Another post on Facebook complains about Tiger Airways. “Second flight cancelled, no info. Never flying Tiger again”. Within seconds a sense of comradely builds as other ‘friends’ join in to attack. “Missed flight due to check-in shambles. Worst airline ever, don’t fly Tiger”. “Stranded again. Thanks Tiger, first and last time!”.

In today’s social media world, people are empowered to spread the word and it happens instantly. This is, for many brands, the downside to social media.

This isn’t new – especially for Tiger. The low cost airline has more than its fair share of customer complaints, blogs and negative media. The issue is that’s all one way. I couldn’t find any real effort from Tiger to respond to customer concerns.

Any brand should be concerned about negative PR, especially when it happens frequently. However, it can also be an opportunity. Things do go wrong, but it’s how you respond that can be the difference between loosing your customers and actually building ambassadors for your brand.

Having Facebook sites, blogs and tracking comments on Twitter is yet another opportunity to get closer to customers, to show you understand and care. But you have to go beyond the ‘likes’ and build dialogue on the good and the bad. It also helps retain customers by quickly offering something to compensate when the brand disappoints. Smart brands are now also taking the next step with unexpected rewards and random acts of kindness.

Tiger don’t actively do any of this. They don’t even appear to even be listening. The perception is they don’t care and they don’t want to know.

If you follow the conversation online, the brand seems to have high dissatisfaction levels and virtually no loyalty. If so, the brand is in serious trouble. It’s not perceived as a brand of choice (even when considerably cheaper). This forces the brand to constantly attract new, unaware customers – and spend significantly more to do so.

Being budget is never easy but it has to be about more than price. Most budget airlines get this. One example is America’s Southwest Airlines. This is a powerful brand that has built a distinct and quirky personality that connects with its customers and works hard to deliver memorable experiences. Often cited as the world’s most successful and loved discount airline, Southwest boasts 1.4 million likes on their Facebook page, an innovative “nuts about Southwest” blog and no shortage of stories of positive experiences.

So what’s next for Tiger? The brand needs to be completely repositioned. With Virgin now moving more upmarket to compete with Qantas, the time could be right. However, there is a massive caveat on this – the brand needs to be built from the inside first. It doesn’t matter how sexy they look, what they call themselves or any gimmicks they create to get attention if they don’t have a solid foundation for the brand.

Tiger has to get the basics right and then look beyond ‘being cheap’. It needs to uncover its compelling truth, to unite its employees and truly, deeply connect with its audience. The new brand needs to build understanding and commitment amongst stakeholders who represent the brand. It must also actively listen and build dialogue with its customers and then constantly seek opportunities to delight. Ultimately, the aim is to inspire employees to consistently seek ways to deliver memorable and valued brand experiences. The result will be measurable improvements in the customer experience, organisational performance and the brand’s reputation.

Michael Hughes
Director of Brand Strategy

For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter.

Another Poignant Brand Thought from Illustrator Tom Fishburne
The Social conundrum for brands continues to evolve. With every brand and his dog asking me to “like them’ on Facebook these days I’m beginning to wonder whether Facebook is becoming a replacement for active brand engagement. A Facebook friend is no replacement for a true brand fan.

For brand managers and owners the big brand question of the day is; Do you have an online brand strategy? Your online strategy should:

• be driven by your brand strategy;
• consider but not automatically include social media;
• if including social, define the engagement goals for your social media activities, ensure the brand voice is true and consistent, demand constant, engaging activity, and most of all brand relevance.

If you’d like to talk about how to translate your brand to a social butterfly, why not give us a call

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
Brand Creator & Jelly Fanatic
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter

Related articles

• Beatbox Burgers – a Brand with Balls (trulydeeply.com.au)
• Essential Q & A on Facebook Marketing for Small Business (toprankblog.com)
• Social Media Strategies (ontargetmarketinggroup.wordpress.com)

A Lesson in Building Brand Fans
Last week I cam across an interesting account on the web of a wonderful brand gesture from European Airline KLM. KLM have created the ‘KLM Surprise Team’ who monitor social media channels to discover travelers commuting to, from and through Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. They make contact, arrange to meet and then surprise the traveler with a gift. As John Bell on his blog, ‘The Digital Influence Mapping Project‘ says; “This is an example of a large brand ‘reaching out’ in a very intimate and personal way to individual customers, yet at the same time enjoying a resonating effect from their efforts – thanks to the power of social media’.

We came across this first hand account from Tim van Waard, who titled his blog post, “How KLM made me feel like a popstar”:
“I announced through my @klmfan Twitter that I would be on Schiphol airport on Tuesday morning 2nd of November. Suddenly I got a reply from a new KLM account named @KLMsurprise to ask me if we could meet up somewhere on Schiphol that morning. Uuh, sure why not?When I arrived that morning at Schiphol airport to catch my flight to Copenhagen… I tweeted @KLMsurprise that I was ready for a meetup, unaware of the intentions. We set a place and a time through Twitter and when I arrived there I saw two guys with a big piece of paper with my name on it. This was pretty cool. In some way, people standing with a paper with your name on it makes you feel very important (popstar-like). Or maybey that’s just me. These guys handed me a present: a great aviation watch (limited edition) of KLM’s 90th anniversary and hope that I would remember them next time I would fly.
This is of course a genius form of marketing. When I arrived at the conference I have told this story over twenty times to different people and also when I returned I talked about this alot.”

The genius of this brand experience is that KLM engage people who are already active in social media, almost guaranteeing that the gesture will become an immediate piece of positive brand communication, broadcast around the world through the social media. The power of simple brand gestures like this is their ability to create a “ripple effect” for the brand as the person involved becomes an active brand ambassador. The team then tracks the “ripple” effect as the delighted passenger tells theirs friends. It’s a brilliant way to create rich brand stories for people to share – and they willingly share them because the stories are loaded with personal meaning.

If brands are genuinely committed to finding ways to surprise and delight their customers, there’s something here to be learnt from KLM.

// Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brand Gestures that Surprise & Delight

Spotted on the blog of our talented mates at Emotive Brand: emotivebrand.com
Read Tim’s full blog post here: http://tiny.cc/moocc

Related articles

• #KLMsurprise – KLM launches unmoderated hashtag feed. Surprise! (malcolmcoles.co.uk)
• Sarah Perez: KLM is the First Airline on Foursquare, and They’re Giving Away Free Stuff (jaunted.com)
• KLM Airlines: When social media goes awry (gadling.com)
• KLM gets a surprise of their own [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)
• Royal Dutch Airline gives passengers a surprise [TNW Social Media] (thenextweb.com)

The Critical Role of Authenticity in Brand Sponsored Content
Just the other day LA advertising gun Miry Whitehill and I were swapping thoughts on a new content-based social media campaign for Levis.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What a huge project, with a nice, soft brand ownership from Levis, but something just wasn’t quite striking the right note for me.
The Brand Design/Brand Content/Social Interaction space is a really interesting place right now. Vanguard brands looking for ways to integrate their messaging into content that is sought and valued are all over this space at the moment. What I found interesting with the Levis ad was as I was watching the video there was something that wasn’t quite ringing with authenticity – something that felt slightly produced. When I watched the ‘Making-of’ clip it became obvious that the focus of the ad was on the production technique to illustrate a sense of ‘walking across America’ rather than the act itself (the guy didn’t actually walk across America).

Click here to view the embedded video.

And it struck me right there that the thing about brand sponsored content – the main game about for all content, but especially that sponsored by brand – is authenticity.

As a result of so many people around the world doing seriously cool things and putting them into social circulation, the bar has been raised . Our expectation level of ‘cool’ is at a high-point, and viral that doesn’t live-up to that falls kind-of flat – even more-so if it’s brand sponsored. We don’t mind watching something half lame from a guy in Uzbekistan, but tell us that it’s sponsored by a big brand and we become far more critical. Here’s a genuine example of authentic cool:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even though the guy fails on his challenge he succeeds with bucket-loads of authenticity. What a missed opportunity for a brand like Gillette to jump in for sponsorship and positive brand association.

We just published a blog about a creative collaboration between a shoe brand, shoe designer, shoe retailer and a bunch of influential style and fashion bloggers. This is an example of a brand leveraging both the authenticity of the experience (they didn’t just ship the designers and bloggers to a location for the video and have them put their names to a series of shoes that had already been created) to create some rich brand storytelling.

Ronnie Fieg Presents The Nexus Project Trailer

So the message for brands looking to engage, create or connect with on-line content with brand experiences through social media:
01. Build your social cyclone from a starting point of authenticity – keep it real (Authenticity).
02. Ensure there’s a strong connect of relevance between your brand proposition and the story-telling of the content (Relevance).
03. Stand back and let the content run the show – don’t turn it into an on-line ad campaign (Association).

If you’re keen to create some high value content for your brand, get in touch – we’d love to help you get it right.

Dave Ansett, Brandamentalist
For monthly updates of our thinking, click here to receive our free Brand Newsletter
Designer of Brands with Authenticity

Illustration by the talented Martina Flor

Just Because your Brand’s On-line -
Doesn’t Mean it’s On-target
With 130 billion spam mails hitting in-boxes every day, it’s no wonder consumer outcry about mis-targeted marketing has grown from a murmur to a roar. Across the globe those screams attract the regulator and put businesses at risk as well as damaging the reputation of the brands who are getting it so wrong. This used to be a problem of the snail mail industry but it is exponentially worse since the advent of eDirect and email marketing. Each day my savior the spam filter weeds out a pile of these brand communications that are sent to me blindly in the name of eDirect. Here are just three from my in-box yesterday.

For those of you who’ve never met me, let me assure you, I do not own a large wardrobe of over-sized ladies clothes with dubious fashion credential, I harbor absolutely no desire to become a nurse – much to the relief of our public and private health systems, and whilst I may have had close relationships with a couple of vending machines over the years I have never had any interest in owning one. When it comes to targeted marketing, much of what they call eDirect marketing appears to be as indirect and indiscriminate as is humanly possible.

As a direct marketer with 20 years plus experience in the industry I spend a lot of time talking with our clients about where direct is going, and these reminders of poor targeting that constantly clutter my email in-box reminded me of a test that was put to me many years back to demonstrate that direct mail was no more inaccurate at targeting relevant customers than the newspaper.

Here’s How the Test works
Next time you buy the multi-sectioned monster that is the weekend edition of your newspaper.

(1)   Read it from cover to cover

(2)   As you progress tear out all the ads (or sections of ads)

(3)   Put those that are of interest to you as a consumer in one pile and those that aren’t in another

I’d be prepared to bet my Sunday lunch (and my newly acquired vending machine) that  you will have a substantial pile of paper in the ‘not of interest’ pile and a much smaller number of ads that appeal to you as a consumer. Which begs the million-dollar question; If this is the case why do we feel so differently about the newspaper than we do about direct marketing? The difference is of course that you choose to buy your newspaper, based on its content and broad appeal to you. If the newspaper has got it right it represents the views and interests of a broad group of which you are part. The ads are aimed at that group (or groups within that group), even if they don’t appeal to all of the people all of the time.

So what can DM learn from this?
Rather than obsessing with only online mail boxes (much like they used to our letterboxes) the next generation of smart direct marketers will embrace a broader range of opportunities the web offers to engage with customers. Social networks, blogs and other thriving online communities survive and thrive because communities of people actively interact with them. These on-line channels are rich in data and customers choose to be involved. Look at the ads and brands competing for my attention on Facebook and Foursquare.

The chances of me being interested in a smart phone, a new car or a digital SLR are high. Call it good guess-work, call it smarter targeting, but I currently own all three – Dumb eDirect 0 / Smart eDirect 3.

Whether you reach out to customers through existing on-line communities or create you own interactive communities through which to build your customer relationships,  you need to be smart about it. To avoid looking like a wedding-crasher with your eDirect you need to build a foundation of trust and relevance.

• Make sure you have a right to be a member of the community you wish to communicate with. If you build your own on-line community through a blog or other social channels, your relevance comes ‘baked-in’ as you automatically earn the right to be the tribal leader. If you are communicating to an existing on-line community you should ideally be a positive participant first and an advertiser only after you have been accepted. The third approach is to build channel partnerships with the blog owners in order to create offers that add to the community experience, especially if those offers uniquely reward the community for their membership.

• Your brand must align with the values and needs of the group you wish to engage with. This cuts to the heart of the way on-line communities differ to consumers of other media channels. We feel we have no right to a say in who advertises in newspapers, magazines or on TV as long as they stay within the social codes of acceptable practice. On-line communities are something else. We take our on-line communities very seriously, and all feel a strong sense of ownership and kin-ship, which means we respond far more negatively to an ‘outsider’ who trespasses without good reason.

• Your brand voice must resonate with the community. Most brands give scant regard to their tone of voice. Other than advertising headlines (if they advertise at all) few brands understand the extent to which the way they speak positions them with their audiences. Brochure copy, web site copy, DM copy is all written with just the communication objective in-mind, not the voice of the brand. As a result, most brands, even those who’ve engaged a professional copywriter, end-up speaking with an almost identical voice devoid of any brand personality. We wrote about the power and importance for brands to speak with personality a few months back. When we communicate on-line, brand voice plays a lead role – especially in establishing our credentials of relevance. In on-line communities where the members of those communities speak in their own, natural voices – neutral brand speak, or worse, fake brand speak jar with the audience. Brands need to understand and define their voice and speak with that voice always to establish an authentic sense of who they are.

The growth of the web has provided DM with the perfect opportunity to engage with customers in a far more targeted way than ever before. The easiness and economy of this new channel to market means many brands are abusing the opportunity through laziness and ignorance. Creating eDirect campaigns that leverage the advantages of on-line is no simple task, if anything, the multitude of variables make the task of direct more difficult than ever. As an agency we’re committed to providing our clients with best advice around how to align their brand and core message with their customers whether in the off-line world, or the on-line world.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help your brand get direct with your customers just give us a call.

Malcolm Harvey
Client Experience Director and DM go-to guy

All Logos Files are Not Born Equal
After recently explaining yet again why the jpeg of a logo, taken from the website, can’t be used for a brochure, I thought it might be useful, valuable and insightful for someone to write this down. So here we are. Trying not to get all technical, I’m going to explain as clearly as I can, the difference between the different kinds of files. Hopefully this will save both clients and designers lots of time and heartache.

Different File Types
Most popular image files break down into two basic groups Bitmap or Vector.

A Bitmap image is resolution dependent. Which means it can only be used at the size it was created for or smaller.  There are many types of bitmap files, JPEG, TIFF, PSD, PNG are all bitmap file types. Any digital photograph, for example, will be a bitmap image. They’ll use different techniques to store the information but are always defined by the resolution, that is a pixel by pixel count. Think of them as mosaics with each pixel being a tile. You make the mosaic bigger, you’re going to see the cracks.

A Vector image is resolution independent. Which means it can scale up to any size. There are many type of vector files, AI, EPS*, WMF, SVG are all vector files. The key thing is, no matter the format, they all use points in a XY space to mathematically describe the shapes in the image. No matter how much you scale it up, because it uses maths to describe the shape it’ll still be  sharp. (*Just to confuse things an EPS or PDF file can contain a bitmap image)

To demonstrate the difference we’ll use the diagram above and scale it up a couple of hundred percent. If we use a bitmap file when scaled, we’ll start to see jaggy blocks, these are the pixels that make up the image (left blow). But if we use a vector format, no matter how large we go it uses the maths to create sharp edges and smooth curves (right below). There are also differences in the colour capabilities, but that’s another days discussion.

Different File Requirements
When using an image in print it needs to be at least 4 times the size (resolution) that it needs to be on screen. So if a brand mark is to be an inch high on screen it can be 72 pixels high, but for it to look sharp when printed it must be at least 300 pixels high – that’s because the printing process requires more detail in the file than a computer screen does.

This is where you get into real trouble when you try to use files created for websites (JPEGs) in print jobs. With vector files, it doesn’t matter, as they can scale to any size. EPS files, traditionally, are the most common vector file format that a logo would be created in, hence it is the one a designer will ask for when they would gladly accept any vector format.

We now supply logo artwork to our clients as vector PDF files and bitmap PNG files. This gives our clients to best of all possible worlds. Vector PDFs are basically modern EPS files they use the same vector technology and can be viewed freely with Acrobat. The PNG files are similar to JPEGs except they can have transparency and are great for Word or Powerpoint.

So there it is, the long and the short of why all files are not born equal. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to know more about our logo design services or any of our ideas that make it easier for you to use your brand mark simply and effectively why not get in contact? We’re always happy to help.

Derek Carroll
Director of Design

Word on the Web
As some of the world’s largest financial institutions fight their way back to the top of the heap, it’s not all sunshine and kittens when it comes to their battered brand equity. We’ve illustrated a cross section of current brand sentiment for one of the biggest names in the business; Goldman Sachs. As always, it’s worth reading between the lines (literally) – the smaller words tell the story of current sentiment – and the further you look, the more intriguing the narrative.

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

Word on the Web
Social Brand Snapshot provides a visualized cross section of current blogs, tweets and social mentions of Starbucks, providing an instant view of current brand sentiment.

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

Like all new frontiers, social media is a lawless place where anything goes, especially when it comes to brand. Everyone seems to have moved into these boom towns with a population of more than 12 million people projected for Twitterville alone this year. It’s a on-line, communications gold-rush, a world of wonderful opportunity – but exactly what is social media? Is it a tool for social interaction or business commerce? At the moment it’s both.

So with a poorly defined and misunderstood purpose, how should businesses of one to a thousand employees build their brand image on-line? Like all brand building exercises, your social media presence should be consciously directed by a brand strategy; it should be strategic first and tactical second. Currently the vast majority of business presence in social media is driven by what we call ‘Scategy’, a tactically obsessive approach of trying to do a little bit of everything and trying to mean a little bit of something to everyone. The result – your brand ends-up meaning nothing to anyone.

Here are what I believe to be the crucial five steps to building your brand image on social media.

Step 01. Why am I here?
The first and most critical step is to ensure you have clarity around why you are utlising social media in the first place. Is your Twittering, Facebook-ing and LinkedIn-ing a social pursuit, or does it have a commercial focus? Presently there are many Tweeters who seem to have a foot in each camp. If your social media activities have a commercial role, then you need to be clear on the role your activities play in building your brand. Tip: ‘Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter, so I didn’t want to miss the action’ isn’t a strategy.

Step 02. How’s my hair?
Your brand strategy should drive the thinking for the rest of the steps, including the biggest of all social media questions; photo or no photo? The answer to the photo question is dictated by the nature of the presence. As a brand presence it is expected that you present a well designed brand mark and brand image.  As an individual representing a brand it is acceptable to use either a photograph or a brand image, but your photograph must be a reflection of the brand. Tip: I’m rather partial to kayaking down the amazon with kids-in-tow myself, but it is not how I wish to communicate my brand as a professional business person.

Step 03. What’s the word?

Like all things in life, the fewer there are, the more precious they become. The same goes for those 140-odd characters we use to communicate in Twitter or those short paragraph updates we use in LinkedIn or Facebook. What you write is a direct reflection of your brand’s expertise, professionalism and personality. Tip: ‘Good night peeps, I’m off to sleep’ is not considered a professional conversation unless you’re in the bedding business.
And when it comes to words, none are more important than the handful you choose to position yourself with in your description. Think long and hard about these, they should reflect your business, your role within that business and your brand personality.

Step 04. Do I look good in this?
Your social media backgrounds are one of the strongest opportunities you have to present your brand image to market. A well-designed background provides a glow of professionalism and brand persona to the information presented and communicated from that site.
Tip: The available background templates usually provide a clean and professional canvas for you to build your brand presence upon. They may not be original, but the templates provided are often a better result than many of the personalised backgrounds haunting the net.

Step 05. Do you love me?
The thing about social media is that by its very nature it is social. And like any social interaction, you need to be either interesting, informative, an expert, offering me something, or at the very least amusing if you want people to stick around.
You need to be clear on the role that social media will play for your business and it’s market. Are you:
• Conducting customer conversations like Starbucks
• An expert advisor like Brandscientist Peter Singline
• Telling me what you are selling or where you are selling it like Kogibbq
• Building a brand personality like urbansmiler

Whatever you do for business and wherever you do it, do it with conscious consideration and your leave the ‘scategy’ for those without strategy.

Dave.