Firebrand

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.

Have you ever heard of those little, square, black and white symbols that people have been using in Japan for years? No? Well they are called QR codes and they are coming to western culture and marketing in full force. It’s time to get to know about them.

Definition: QR codes (or Quick Response codes) are a new form of bar code that can be quickly decoded. QR codes are most known for use with mobile phones, where they can be scanned by a cell phone camera link to a web page.

History: QR codes were invented by a Japanese automotive parts company called Denso in 1994. Denso used them innitially to track parts in their manufacturing process. QR codes have the potential to contain much more information than typical bar code. There are also features in the bar code that allow the decoder (ie. cell phone) to see position, scale, allignment and version / format information. There is also redundancy built in so that damaged or hard to read codes can be scanned. QR codes can store 4,296 alphanumeric characters or 7,089 numbers. It was adapted to mobile marketing in 2003, and is called ‘mobile tagging’. The QR code has ISO standardization.

Competition: QR codes are the leading standard in use with mobile phone, or so called mobile tagging. But there are also other standards and proprietary solutions that give it competition-

• Data Matrix: The second leading standard. Can hold only 2,335 alphanumeric characters or 2 kb. Data Matrix was patented by Acacia Technologies, but the patent has expired.
• Microsoft Tag: A code that uses triangular sections arranged in a square that uses Microsoft’s High Capacity Colour Barcode (HCCB) technology. Microsoft Tag uses 4 – 8 colours to encode more ammounts of data. Contrary to the name can be black and white as well, but with less data storage.

Next we will talk about the current applications, and talk about future applications.

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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.

Some people clearly get what brand associations are all about. A tip of my hat to Mercedes demonstrating it’s knowledge of brand association with their hallway lounge areas in high end malls. I came across one while going through Sherway Gardens, a upper end mall here in the west end of Toronto. What Mercedes had done was put out these very comfortable leather lounge chairs in the hallway of the mall with Mercedes symbols on custom furniture all around, even embossed into the leather of the seat. This allowed exhausted holiday shoppers to rest in Mercedes’ big comfortable chairs and breath a sigh of relief on Mercedes behalf.

What does this do for Mercedes? More traditionally, it puts the Mercedes logo in front of it’s exact target audience: well to do people who buy high end items. But the real value is in the brand associations created. People will associate that feeling of relief and comfort with the Mercedes brand. Plopping down into that comfortable seat after long hours of shopping might just as well be climbing into the leather seat in your C-Class after a long day at the office. The neural connection between Mercedes and comfort is made. Perception is reality. That experience the customer has in the lounge at the mall will actually make the future Mercedes seem more comfortable.

Cheers to you, Mercedes!

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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.

Over the last year, Design Critique: Products for People podcast has worked with Firebrand Creative to redesign the blog page for the podcast. It was found that the vast majority of people were getting the content directly from the website, and not iTunes as the metrics originally indicated. To make sure the podcast audience had the best experience possible, we redesigned the page to keep in character with Tim Kiernan’s vision for the show. We chronicled the process in a set of podcasts, which you can find at DesignCritique.net.

We are proud to unvail the designs that came out of that process:

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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 delare it: Breast Cancer owns the colour pink.

Watch out Lasenza Girl and the singer Pink. You can’t trademark the entire spectrum of a colour, but the Breast Cancer movement has done as close a job as possible through branding. A quick disclaimer: I worked for the Canadian Cancer Society in the past, and my family has been very involved with them. They are not the Breast Cancer Society, but cancer as a cause is very close to my heart.

It came to me when I was watching the Patriots – Vikings game two weekends ago. There was a breast cancer awareness drive with the NFL where players and coaches were wearing various apparel that had colours changed to pink: shoes, gloves, brims of hats. College sports and Major League Baseball are running other pink gear promotions. I was watching the football game with two other young guys; we all knew it was for breast cancer before ever seeing a logo. We are not the typical target audience the Breast Cancer Society targets for their drives, and as far as I know, none of us had any family affected by breast cancer. If people removed from your target audience recognize an entire colour as a symbol of your brand, congratulations, you own that colour.

It speaks to the power of coordinated symbolic branding for decades. Pink would not have become the symbol it is if the Susan G. Komen organization and other organizations had not been so galvanized around using pink consistently. If they had been wishy washy like the majority of companies are and changed to a burgundy 10 years into the movement than it would have half the power it does now.

It makes me wonder about brands that use a combination of colours as their brand symbology. Obviously there is more opportunity for differentiation of branding, the number of colours in the pantone swatch book squared. But I wonder if that combination waters it down the effect of having a colour as a brand symbol. It also shows that it pays to be bold. If breast cancer’s symbolic colours were yellow and blue like that of the Canadian Cancer Society would we have recognized it in that football game. There wasn’t much competition for pink because it is gender specific, hard to print and can be harsh on the eyes if over used. The pink story is akin to the story of the Chrysler muscle cars of the 60s. Lime green and “plum crazy purple” became symbols for Chrysler cars like the Dodge Challenger and the Plymouth Baracuda because not many people wanted to paint their Mustangs and Camaros those bold colours. But those colours became a call to arms for Mopar fans, and have resurfaced recently.

It would be nice if we all could own a colour for our own movements.

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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.