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.

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.

Working in the creative industry (in fact any industry for that matter) the one question that always seems to crop up at the start of any project is “what’s your budget?” Just once we’d love the client to say “hell, I don’t know – whatever it takes”  but those clients and those budgets are few and far between. The ‘budget’ question is not without merit. If we know how much we have to spend (or don’t have to spend) then we can direct our creative juices towards the appropriate solutions. However, sometimes I wonder whether an awareness of budget restricts the creative brainstorm activity.

Every client wants their brand communications to make a splash, create a buzz and ultimately generate sales far beyond the level of investment made. When we think about the campaigns that achieved this end there is a common thread… a big, juicy, creative idea. I was recently digging around some old files on my Macbook Pro and found a few sensational examples showing how a creative, impactful idea can be born out of any budget – big, small or anywhere in between.

A great example of a piece of brand communication at the lower end of the budget scale is this ballet classes advertisement. What a very well crafted and thought out, simple idea that no doubt people would take note of – even if you weren’t into ballet.

We need to be mindful that although the execution of these next ads may not have cost the proverbial bomb, the creative firepower behind them may well have.

A great outdoor campaign for Durex condoms

This moving billboard for FedEx is an absolute beauty!

And how about this one for a zoo in the US?

Throw-in a substantial budget and the big ideas just get bigger.

The famous German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn spanning a freeway to promote FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany

This absolute ripper from the cingular network (now AT&T) in the USA.

And finally, this simple yet effective creative campaign from Bic.

These examples all create enormous impact by delivering a bold brand gesture in an unexpected place and in a unique way. They are about targeted communication and buzz building.The strength of their ideas replaces the need for them to rely on mass media placement and allows them to deliver far more customized messages to specific audiences.
The thing about a great idea is that it makes us all scratch our heads and wonder why we didn’t think of it ourselves.

If you’d like to see your brand communications turn heads, make dollars and be the talk of the town through the way they connect with your market, why not give us a call.

Dominic Guthrie
Client Account Director

Mission Impossible
Could there be a more difficult market segment for brands to differentiate themselves than water. On the surface it would seem to be brand mission impossible, but over the last fifteen years we’ve seen water become a hotly contested market place. In this time we’ve seen an evolution from water brands battling on the purity of their product both sparkling and still based on geographic heritage, then water brands positioning around brand personality, and most recently the launch of a new category of Vitamin waters.

Another Bloody Water
A new competitor launched into the fray a few years ago with the apt brand name of ‘Another Bloody Water.’ Launching with a brand strategy that included a bold brand personality and the lovable brand personality attribute of being able to laugh at itself and the market it belongs to, Another Bloody water successfully grabbed a share of the retail bottled water market.

Challenging the marketplace
What makes this brand stand-out though is more than just a name that challenges the status quot of the market. Another Bloody Water know what it means to be a challenger brand, entering a market with a number of daunting players already in-place. The very brand DNA of Another Bloody Water is coded with a challenger mentality. From the name, to the brand voice, to the way they take their product to market, Another Bloody Water seeks to stand out from the bottled water pack.

Banging-on About Blank Canvases
And that’s where blank canvases come-in. We’ve written about blank canvases before, we’ve been banging-on about them for months, and here’s a brand who intuitively understands their value. For a business like Another Bloody Water who will never have the marketing budget to compete head-on with the big brands in their space, blank canvases provide them the opportunity to make a splash, stand out and cut through.

When Another Bloody Water deliver their product they don’t use a bog-standard truck, they don’t even use a truck with their corporate image painted on its side. Like all else about the brand, when it comes to their delivery truck, Another Bloody Water have thought beyond the expected to the remarkable.

Watching the Grass Grow
The Another Bloody Water delivery trucks are covered from head to wheel-arch in fake turf with the brand name mowed-right into the sides. Simple enough an idea – but they’re often the best ideas after-all. The result is quite remarkable. Having come-across these trucks on their delivery rounds, they stand-out as a wonderfully entertaining break from the usual city traffic. There’s something compelling about the site of ‘fresh green grass’ that seems to somehow underscore the purity of the water – without either making any such statement or obeying the laws of logic.

As a creative brand agency, we salute Another Bloody Water and the mindset that’s enabled them to build such a remarkable brand presence through smart strategy rather than big spending. If you’d like to find out how your brand can take the same approach to success, why not get in touch – we’d love to have a conversation.

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

The Mystery of the Blocked-out Store Window
I was on my Sunday run the other morning, looking for any distraction from the headache of the night before, when I came across a familiar urban retail sight; the empty store with windows blocked-out by newspapers. Almost universally it seems, once a retailer takes a lease, before they even begin their fit-out, the first thing they do is cover the windows – often with old newspaper.

This particular shop is part of a small retail/residential development that has been in progress for the last 12 months, and is located on the corner of a high traffic intersection. No doubt many other locals and passers-by have the same level of curiosity as I do to see what shop will be opening in this newly built retail space. As I stumbled past at a slow slog it occurred to me that a great brand communication opportunity was going begging right there on that street corner.

Missing the Opportunity to Make an Impression
With all of the car, pedestrian and tram traffic passing this corner store every day, what a wonderful opportunity the new tenants have to cover the windows with a great big ad. The windows are as large as a billboard and well illuminated. For a fraction of the cost of the store fit-out, the mysterious retailer-to-be could be actively marketing themselves and their brand to their future customers. In fact if I were in the new tenant’s shoes, I would have had a go at getting the land-lord to cover the cost of the window ad as part of the lease agreement.

This is what we call a Blank Canvas.
We spend much of our lives working with big brands; defining their reason for being – their competitive market position, and providing clarity around how to bring those brands to life to achieve the objectives of the business. Many of the strategies employed by the large and experienced brands translate across to small and medium sized businesses; some work even better for smaller enterprises. Blank Canvases are one of those strategies that are just as effective, if-not more-so for the smaller guys.

A Blank Canvas is any opportunity or channel available to communicate your brand that is currently not being used by the competition. As long as a Blank Canvas is appropriate for your brand and relevant to your market, it will usually deliver a much higher ROI than traditional marketing activities thanks to increased ‘cut through’.

Recently we worked with a local home building company called Nava Homes.
Initially we developed their differentiated market proposition and defined their brand, but the real high value work was in the transformation of their marketing strategy from traditional channels to Blank Canvases. As a home builder, Nava had a number of display homes located in display villages around Melbourne. The vast majority of Nava’s marketing budget was spent on traditional newspaper ads, aimed at driving traffic to the display villages their display homes were located-in. The problem was that as a smaller player, Nava’s ads were buried deep in the real estate section of the local newspapers. The first pages were filled with double-page spread, full colour ads from the bigger home builders who’s ads were aimed at guess what… driving traffic to those very same display villages.

There was no way with our clients marketing budget that Nava could ever own the newspaper advertising space – that was a brand canvas crowded with big players. What we identified as a Blank Canvas was the opportunity to own the car parks at the display villages. Our strategy was – ‘Let the big brands drive home buyers to the display villages, but once they arrive, let’s disproportionately attract their attention and direct them to our Italian Family Living Nava Homes.’ Whilst Nava’s marketing budget would never be enough to stand-out in the newpapers, it was ample to make a big splash at the display village carparks – which were relatively Blank Canvases.

A Strategy from the Big Brands for Brands of Every Size
All brands; B2B, B2C, retail, manufacturing, professional services, not-for-profit, multinational, small or medium sized, have the potential to unlock the power of their own Blank Canvases, and increase the ROI for their marketing and brand communications. If you’d like some help identifying the Blank Canvases for your brand, let us know – we’d be only too happy to be of assistance.

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

Global Marketing Push hits the Streets
Just hours after the launch of the new Microsoft Windows Phone, teams of orange-clad Windows Phone Warriors have hit the streets of Paris talking New Phone Technology to anyone who’ll listen. The Windows software debuts today on 30 different phone models made by Samsung, HTC and LG. The phone’s operating system includes Microsoft Office, Outlook, and applications sold through an Apple iPhone-like ap marketplace.

The Revolution has been Postponed
Three years ago this system would have been the kind of revolutionary masterstroke Microsoft are looking for to regain their flagging market share. But following the success of the iPhone, this looks like another reminder of the fate of brands who spend too much of their energy focussed on the competition and not enough on revolutionizing the marketplace. The feedback on the web has been generally critical of the new OS for being too little too late. A review on Gizmodo blog opined: “Windows Mobile 6.5 isn’t just a letdown – it barely seems done … It’s an interim product and a vain attempt to hold onto the thinning ranks of people who still choose Windows Mobile despite not being somehow tethered to it until the tardy Windows Mobile 7 comes out, whenever that may be. And it won’t work.” Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Windows Phone looks less like the answer to the iPhone, and more like a me-too product.

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

The hidden code
All brands project an image through the visual language of their brand identity. Customers and markets use the code contained within their visual language to make logical and emotional associations that drive their responses to trust, lust, aspire and desire the brand… or not. A well designed brand identity utilizes the visual language code of its market to pin-point the positioning it wishes to own in the hearts and minds of its customers.

When we talk about a brand’s visual language we refer to its brand mark (logo), brand colours and typefaces, and every visual expression of the brand on-line and off including; advertising campaigns, packaging, store design, product names, web site, uniforms, and marketing and shareholder communications. The scope of visual language is unique for every different brand.

Our Visual Decode Process
At Storm and Brand DNA we have become masters of the art of decoding the visual language of brands. This process plays a critical role in the way we position brands once we have defined their strategy and established their market proposition. The visual decode process provides the science that allows us to communicate a brand’s proposition, market positioning and personality based-on the visual cues of its brand identity. The process framework also allows us to provide clients with an informed assessment of the cues currently being provided to the market by their brand identity. The insights provided by this process are often surprising, always informative, and provide a valuable tool for organisations to tweak, adjust or overhaul their brand identity to better serve the objectives of the business.

Grill’d for Success
The Grill’d chain of burger stores in Australia are a case study in how to build a fast growing business by creating a new market segment and launching a highly-tuned brand into the over-crowded fast food market. Here we review how the Grill’d visual language positions the brand within its competitive marketplace?

Company: Grill’d
Market: fast food
Brand Canvases: Identity, Signage, Restaurant environment, Product naming, Packaging, On-line, Experiential marketing, Franchisee marketing

Code of Colour
Grill’d‘s primary colour is red. Red has a strong fast food heritage *(think KFC, Burger King, McDonalds, Nandos to name a few). Whilst not providing differentiation, Grill’d use red to effectively communicate which market they’re in, whilst taking advantage of the eye catching properties of the colour red. The smart use of white reversing out of the red for the Grill’d brand mark provides a cleaner, more contemporary and less mainstream look than the competition who typically add a yellow or orange to their palettes.
* In order to differentiate, a brand doesn’t necessarily need to avoid all the visual code cues of the market, it’s more a matter of consciously selecting which parts of the code to adopt, and which to avoid.
The secondary colour palette of ‘toasted burger bun brown’ and black create a unique feel when applied in-store.

Visual Language Code cues provided by Grill’d's brand identity colour palette:
• Fast Food
• Contemporary
• Warm, Rich, Sumptuous

Visual Language Properties
The Grill’d brand’s visual language is rich with unique properties, none more hard working than it’s playful use of illustration. The illustrations have an irreverent, Mambo-like quality to them, providing the Grill’d brand with a defining urban edge. The Grill’d brand mark is a logotype consisting a typeface only with no symbol. The type style is retro inspired, connecting the brand to the golden era of fast food, when the ingredients were pure and unadulterated. At a secondary level, the Grill’d brand identity uses scrawled hand-writing to communicated on walls, bags, menus and uniforms. These elements combine to give the Grill’d brand a look that is unique within the market. This rich palette of visual language allows Grill’d to free-style the application of its brand identity, providing a sense of authenticity and avoiding the ‘plastic wrapped look’ of the major fast food chains.

Visual Language Code cues provided by the visual language properties of the Grill’d brand:
• Retro Fast Food Heritage
• Urban Cred • Ireverant, cheeky personality
• Youthful attitude
• Authentic burger joint, not cookie cutter franchise

Dialing-up the Personality
The Grill’d brand personality comes through loud and clear through all of it’s communications. The Grill’d way of doing things is clearly unique to its competitive market, and whilst it has enough flexibility to remain fresh, relevant and authentic, it all springs from the same well of Grill’d-ness. We cannot complete an assessment of the Grill’d brand’s visual language without covering-off its brand language. Although not strictly part of the visual language, it provides a rich example of the use of rich brand language as a powerful market differentiator. The Grill’d brand language is personality filled with a rich youthful, urban attitude. Product names include the Kung Fu Fighter, the Hot Mama and the Zen Hen. The Grill’d tag line is ‘Healthy Burgers for a Healthy Mind’ and painted on the walls of it’s restaurants are brand positioning slogans like: ‘No drive through, no clowns and no goddamn Colonel’.

Brand positioning cues provided by the brand language of Grill’d:
• Urban Cred
• Ireverant, cheeky personality
• Youthful attitude
• Healthy burger offer

Step 01. Crack your code
Every industry has an underlying visual code that customers utilize to pin-point the position and proposition of the businesses that are competing in that market. Do you understand the code for the market your business is competing in?

Step 02. Clarify your Go-to-Market Proposition
Once you understand the competitive landscape of your marketplace, establish you most competitive position within that landscape. Determine what positions the leading brands occupy? What positions are available that you can own and dominate? Ask yourself, ‘is there a large enough market of customers out there for me to grow my business?’ (McDonalds and Burger King were competing for the burger market, So Grill’d created the Healthy Urban Burger market). And finally, do you have the skills, experience and knowledge to deliver on your go-to-market proposition?

Step 03. Leverage the code of Visual language
Decide which elements of your market’s code of visual language you will leverage, and which you will differentiate with. As a rule of thumb, a new player looking to quickly establish their brand in a market will leverage most of the visual language code of that market, whilst a dominant player wishing to create a challenger position (similar to the Virgin approach) will leverage as few of the cues of a market’s visual language as possible.

Don’t try this at Home
The process of decoding, development of a go-to-market proposition, and leveraging of your markets visual code can be complex. Our process and skills have been honed over nearly twenty years of working with hundreds of brands in almost every different market conceivable. If you find this process to be confusing, get in touch and we’ll help show you the way.

Dave.

Building your business through brand extension
During tough market conditions, brand or product line extensions might just be the best way for your business to stay healthy, especially if they’re not something you spend much time thinking about. When done right, brand extensions can either be a positive way to build stronger and more profitable relationships with your clients and customers. When done poorly, brand extensions can be expensive experiments that drain cash flow and confuse your market’s understanding of your business’ proposition.

Loyalty and Trust
One of the greatest benefits of building a strong brand is the loyalty and trust that you build with your clients and customers. As purchasers of products and services, people will always prefer to deal with someone they have a trusted relationship with, over forming a new relationship without established trust. Adding a product or service offering to your brand that is relevant to the needs of your customer can not only have a positive effect on revenue, but also further enhance the relationships your customers have with your brand.

Real estate agents extends themselves
Melbourne real estate agent; Marshall White recently developed a value-add service for clients preparing their homes for sale – huge removal and self storage trailers. Parked out front of a house sporting an ‘upcoming auction’ sign, the over-sized blue and gold trailer not only drew attention to the house on behalf of the vendor, but also provided a high traffic billboard – all for the benefit of Marshall White.

We recently sold our house through Marshall White, hiring an off-site self-storage unit in the process. We not only invested a reasonable sum in doing that, but also hours of weekend time carting our much loved (if little needed) household junk over to the storage unit. During the four months we had the unit, we visited many times to retrieve the odd needed item, and then at the end of the process had to cart it all back again. This whole process would have been made immensely more simple by the availability of a giant, secure trailer.

Which leads me to the six golden rules of brand extension.
Golden Rule No.1 – Brand Alignment
The universal mistake common to almost all failed Brand extensions; the new product or service did not relate directly and positively to the business’ brand, it’s proposition, what it stood for in the minds of its market. When aligned with the values and proposition of the brand, the product extension is half way to being successful.

Golden Rule No.2 – Understand your Market
What would your customers and clients most value? What is it you could bring to their lives that would make the greatest positive impact? The answers to this question most usually lie in the behaviors of your clients and customers either up-stream or down-stream from their interaction with you and your business. By observing, discussing and understanding how and why your customers behave in the way they do will provide all the gfround you need for identifying new product extension ideas.

Golden Rule N0.3 – Research
What are your competitors doing? What are your peers in other markets locally and abroad doing? What are the strongest trends impacting the lives of your customers. By spending time on the internet investigating, you may just short-cut the whole process, at the worst you’ll be doing some useful competitor analysis.

Golden Rule No.4 – Brainstorm for Ideas
Get your team together (include everyone with an imagination), play back for them the research you have done, your target market profile and their behaviors. Throw the subject open for discussion and white-board the ideas.The more ideas the better, don’t discount anything at this stage of the process – many good ideas were binned before their potential was identified.

Golden Rule No.5 – R&D
Assess the ideas for brand alignment, cost to execute, and brand promotion and commercial potential. List the best three ideas. If you have a large enough team, develop and execute all three giving one person responsibility for each. If your team is smaller, focus on the best idea only and develop that to execution before considering your other ideas. Consider these brand extensions as products that you can individualise and package-up to own.

Golden Rule No.6 – Market like Crazy
Market your brand extensions to guess who? – your current clients and customers, old clients and customers and potential clients and customers. Add the new product or service to your existing marketing and advertising campaigns.

The undeniable value of great brand extension
Had Marshall White have had this brand extension when we were making our decision about which agent to engage to sell out house, they would have had an even greater point of differentiation. Just as importantly, they would also have pocketed the additional revenue that we invested in another business.

If you’d like to get together with us to discuss ideas for extending the product and service of your brand, give us a shout.

Dave.

HP recently ran a memorable guerilla campaign created for them by Publicis Malaysia for their high quality photo paper. Like all great campaigns – guerilla or otherwise – the creative brilliance is laser honed to the product proposition – HP produce high quality photo paper that in their words gives ‘true to life image quality’. Publicis created a series of stand-up posters that looked like a hole caused by someone walking through a huge sheet of paper. The posters were strategically placed in a variety of locations to create the optical illusion of real-life being printed on an enormous sheet of paper – blurring the line between what is real and what looks real to their eyes.

With every effective guerilla campaign, the cost and effort provide and exponential return through generated public interest and media coverage. Given the punch that guerilla can pack, It is surprising that it is not considered a key component of any integrated brand campaign. But the real value in this campaign is the unique level of engagement that it creates with those who experience it. This heightened engagement rarely occurs without the dimensions of discovery and involvement, dimensions almost impossible to capture through traditional advertising mediums. And it is from this new level of engagement and relationship that the impetus for ‘Status Stories’ is borne.

‘Status Stories’ play a similar role to physical status symbols – they have begun to replace the more visible, traditional symbols of status with stories, passed from consumer to consumer based upon the unique, on-brand, personal experiences they’ve had. ‘Status Stories’ are set to become increasingly important to brands as they seek to remain relevant, valued and loved by consumers who less and less are relying on the cues of mass media for their brand relationships.

As engaging brand experiences go – this one is a ripper.

Dave

We often talk about memorable brand experiences not having to cost the earth. This was well and truly demonstrated recently by the ‘Erotika Sexy Shop’ in Milan who attracted all kinds of interest with a low-budget guerilla marketing idea. Parked in the street outside their store was a car which appeared to be doubling as an orgy on wheels. Pedestrians and passing drivers alike were greeted by the sight of bare buttocks and faces in the throws of orgasmic excitement pressed against the car’s windows. On the side of the car was a sticker with the name of the store and the headline;
‘TOYS YOU CAN’T WAIT TO USE’.

The Sex Machine campaign incorporated a number of elements that combined to create an engaging and memorable brand connection.
Those elements included:

• Suprise – A most unexpected sight
• Humour – Cheeky, risqué, on the edge, call it what you like, but definitely amusing.
• Immediacy – You get it, you turn around and there’s the Sexy Shop.
• Buzz – tell me if you walked past this on the way to work you wouldn’t want to tell everyone about it, and most importantly -
• IT WAS ON BRAND – If you found the ad completely unappealing – I’d suggest you’re not the Sexy Shop’s target market.

The impact, the relevance, the pure talkability of the execution of this idea adds-up to what we’d call a Bold Brand Gesture.

Dave