No matter how carefully you design a brand experience for customers, bad things will happen. Some will simply be beyond your control. Recent heart bypass surgery recipients will waltz into your store, try to use the restroom, and end up glued to the toilet seat in a lonely stall.
No, this isn’t something out of The Onion: Man’s glued ass spurs lawsuit
The only question is, how far would you be willing to go to rectify this?
Consider these tidbits:
Why engage in these expensive endeavors?
Well, if a brand is an expression of everything you do in the world, then why not literally build the brand again in front of the world. These are tangible brand mantras, intensely meaningful. And probably better at saying "this is our brand" than a written positioning statement ever could be.
As such, they’re priceless.
18nov05 update: here’s a nice overview of the 2002 project, written by Matt Davis (superb as always)
Clap. It’s a verb, but it’s also a noun highly correlated with another popular verb which I can’t use within the limits of metacool’s PG-13 language decency protocol. And, as I’ve just learned, Clap is also the brand name of an automotive engine therapy product which supposedly features nanotechnology.
Just what were the Clap marketers thinking? Now, over the years I’ve been known to apply scatological appellations to certain things I’ve run across in the product development funnel, but never have I ventured into the realm of social diseases as a source of naming inspiration. But maybe — and this is a bit of a stretch — maybe there’s a touch of genius at work here. As a brand name, Clap is so bad it’s good, and – who knows? – it just might be the magical message which really connects with the demographic/psychographic market segment of males who really believe engine treatments will work wonders on their clapped-out Chevy smallblocks. Good marketing takes guts.
I’m happy to say that I’m now writing a column for BusinessWeek Online
Here’s my debut: Saturn’s Rust-Proof Brand
I’m writing an extended essay on the subject of "How far? How?". I’m building off the Saturn story from my earlier blog post, but would love to hear about other remarkable ways that companies express their brands.
Please send me an email if you’ve got a good story.
Mahalo!
When I first began this blog my day job was marketing web software, and I was obsessed with figuring out how to make ideas more likely to spread across the web. Though part of the reason for blogging was long tail self-expression, much of it was about building my professional chops. I’m a big fan of knowing by doing.
I’m no longer making my dough as a web marketer, but I’m still fascinated by the mechanisms of thought contagion on the web and elsewhere. I love sifting through web logs to see who is visiting and linking to metacool.
Imagine my delight earlier this week when PubSub indicated that metacool was the 14th strongest website out there (out of 16 million sites tracked!!) in terms of link strength and buzz. Sure, I’m happy to be up in the quantitative ranking, but really turns me on is the prospect of figuring out what makes PubSub tick as a measure of contagion. To that end, I need your help:
Thought contagion is so cool, eh?
The whole "nano-as-the-ultimate-modifier" marketing thing tipped last week with the release of the iPod nano. While I don’t (yet) own one of these iPods, I do own several shirts which supposedly feature a nanotechnology fabric treatment. I believe we’re now going to see "nano" applied to everything from cigars to Civics. Which is fine, except that in few cases will the product actually contain, or be about, nanotechnology.
Such is the case with the iPod nano, and that is why I believe that nano is the new turbo, another technical term appropriated by marketing people and applied in so many ways as to make it meaningless.
Nothing wrong with this, of course, for the truth is all marketers are liars. But it really rankles the engineer in me. And delights the marketer in me.
A few weeks ago I lamented the fact that I couldn’t order a Freitag Murse online. Of course, many of you are lamenting the fact that I want a murse, but for me the lamentation stems only from my continuing state of murselessness. Each morning as I try and squeeze my gadget-stuffed pockets into the seat of my car, I remind myself to find a way to get out to the Freitag store in Davos.
Salvation came in the form of an email from a nice person at Freitag called Manuela, who told me that, while the object of my murse lust won’t be available online until late September, it is possible to purchase one today without jetting off to Davos. How? Well, if you consider the designed-as-a-one-of-a-kind-object premise which forms the essence of the Freitag brand, then the solution is obvious: log into a web cam in the Davos store and have a living Freitag salesperson show you each bag until you find one you like.
Seriously. You must see it to believe it.
It’s kind of cool and brand-enhancing, eh? But I still don’t have my murse. The tyranny of the wallet has yet to cease.
The other day I was asked to name the person I’d most like to have evaluate the design of a website. A few designer names swept through my head, but then I thought, "No, I’d want a marketer who thinks like a designer who thinks like a marketer. Seth Godin."
Over the past five years I’ve had a hand in architecting and building five major websites, and Seth’s thoughts on permission marketing, sneezing, and remarkability played no small part in shaping their design. This one was done on less than a shoestring budget but got nominated for a Webby. This one is built around getting people to a permission asset, and as a bonus gives sneezers a handy little manifesto for cocktail parties, too.
Seth just wrote a new guide to creating websites that work. It’s free, it’s here, it’s Knock Knock
Last week, while strolling through the wilds of Silicon Valley on my way to "work" (I love my job too much to think of it as work; I refer to it instead as "flow central", but that’s fodder for another post), I passed by a Muzak cargo truck. Yes, that Muzak, of tunes and elevators.
The broad tall cargo wall of the truck was emblazoned with the Muzak logo:
And I couldn’t help but think that the Muzak "m" felt a lot like the "m" logo found on the side of a bottle of Method soap:
Yes, to a graphic designer they’re quite different, but to everyone else they’re pretty close. They are, for all intents and purposes, doppelgangers. I find this notion of brand doppelgangers quite intriguing. Is this good? Bad? Irrelevant? I’m not sure yet, but I’d like to think more about it.
Can you think of other examples of brand doppelgangers? Drop me a line or leave a comment.
Mahalo.
