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Trends in Branding 2010

Is Procurement Hurting your Brand?

Category Brand Economics, Brand Metrics, Business Branding
  • Jul 2, 2010
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In tough economic times, companies turn to their procurement departments for more fiscally-disciplined policies that help rein-in unchecked spending and wasted resources. Increasingly, companies are subjecting strategic and creative services to standardized procurement processes across the board without differentiation. And while this is great for their bottom lines, it is restricting their ability to come up with the innovative ideas necessary for brand leadership.

So, is procurement helping or hurting your brand?

There’s a fundamental flaw in the logic of applying commodity pricing tactics to creative ideas. The problem with procurement is that it assumes all ideas are equal – but all creative ideas are not created equal and great creative is extremely valuable. Having your accounting department drive creative decisions is about as logical as having your creative team manage company financials, but that’s the absurd reality of modern procurement.

On its website, a major oil company describes a job in Contracts & Purchasing as “purchasing and supplying everything from pencils to pipelines.” Creative and strategic ideas can’t be valued in the same way as office supplies or raw materials, and agency relationships shouldn’t be subjected to the same process as manufacturing goods.

Client-side marketers and agencies alike are seeing the real-world impact of procurement, and it’s not pretty: more paperwork and process, less incentive and focus, and end-results that ultimately satisfy only the accountants. Procurement is forcing marketers and agencies to find ways to work around an inefficient, inflexible system, instead of one designed for the realities of client-agency relationships.

Sure, any agency worth its salt will adapt to the budget constraints that come with tightened economic belts, while striving to deliver quality work. But more often than not, working with procurement is a horrible experience – grueling pitches, unnecessary project delays, fluctuating budgets, requests for mountains of information that nobody reads. As it is now, procurement is shifting the focus from great ideas to short-term, lowest-cost creative solutions, and hindering long-term client-agency relationships—all at the expense of your brand.

It’s clear that most blanket procurement processes are not yet nuanced enough for managing agency relationships. Companies who shape procurement processes to create an environment that fosters agency relationships yield vastly superior creative results. Agencies and client marketers must be willing to fight for great creative and finance departments must find ways to pay for it without all the red tape.

At the end of the day, agencies, marketers, and accountants all want business success—and great branding has the capacity to impact great business results. Of course companies should look for better ways to get more for their money, but if procurement is hurting your brand, it’s your responsibility to ensure that it’s not at the expense of brand value, brand agility, and ultimately, business success.

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Short & Simple

Category Brand Culture, Brand New, My Brand
  • Jun 25, 2010
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Just ask Shorty—nicknames are rarely chosen by the ones who wear them, they’re assigned. And for major brands, those nicknames can wield immense power: they can permanently shift a brand name or image, and have the ability to solidify a connection with people’s daily lives—but only if the brand accepts that the nickname exists and has the guts to adopt it.
KFC, BevMo, FedEx, and Chevy all bear the mark of affection and cultural currency – a place to be treasured by a brand.  After all, no rational argument can drive sales like emotional affinity and likeability can.

But not every brand is inclined to accept their public-generated monikers so easily—after all, brands work hard to get anyone to remember their name in the first place! A couple weeks ago GM issued a curious memo to their employees and affiliates —one that they quickly revised—directing them to drop the familiar “Chevy” nickname in communications and instead use the more formal “Chevrolet” consistently. This precipitated an immediate and vehement uproar in forums and social networks. It took only a quick check against ongoing banner ads, TV spots, and even GM press releases referring to “Chevy,” to see that GM was well aware of their gaffe, and was tip-toeing back from the brink of catastrophe. In a smart move after fumbling what should have been a minor announcement about tightened international brand guidelines, GM took the opportunity to demonstrate that a dogged adherence to consistency in brand communications was eroding their ability to maintain authentic connections with consumers.

Of course, it’s not easy to strike the right balance, and snapping to a formal name consistently across communications is superficial if you’re not staying consistent with the cultural value and affection ascribed to your brand by consumers. Sure, it’s important for new brands to speak with a consistent voice, and to be disciplined about how they bring their brand to life through products, service delivery, design, and communication. But mature brands have an opportunity to entrench themselves more deeply with their fans. They can leverage an open dialogue with the public (social networks make this easier than ever) to gauge opinions and look for trends—nicknames not excluded—that can help build and maintain emotional connections.

And no, not every brand needs to build a deep relationship with its consumers —but brands must recognize that they serve as cultural short-hand for personal identity, beliefs, style, and other manifestations of “me.”  In our industrialized information-laden society, the brands we choose, use, and ignore are part of the tools we use to define who we are. So when you change a well-loved brand or identity in the wrong way (think new Coke), you’re asking customers to change a little part of their own identity as well.  Good luck with that!

The best way to win hearts and minds – and isn’t that what it’s all about? – is to embrace existing perceptions and make them work for you. Besides, my Dad drove a Chevy.

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Can you trust me?

Category Brand Management, Trends 2010
  • May 28, 2010
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It’s a tough time to be a trusted brand. Information (truth and hearsay alike) flows like water, opinions spread like wildfire—one day your brand is synonymous with trust for millions of people, the next it’s being dragged through the digital mud by a few over a product recall or privacy violation. And it’s all happening faster with bigger implications and greater transparency than ever before.

Brands no longer get to rest on their laurels. We’ve stopped basing our trust of successful brands on the mere knowledge that they are financially successful—or because they run ads that tell us we should trust them. In fact, it seems the very definition of “brand trust” is morphing in front of our eyes. More often, an increasingly-skeptical public is flocking to the web for real-time information and social network commentary posted by “officials” or by anyone else with an Internet connection and an axe to grind.

So, this begs the question: how should we begin to redefine and measure brand trust? Essentially, trust is still a currency that brands earn, lose… and even occasionally regain. Trust used to be measured one voice at a time in the aisles of supermarkets and in the offices of doctors. But how can its value accurately be measured now that millions of voices are screaming their opinions about everything, all the time? How can you differentiate public opinion when violations as minor as misspellings are condemned in public forums with equal fervor as high-level corporate gaffes?

Curiously, the answer appears to be different for different types of companies. People are holding older, established companies and newer born-digital companies to widely-varying standards and expectations. To illustrate, here’s a hypothetical scenario: FedEx announces that, starting this week, they will begin opening all of your packages to see what you’re shipping, and then storing that information and analyzing it for trends—they promise they won’t harm any contents and will re-seal the packages perfectly. Then they announce that they will be improving your life by selling their findings to advertisers who can then deliver more relevant, better-targeted product ads directly to your doorstep without you having to make any additional effort. Do you continue to trust this company and recommend them to others? No?

Yet, here we have Google – whose motto is “Don’t be evil” – openly admitting to having developed fancy algorithms that anonymously read every piece of your Gmail and serve you targeted ads based on their content. Like established banks and credit card companies have always done, they make no secret that they’re collecting information, but this goes well beyond purchasing habits to include everything you search, read, visit, send, view, and produce through their sites – in the “privacy” of your own home. And yet the level of public trust in Google seems to remain very high.

Why is it that born-digital brands seem to benefit from a double-standard on trust versus established – or even transitioning-to-digital – businesses? Perhaps it’s because we’re sending our hard-earned money to the established ones. When we’re shelling out for goods and  services, we expect a higher level of protection in return. Google, Twitter, Facebook? We never have to send them a dime, but instead freely send them our most personal information – our thoughts, our photos, videos, likes and dislikes, purchasing habits – and only peripherally consider what they do with that information because their services are just so great. But, when they sell our personal information or share our intimate details with anyone who comes asking… what did we expect we would get for free?

Perhaps it’s time to ask whether trust even has any effect on purchase and usage patterns any more. Last week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg declared open war on privacy. The result: an uproar, to be sure, including open letters from senators decrying the policy, and a request to have the site investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. But Facebook’s active user count (currently over 400 million) doesn’t seem to be taking any dives. And before that incident, Google was caught sniffing and storing personal data from Wi-Fi networks through its Street View vehicles. Again, no sign of rats fleeing the good ship Google—perhaps with the exception of the German government.

It must be tempting for companies making their first forays into social networking to simply plug Facebook Connect in to their sites and build a large public audience, but when they do, they may have just inherited all the negative associations people have with Facebook’s privacy policies. It’s a volatile world and your brand – whether established or just becoming established – may find itself at the mercy of a fanatical minority empowered to be 24/7 critics, and in an atmosphere where trust can be as fleeting as a single Tweet.

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Branding the Dead

Category My Brand
  • Apr 14, 2010
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“In mortalitas, lucrum” (In death, profit)

The term “personal branding” didn’t exist when Malcolm McLaren began searing the Sex Pistols’ image into the world’s psyche, creating an inexorable link between their visage and the punk rock movement – and more generally a link between fashion and music. That indelible association has continued unabated, influencing modern art, music and fashion – spawning new industries and creating massive profit based on the images McLaren helped invent. But what does the future hold for McLaren himself? With a family still deeply ingrained in the fashion industry, now left with not only his legacy but his iconic image and the revolution and counterculture it represents – will they choose to brand and sell it the same way he sold punk?

Let’s face it, the dead are big business. Sony recently signed the biggest record deal in history to license the Michael Jackson brand for $250 million and is planning music, movies and video games based on the life of the recently departed King of Pop. Other dead celebrities and performers often top the list of highest grossing artists year over year. Sometimes it’s the usual suspects – musicians like Elvis, John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, writers like J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Schultz and Dr. Seuss, or just established individual entities like Einstein, Monroe, Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent. The estates of these artists have been nurturing the power of their brands and reaping huge profits from their legacies. In fact, Forbes publishes an annual list of top-earning dead celebrities reporting the ongoing value of these stars. The top 13 grossed $886 million last year alone. And new names are being added to the list – daily! Death is far from the end of life for these household names and there will always be others seeking to cash in on their fame and fortune, even postmortem. The dead are literally rising again. The Bruce Lee estate is aggressively looking to expand the reach of the world’s most famous Kung Fu master. Amelia Earhart is flying again, and classic figures of literature like Jane Austen and Lord Byron and being re-packaged and rejuvenated in movie deals and licensed products.

But whether it’s Malcolm McLaren, recently-departed fashion icon Alexander McQueen, or reggae legend Bob Marley, working with the dead isn’t always easy. Managing their postmortem careers means navigating complex licensing rights and an army of lawyers ready to protect those valuable assets – for the sake of their memory, of course. There’s enormous incentive to nurture and protect the brands of the dead in order to maintain their impact over time. Take Jim Fitzpatrick’s iconic Che Guevara from 1967– it seems to have an unlimited lifespan, on clothing and in politics, enduring as a permanent metaphor for the underdog. Marilyn Monroe’s image has been cemented in its representation of the glamor and excess of Hollywood. But with larger-than-life living celebrities like Madonna and Lady GaGa co-opting and vastly extending that image, it’s hard to say whether the image of Monroe or old Hollywood will stand the test of time.

For revolutionaries of the past, their profit in life may have been nowhere near as lucrative as in death. But these days, the brands of the dead are facing stiff competition from the brands of the living. With our ‘always on’ lifestyles, it has also become easier to achieve “celebrity” status (think overnight sensations like Perez Hilton, Adam Lambert or Kim Kardashian). They’re all looking to sell something – be it revolutionary ideology, an aspirational version of “real life”, or the latest diet pills. With the ever-expanding competition for mind share and longevity, the dead and their managers will need to work overtime to ensure that their brands can stay relevant and competitive in the world of the living. In the words of Andy Warhol – everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, some just want to license the rights to it for a little longer.

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The Return of the Logo

Category Brand Creation
  • Mar 16, 2010
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Logos have always sat at the tip of the proverbial brand iceberg. In the best cases, they are a simple, visual representation of a brand and all that it promises. Be it a wordmark, symbol, pictogram or signature – logos have the power to crystallize an abstract idea, product experience, or ad campaign into a single, distinctive, iconic statement. And although they may occasionally need to be nurtured or tweaked to keep them relevant and engaging, they can potentially endure the test of time.

Despite their significance, logos have been taking a back seat in recent years. Although brand new logos and updated logos still generate some buzz, online technology has expanded the ‘brand experience’ thus diminishing the role of the logo. On the Internet, brands have much more real estate, plus the power of interactive technology to communicate their brand personality – through editorial, secondary graphics, imagery, multimedia, animation, blogs and reviews – not to mention the actual user experience. The brand impression is composed of multiple elements working together, reducing the onus on the logo to communicate the whole story.

But, alas technology continues to evolve and people no longer have the patience to sit and absorb content-heavy websites. Nor do they have to. With the rise of smart phones, brands are now expected to deliver their content in sound byte form. In much less space, and in fewer seconds (patience runs even thinner when it comes to mobile experiences) brands are taxed to connect at the pace of life today. We’re all reading less, and scanning more. We look without really seeing, as we try to digest the thousands of images, ads and messages that assault us everyday. Suddenly, the logo is back on top as the single element with the most potential to cut through the clutter filling our brains.

Evolving with the times, however, even the logo is getting ‘abbreviated’. As the real estate for branding shrinks, logos are again forced to work harder. Compressed into sixteen pixels for a favicon, forced into a tile to compete in a sea of apps or serving as a live link button at the bottom of a page, the logo is being pushed to the limits, trying to deliver more meaning in a smaller footprint. Ironically the cry by most Brand Managers has always been “make the logo bigger” – now it’s all about making it more compact.

And it’s not just web and mobile technology that is driving these changes. Our consumption of television has changed – time-shifting and the ability to evade commercials altogether has become a reality with DVR, Video On Demand, streaming content on hulu.com, and downloadable content on itunes.com. With commercials losing their foothold, advertisers are working harder to embed their logos into programming, movies and games, aiming for a more integrated, less avoidable impression.

And another stress test? As the world becomes more connected and consumers interact with more and more international brands, the demand and reward for a logo that can be instantly recognized and understood becomes even greater. They say a picture paints a thousand words, and when that picture can overcome language, linguistic and cultural barriers to tell a rich story, its value becomes immeasurable.

Perhaps one of the best examples appreciating the impact of the logo and celebrating its visibility is the recent short film Logorama. Made by H5, and winning a freshly minted Oscar for the best short animated movie, Logorama weaves a story through a world of logos, mascots and international icons. The film is available for purchase through iTunes at $1.99.

Source: logorama-themovie.com

So while many bemoan the infiltration of branding and advertising into every aspect of our lives, it’s simply unavoidable. Logos are an indelible part of our culture. They are shorthand for our preferences and symbols that often define who we are. They are woven into the visual fabric that surrounds us and connects us. So as any designer will corroborate, we celebrate the return of the logo – at any size!

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