Firebrand

Sometimes we think that business to business is not comparable to business to consumer sales because organizations are much more rational about their purchases. We think a proposal is weighted on it’s value proposition versus cost and the best combination of the two will win. Business clients are wooed into emotional purchases, and swayed by flashy advertising campaigns.

I wholeheartedly disagree. Consumers generally have a much better to make an apples to apples comparison; all of the tomato sauces in the grocery are laid out in a row for me, and their nutritional information, ingredients and price are clear. With business to business sales, the value and price is much more convoluted and this opens up the door for personal scrutiny that can be swayed to emotional. “Well company X has a shorter timeline an requires less cash down, but company Y has a track record of delivering on budget.” I would argue that brand plays even more of role in B2B than B2C.

To build your B2B brand, you have to create great customer experiences. And that starts with how you treat your clients when they come visit you. You need to think about their experience in a way a hotel or a restaurant thinks about your visit with them.

When I stayed at the the Swan and Dolphin resort at Disney World in Orlando for a conference, I was amazed at how much thought was given to making sure I had a positive brand impression of them. A shuttle picked me up and took me right up to the door. The entry way was beautiful and the path to the check in desk was clear. I was greeted with a smile and great service, and clearly shown where my room was. In my room, the TV was on with a video looping through pictures and video of the hotels services, set to serene music. I actually took notes on it, because it was so powerful at positioning the hotel as relaxing and inviting.

You get the impression that no stone has been left unturned to create a great experience with really great places in the hospitality industry. Experiences like Disney World and the Mandarin restaurant actually seem synthetic because of their how fine tuned every part is. But I’ll err on the side of a great controlled positive experience rather than a casual experience.

Take a walk in your clients shoes. Is there easy access to parking? Are they greeted at the door promptly and curtiously? Is the office well decorated and clean? Is the office laid out in a simple way? Is the meeting room easily accessible? Is the meeting room open, well lit and have windows, or does it feel claustrophobic? Are the clients offered a coffee, tea or water? If they require a tour, do the salespeople know how to give it professionally and stick to points the client would car about? Is your branding places prominently around the office?

You may think that you don’t need to think about that fluff, and you can concentrate on your product and operations to compete. Admirable, but spending a little time thinking about the experience can have a high return on investment (ROI). Spending a few thousand dollars and some man hours tuning up the client experience can all be paid by getting one contract you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Your clients are coming to see your location because they want to judge how professional it is; if they didn’t want to know that then they would stay in their office and let you come to them. Manage their experiences.

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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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We live in an economy that’s based in reciprocity: I do something for you and you give me something (typically money.) Everything is a transaction with tangible goods or services for money. Nothing is truly for free.

Now, marketers and companies know if they give something away, their business can grow in unpredictable ways. It’s the karmic model of marketing. The freemium is a part of this; there is rarely a piece of software or a website that does not offer a free version or a trial of their service. I call this the drug dealer model: the fist taste is free. This was always the model for most art forms. For music you could listen to a song on the radio for free (essentially) in the hopes that you would be enticed to buy the album or go to the concert. With art you could always few a painting in a gallery or the artist studio with the artist hoping you would purchase it for free.

Now the marketing world is taking it one step further because of the tendency of the web and our connected society to make things viral. We see this all the time in the marketing community with free eBooks. I’ll freely tell you that is the strategy I am counting on when I provide the insights here in this blog. I provide this content with no expectation. Now I would be happy if you enjoyed it and told other people who would enjoy about it, but I have no expectation of that. I don’t force you to email 3 people about the blog before I show you the latest post. There is no transaction. I do this for myself, and the hope that you will enjoy it.

Now the karmic marketing model and the reciprocity based society don’t mix. They create dissonance with people. Our society tells us that every thing is a tic for tat transaction, but people are trying to give us stuff for free. As a result people have an ingrained mistrust. They are looking for the hook. “Why are you doing this? Do you want my money? Email address? My time? Personal information? My contacts? A reference? Etc. Etc”

This basic mistrust of anything being given away is a fundamental resistance that you need to disarm if you are going to give something of value away.

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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.

Now that we are in a digital age, there are some products that are so easy to distribute that it may be worthwhile releasing a product just to promote another product in the future.

I do not mean the freemium model, or what I call the drug dealer model: the first taste is free but you have to pay later. This is where the brand gives you a free trial that is limited by either locked functionality or a time limited offering. We are used to seeing this in the App market and video games. But that tactic is using the same product to promote itself, and that is not what I am talking about here.

In this age you can release a related product to build buzz and excitement or introduce a new concept before you launch the big product. The intention of this is to build excitement in the core fans of the brand to build general buzz to build a good climate for the big launch to proceed in. Here are a few examples:

I was watching the Blu Ray releases of Star Trek 3-5 last night, and the only trailer on all 3 discs was for the modern Star Trex movie by JJ Abrams. This was a 3 disc collector box set in never before seen quality. While I was watching these movies a year after the modern Star Trek was released, the core fans of the original Star Trek television series and movies would have picked this set up months before the release of the modern movie. They would then talk to their friends, colleagues, and neighbours about the original Star Trek and hopefully how excited they are about the movie.

Another movie example is the release of the Thor and Captain America movies to build to the Avengers movie. Thor is scheduled to be released May 6, 2011 and Captain America is coming out July 22, 2011. These movies will be phenomenons in themselves, but they are building to one of the biggest movie launches in history: The Avengers in May 2012. The Avengers is a superhero team up movie that pairs Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and a few others. Given the talent that have played these characters in the single movies, you can imagine the ensemble cast of the Avengers: Robert Downey Jr, Samuel Jackson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo and the list goes on.

If you are seeing a pattern here, and that these seem to be part of the geek culture, you would be correct. But that is because they have an engergizable base of fans of those brands. But a broader market example of this was the iPhone softening the market for the iPod touch. You might think that the iPod touch is a small footnote compared to juggernaut launch of the iPhone. But there are almost as many iPod Touches sold as there are iPhones, and the iPod touch was released 6 months later. The iPhone broke the touch device concept into western culture, and built amazing excitement around it. This was excitement that some people couldn’t take advantage of because they could not afford the monthly fee of the iPhone. Along comes the iPod touch. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they had released the iPod touch ahead of the iPhone. Apple wanted the huge paradigm shift to make their brand seem more innovative, especially since the computer and iPod innovation had stifled. If they had just introduced an iPod touch that could make calls, it would not have exploded in the way it did.

Is these a product or service you can launch to build buzz for a future, innovative product or service? This might be a tactic that has some appeal specially if your company is product driven and not great at promotion.

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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.

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.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

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.