Firebrand

We hear at least once an episode from Jason Calacanis on This Week In Startups podcast: “ideas are easy, execution is hard.” The 99% website and conference’s name was based on the Thomas Edison quote: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

It is true. An idea is just firing neurons and words if it is not executed. If you are truly committed to your idea, then you have a responsibility to bring that idea into the world. You need to take the action steps necessary to get from an idea to a change in the world. Branding is about what your customers can experience, and they can experience something if it is just an idea in your head.

Seth Godin in his book Linchpin talks about trashing early in a project. By thrashing, he means identifying and working through problems; the behavior that our nature is to do at the end of the implementation process. We want to  identify problems at the end of the process because we don’t want to hit the execute button. Pressing the execute button opens us up to risk. But risk mitigation isn’t our job when we are in the implementation stage of a project. That should have happened long ago.

There are a lot of industries where you can be falsely lead to believe that you are planner. The design industry and the marketing / branding industry is definitely one of those. Even if you are in a strategic role, you may believe that your job is to plan. Your job is to deliver a plan. If you think about planning as an activity rather than a means to an end, you tend to talk and talk and brainstorm to know end. Think about the deliverable.

I call it the execute button because it is really a button for many people. For most people it is the “Send” button on an email with that proposal you have been working for a month on. It may be the export button for the final draft of the new campaign presentation. It could be the button that put a radical new build of your software product. It could be the “Publish” button on your blog, as it is for me right now. The things that have that execute button are the things that grow your brand.

There are forces inside you that keep you from pressing that button. They are inside all of us. But you have to perservere and move forward. Hit the execute button.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

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Nowadays, small companies are beginning to compete with larger companies. With social media, everyone has a voice. For the last few decades, the brand with the loudest voice won. Now, the voice that is most repeated is the one that wins.

In industrial design we talked alot about the democratization of design in the last decade. Good product design was a luxury of the rich. In the past, you only had an easy to use, beautiful CD player if you could pay for a Bang and Olufsen. Now you can go to Best Buy and get a Sony Plasystation 3 that can be the jewel of your living room, and be the best CD player you could ever want and do hundreds of other tasks. You can go to Target (if you are in the USA, soon to be in Canada) and get a Michael Graves tea pot that used to be a working sculpture only people in a higher tax bracket could afford. Target has been a great leader in the democratization of design, as well as IKEA. Unfortunately the quality has not followed the beauty and ease of use in these consumer products.

A similar movement is happening with marketing. There are avenues in which small companies can get their brand’s message out that have never been there before. Facebook gives any business the ability to do hyper targeted advertising based on demographics, psychographics and declared interest. That level of targeting was only available to very wealthy companies in verticals with high customer lifetime value. Google has made billions through giving people the ability to target their ads to people with declared interest at the moment of interest.

But even those services can eventually be crowed out by brands with the biggest pockets. What can’t be crowded out is social media’s natural effect of amplifying word of mouth. Yelp and other social review sites are the greatest example of this. I personally have found small business restaurants with great food and service using Yelp. A particular barbecue restaurant in Etobicoke comes to mind. This was one that was a 4 star recommendation on Yelp about 10 kms from where we were. The food was delicious and they over serviced us. We talked to the couple that owned and ran the place and they said that most of the traffic that they were getting was from Yelp and other restaurant review sites. Here is a mom and pop shop competing with deep pocketed chain restaurants and getting mind share and customers. Kelsey’s could throw 10s of millions of dollars into an advertising campaign that wont change that their food and service is spotty. And a mom and pop BBQ shop can take way business by concentrating on product and service.

This is what marketing was all about: connecting great products with people in need. We got sidetracked with mass media giving the rich a large megaphone. But now we have given millions a voice, and together they have a voice loud enough to drown out that mass media megaphone. But this means that if your product is sub par, your not going to get any traction.

The cream will rise to the top, just as well intended all along.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

I was recently excited that a new restaurant was opening near my house called Wild Wing. What excited me about it (other than the wings of course) was that the logo was similar to the Top Gun logo of the 80s. With the wing tie in, I was sure that it would be decorated with the movie in mind.

I was wrong. It was a country western themed bar and restaurant. Nothing wrong with that, but I was excited about and expecting something else. The surprise factor tarnished my first experience, and the first experience is the most critical time in the relationship between a customer and a brand.

People (generally) don’t like surprises. There are good surprises, but people are generally used to dealing with negative surprises particularly from companies. When they are surprised, they assume it is negative and need to be convinced otherwise. McDonalds has built an empire on people being able to buy the same okay tasting hamburger anywhere in the world. United Airlines boarding, flight and deplaning is a scripted, predictable, choreographed play. Denny’s you can expect to get the same greasy breakfast 24 hours a day. People don’t get their cars serviced purely based on the fear of surprised.

People are also weary of bait and switch tactics. No matter what the bank offers at first, you wonder how long it will last. Sure the cable company is giving you 3 months of free service, but how bad is the service? The phone company wants to give you that shiny new phone, but how long of a contract do they lock you in for? When someone is surprised, they look for the hook.

Make sure your branding isn’t going to imply something that your product or service is set to deliver.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.

You need to love your customer.

How do you get a customer to come and use your product and service again and again? You get to know them. You talk to them, you look at them, you ask them questions. You try to get to the bottom of what makes them who they are what they need you to do for them. Once you know their needs, you need to be selfless. You need to put your needs above your own. You need to over service them and then ad a cherry on top of that. Seth Godin in Linchpin “Art [or service] is a personal gift that changes the recipient.” You need to not only give them the product or service they require, but you need to make them feel better themselves. You take a load off their shoulders, make them laugh or make them think in a new way.

All of this seems like love to me.

This is how you build your brand, one loving interaction after another. You might be thinking that this a long, hard and tiring road and there is no way you or your employees could keep that up. But the interesting thing is that once you get to this point, it becomes a self sustaining cycle. The energy you or your brand mates will get when you see a customer completely fulfilled will give your energy to service the next client. And the energy from that client will feed the service of the next. And the next. And the next.

This isn’t the first time we have used a dating metaphor for user experience. Here is an article on how packaging is the first date of user experience.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.

I came across another company benefiting from the brand associations of another brand. We talked about this in regards to the Hyundai Genesis badge being similar to the Bentley, and Genesis benefiting from all of the luxury associations that come with positioning them selves closely with Bentley from a graphic standpoint.

Well this one is cross industry. The logo for Heys luggage has the same old coat of arms design as Porsche.

Porsche has the broader brand awareness, so Heys is the one that benefits by all the brand associations that come with having a logo similar to Porsche. Heys has pre existing associations like performance, high engineering, luxury and quality even before they run their first add. This is an amazing advantage, because Porsche had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to earn those brand associations, and back it up with 60 years of quality products.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you are building a brand, you need to capitalize on these associations so that you are getting a head start at building your brand to have those qualities with your customer. You don’t want to directly copy a logo, but to model your logo, graphics or architecture on that of other brands you want to be associated like in encouraged. But those associations are only stepping stones; if someone buys a Heys piece of luggage and doesn’t find the Porsche quality and performance, than they will quickly drop those associations they had. They will also feel duped or taken, and you will never recover them as a customer from that. Thankfully Heys makes very good bags.

Unfortunately you take the good with the bad. Hey’s has the Lion crest very similar to the Peugeot one. Now Peugeot has a porr reputation for quality, and if Heys was in Europe they may see that brand association as well.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.