“My 6 year old son could have done that”
Anyone in marketing dealing with branding has heard that one before. About a logo design. About a tag line.
Most of the time, it is very hard to argue the point. When you look at the final product of a logo design, or when you read a final tag line, it is probably really simple. Doesn't look hard to do. But that's measuring the wrong thing. It's not about how hard it is to create something, but how strong it communicates the desired brand positioning.
For example. Kraft thought it was a fun idea to engage their customers in naming a new product. They put little jars with Vegemite flavoured cheese spread and decided to crowd source the name for the new product. "Name Me" the little jars of spread shouted off the shelves. So that was the brief. "Name Me".
The result was that thousands sent in their ideas, and the good people at Kraft, (custodians of one of the most iconic brands in Australia, Vegemite) chose one that sounded like something their target audience might like. iSpread 2.0. I won't go into all the reasons why this was a terrible choice, there is plenty of commentary from all sorts of media (social and otherwise) on that. In fact, the Wall Street Journal even reported the fact that the company has decided to pull the name and think of a new one.
What I am more interested in is how they got there. The reason you don't let your 6 year old son design a logo (or a product name) is that he is not likely to be clear on what you're trying to communicate, how you are trying to position the product. That is the difficulty in design and good branding; how to communicate an idea in the simplest, most powerful way.
The sort of thoughts you expect to go through someones mind naming a product (especially for an iconic brand) are:
Without that, how could either the people creating the name, or the people choosing the name know if it was good, bad or indifferent?
It is the difference between advertising thinking and brand positioning, and I think Al Ries should have a field day with this one, in one of his contributions on Branding Strategy Insider.
Get your customers involved is fun, but don't think that you can take a short cut to the hard work of positioning a product.
Have you killed anyone lately?
- If you ever have to create presentations, you need to see this.
- If you ever wondered how to fuel word of mouth, take a leaf out of Alexei Kapterev's book
How good are agency websites?
There are two types of businesses that almost exclusively use "Flash" websites: advertising agencies and architects.
Why? Does it work? I.e. do their audience want this? Are these the most effective websites for agencies and architects?
I asked a mate in a digital agency about advertising agency websites and he came back with this:
"Normally it's to show off the 'creative' nature of the business. Also, a lot of the agencies around are still tv centric so the moving image is a big part of what they know and understand. I think agencies just want to appear "cutting edge" in the internet world and they think that Flash says that about them..."
When I asked him why they create Flash sites for themselves and non-flash sites for their clients his answer was:
"For the client sites, it all comes down to demographic of their audience (for example, some brands are purely 12-20 year olds who want the flashy - everything moving - type sites. Where as (other brands) are mainly 25+ women so they don't care too much about flash."
Back to my point; is this what works for agency clients? I don't have the answer, but I'd love to hear your views.
UPDATE: David Meerman Scott posts this answer to the question. You won't be left wondering what he thinks:)
Have a peek into the future
Innovation is exciting. If you feel like having a look at how we could be interacting with computers in the future, have a look. Thanks to Will from Marketing Results for the tip.
http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han&flashEnabled=1
Knowing what you don’t want is important
As we are working on re-developing our website and brand identity, I have come across a couple of sites that do a great job in highlighting what we have to avoid at all cost.
From my experience in planning anything, it's equally important to look at what you don't like as it is to look at what you do like.
The first one is webpagesthatsuck.com which is a bit of a classic in webdesign land I think, but I had never had a close look.
The second one is sending-up well, us I guess. I mean marketing consultants, marketing experts, whatever you wish to call us...the name says it all: Huhcorp
Please let me know if we ever start to sound like this...
The cobblers children have no shoes
Cliche, but true. Advising people on marketing for a living, we've had a good look at what we actually do for our own business and decided that our children desperately need new shoes...
Our brand image doesn't represent who we are very well, our communications are too dull and wordy and our promotional activities are inconsistent and spasmodic.
The thing is that business is actually going well, so why would we bother? Simple; we will never grow significantly if we don't, and when business is good, it is much easier to do new things than when you are under pressure.
So we've reviewed our business plan, developed our marketing plan, commissioned a re-branding excercise and are in working hard on developing a new website as part of the marketing plan for 2006. Now all we have to do is what we tell our customers to do; follow through.
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