism, inspiration and coincidence.

I am surprised that this hasn’t been picked up before. Sure, I am very familiar with the Emaar brand, having spent six years in Dubai. I have also worked withe Emaar as a client, developing brands for their communities, shopping malls, destinations and buildings including Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building).

Emaar is also not a small, shy regional brand. It is one of most well known brands in the Middle East and also has extensive developments across the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. A significant amount of Australians in the construction industry have worked for them or know of them. If you’ve visited Dubai, it is likely you would also be familiar with the brand.

The Emaar logo in its current form was launched in early 2004. The Silverwater Resort was launched in 2008. It seems unlikely that Emaar copied Silverwater.

However, apart from lazy design, it is also doubtful that Silverwater would benefit from an association with Emaar’s brand with local Aussies. However, international tourists, particularly from the Middle East might feel cheated that the familiarity and confidence in choosing the Silverwater Resort based on brand familiarity is not genuine – especially if they are expecting an understanding of Middle Eastern culture when they get to the resort.

To give either brand the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume the emulation was not deliberate. The idea behind both logos is not incredibly distinct or well crafted so it is possible this could be a coincidence. This is also makes it difficult for either to defend legally.

A brand’s identity is an important representation of the company’s image and reputation. It’s far more than a logo and needs to be carefully considered and crafted around a distinctive and authentic idea. Choosing a strategic brand design partner is essential to uncover your brand’s DNA and then bring it to life in a unique and compelling way to truly connect with your audiences, build loyalty and help your business survive and grow. Protecting this intellectual property legally is equally as important.

If you’d like to hear how Truly Deeply develops authentic and powerful brands that significantly enhance a company’s ability to compete and grow, I’d love to hear from you.

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy