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.

—

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.

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.

—

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.

1. Funny spokesman
2. $100,000 budget for a set
3. Talking tige…

… there is no recipe for a viral video!

The most powerful medium of this time in marketing is also the most elusive. It’s the viral video. If we knew the recipe, than advertisers would be leveraging them so much that they would loose power and ability to spread. Much like mass media advertising, there is only a certain amount of space for viral videos. In stead of air time, it is mind share. The public has a very set appetite for viral videos, and when blasted with too many, they tend not to pass it along.

One company that gets it is Old Spice. Old Spice has hit the holy grail in that they have had so many successful virl videos that hundreds of thousands of young men looking at their You Tube channel to see what they come up with next. They are the fifth most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. Their videos have an unfair advantage towards going viral because of the 300,000 or so views a video gets just being on the Old Spice channel.

Another thing they have been able to do that eludes most viral videos is stay on message and on target. Their ads speak directly to the product and in a way their target market of young men respond too. Most company sponsored viral videos have nothing to do with the company or even the brand, except a 5 second logo flash at the end of the video. All of Old Spice’s videos talk about the product, and they don’t even comically over exaggerate the features of the product. They just associate it with fictional gods of manliness. They don’t say that if you use Old Spice, that you will instantly become a pillar of manliness. In fact they say that you will just smell like one? That association plays to the product attributes and the aspirations of their target market.

That leads to the most important part of a viral video: speaking to something visceral at the core of a segment of people. If it doesn’t hit someone in the gut in 30 seconds, than they wont pass it along. A common misconception is that a viral video has to speak to everyone; quite the opposite. It needs to speak to some people deeply. With Old Spice, that deep sentiment is the need for young men to feel manly and desirable. With Nike’s “Write the Future” video, it was the cultural diversity and cultural pride of the World Cup. With the Tom Tom’s Darth Vader recording studio video, it was about seeing someone who is known to be serious in a comedic way. Wit Hi Tecs “Walk on Water” video, it was making something you knew was impossible seem possible.

A more simple thing to learn from Old Spice is that you need to take alot of swings of the bat to hit a home run. They produce alot of videos. For every video that Old Spice has that goes to 3 – 6 million views, there are 2 that are at about 1 million views or less. When you strike gold, you aren’t going to know exactly how and why or if that is even repeatable. But the why doesn’t matter, the video going viral does. You just need to experiment.

Another repeatable thing Old Spice uses is brevity. Thirty seconds or one minute and that’s it. The principle reason Old Spice does this is to fit into the time slots of video services intro / outro slots. Most viral videos are around 2 minutes 30 seconds, but being brief gives you a higher percentage of being passed along. If people feel like they are committing their friends to watching a long video, it had better be captivating. A short video is just a snack.

Something also it keep in mind is directing your cinematography so that the video can be understood when viewed small. We are getting the opportunity to have HD video now, but that doesn’t mean people are watching it in HD. They are watching it from their Facebook news feeds, or huddled around a 19″ monitor in a cubical. Make things large, graphically simple and only have one area of focus on screen at a time.

Consider using an audio logo like Old Spice, but we already have a post on that.

While creating a viral video may seem like a black art, it is doable. If you don’t think that you can make something that can get to 5,000,000 views than just remember that if it reaches a few thousand people who are your direct target market, than it was valuable. Happy experimenting.

—

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.

In the last few posts we have been talking about the aspects of brand identity as laid out by David Aaker in “Building Strong Brands.” We have been focusing on the interplay of ‘Brand as Organization’ and ‘Brand as Person.’ No organizational policy affect a companies perceived personality more than dress code.

Imagine going into Quicksilver’s office; what clothing are the people wearing in your imagination? Now go into the corporate head office of Bank of America? I doubt people in the two companies are wearing the same thing.

We all know that people’s perceptions of us are effected by our clothes. If we didn’t think that than we wouldn’t take so much time, effort and expense making our own clothing reflect our personality and goals? A company is the aggregate sum of all it’s people, and how those people are dressed are going to effect not only how the company’s personality if perceived, but the actual personality of the company. If a sales person is in a suit and tie with a clean haircut than I am going to expect that person to be all about business and rather stiff. That is going to change my interaction with them, for better and worse. I will ask my question clearly and expect a clear and concise answer. Great for a bank. If the salesperson was dressed more casually, I would be more inclined to have a more casual conversation with them with a better opportunity to develop a relationship. I would also think a more casually dressed sales force would be less knowledgeable, unless it was in certain vertical’s such as Quicksilver’s surf and snow fashions.

This does not only effect the customer facing people in the company. The way the back end people dress will affect their work and decisions. That work and those decisions will effect the personality of the brand down the line. A tight formal dress code is going to influence decisions to be knowledgeable and safe. A more casual workplace will be more free spirited and potentially more creative. This is because dress code is a clear direction from management on how they want the company’s people to be perceived; people will pick up on this and act accordingly if only unconsciously. People will make decisions and behave their way to that desired perception.

Have people dress to the personality you would like your company to have.

—

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 have been re-reading David Aaker’s “Building Strong Brands” and this like alot of posts in the coming weeks is inspired by the book. Aaker spells out the 4 aspects of brand identity: 1)brand as product, 2) brand as organization, 3) brand as person and 4) brand as symbol. To expand on Aaker’s thinking, brand as organization is the precursor to success in brand as product and brand as person.

Let me quickly run through the aspects. Brand as product is the attributes you want associated with your products and services. Brand as organization is the brand of and for the people in the company; for example, “Company X: never leaving a stone unturned for innovation.” Brand as person is the interaction between the company and the customer on a personal level (“Skype always seems so friendly!) And Brand as symbol is the graphics and colours that people associate with your brand.

To me, the foundational aspect is the brand as organization. We have talked about brand dissonance before, but it is when the face that a company is trying to show to consumers is completely different than the company actually is. It usually comes out in a scaring article, or a bad customer experience. I had that experience with Fido recently. I didn’t appreciate the brow beating I received from the commission hungry, clearly offshore firm they hired to tele-market their mobile internet stick, especially since their ads are filled with cute puppies and friendly yellow graphics. If your brand image and your organization have different values and personalities, than customers are going to get an uneasy feeling about dealing with your company. The same feeling in fact as when they hear a dissonant chord in music, interestingly enough. (Joker Theme by Hans Zimmer is a good example, if you dare.)

Brand as organization drives both brand as product and brand as person. To use that “Company X: never leaving a stone unturned for innovation.” as an example once more, if management fosters that culture of innovation throughout the company than the products will truly be innovative. If a company says that they are innovative to the outside world, but their culture is risk averse than their products will not be innovative. If  company says their products are innovative, but they are not than they are going to loose credibility and the brand becomes a liability. I often hear a chicken or the egg argument to get there unfortunately. “If we want to be innovative, do we brand our self as innovative and let the employees rise to that brand?” No. You brand internally as innovative and foster a culture of innovation, then when you have something to show for it (a class leading product perhaps?) than you show off that innovative culture to the outside world. This is simply because culture change takes longer than brand image change, and in the time when your brand is dissonant you will be doing damage to it. This is not just true of innovation as a trait; the same rules apply if you want to be known as friendly, customer service focused, quick to respond, serious, professional… anything and everything.

This internal to external branding strategy is why CEOs with marketing based mindsets do so well. They know how to foster a culture because they spend as much time marketing and branding to the companies employees as they do to it’s customers.

—

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 in this blog do not necessarily reflect the views of Colin Finkle’s employer, FX Displays.