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.

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.

Sometimes when you browse a corporate site that they are making an concerted effort to make sure that you don’t see the price until you are already invested. Usually these sites want you to give personal information, have a sales representative contact you or dedicate time to starting the process.  This is especially true in subscription services.

This is not okay. As marketers, we reserve the right to try to explain the value of our product or service before we say the prices. But asking someone to spend their time and attention on something is far different than mentally locking people in before allowing them to see the price.

The basis of our economy is based on rational decision making balancing value with price. By withholding the price, you remove one half of the equation. When they are finally allowed to see the price the equation has changed. Now the cost is balanced against the value of the product or service plus the loss of the time / personal information / effort if they do not take the service. This is subversive, and gaming the system. It takes paying from opt in to opt out, which uses our human preference towards opting in against us.

One example of this is eHarmony. In the first level of their website has no mention of the price of the service. They ask you to sign up and give your time and most personal information to take their personality profile before you see the price of the service. The price of the service is based on how much time you sign up for, and is not determined by any of the personal information you gave. There is no reason to withhold the pricing information other than to have us already invested in the service before we pay for it.

The whipping boy of poor sales and marketing critics, the car dealer, uses the same tactic. They withold the final price of the product at the last minute of the sale, often pocketing profit through fees. When I was looking for a used car at the end of the last year, I experienced this first hand. Dealers would want me to appraise my trade in before car even before letting me test driving their product. One sales person verbally strong armed us into his office after a test drive. I would never have bought a car with him no matter how good the deal, because he had destroyed our relationship with him and thus his brand. I apprehensively bring up used car dealers, but would you like your business to be using the same tactics as a used car dealer?

If a company is confident of both their value and their price, than they will present both alongside each other. At FireBrand, we are all about long-tail branding excercises based on respectful and valuable relationships with your customers. This hurts your brand. If you start your relationship with your customer by tricking them, some will hold you accountable for that.

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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.

Timothy Keirnan of the Design Critique podcast did a great podcast on how even a brand with an innovative product can be destroyed with poor quality and poor customer service. He was referencing Art Studios Entertainment Media and the launch and subsequent boggling of their EFI-X boot module that allowed users to run Apple OS-X on a standard PC. He asked me to comment, and we will also discuss it on a future episode of Design Critique.

First let’s outline the story. Tim’s podcast and this Tom’s Hardware article do a thorough job of documenting the story, but I will run through it quickly. The EFI-X boot module plugs into the motherboard using the USB header, and would allow the user to choose from multiple operating systems installed on different hard drives. One of the operating systems could be Apple’s Mac OS-X if the computer hardware was compatible. Initial media coverage was good as it did what it claimed.

Users started to have problems, particularly after a firmware update. Problems for the user would crop up while others were being fixed. The users were using forums to voice their problems; forum moderators deleted topics. After awhile, the modules just tarted dieing altogether. Three of Tom’s Hardware units died prematurely. . There is also evidence that it is a repackaged version of another product. An allegation not helped by the epoxy hiding the electronics. The unit’s firmware was also proven to have used stolen code.

Customers were told by Art Studios that all problems would be solved in the next version of the unit thanks to better quality components and standards. What were generation 1 customers to do? Not go to the forums, they were terminated. The last straw for all users was the announcement that first gen users would have to upgrade to version 1.1 to run the new version of OS-X, Snow Leopard. This is despite promises from Art Studios that all versions would run all future versions of OS-X.

Tim points out that the experience with the product directly is not ll of the user experience. The poor treatment of users by Art Studios Entertainment Media has poisoned the customer experience. If a brand is meant to leverage positive experiences to create loyalty and recommendations, why would ASEM bother having a brand at all if they have such little regard to the customer experience. This is the sort of experience you expect from a nameless discount electronics companies and are prepared for the risk of when purchasing from. This is not acceptable when users paid a premium for the module.

David Aaker in Building Strong Brands talks about how the first generation of a product is make or break because of the scrutiny it is under. “Too often there is a delusion that brands can be created by advertising without a product or service that really delivers quality and value- in short that is the “problem” of advertising. In reality, the product drives the image.” The Microsoft Zune fell victim to this. Great advertising could not prop up a mediocre product. Aaker sites Saturn as a positive example: great advertising, press and public relations only enhanced the momentum of a high quality product.

The Art Studio’s EFIX was in that new product pressure cooker. They were the beneficiary of alot of press and buzz at the launch. But a poor quality product with extremely poor customer relations turned that momentum completely around. Now they need to face a barrage of scathing customer reports, which will create a reputation that with the new era of the web, will never go 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.

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

I realized that whenever I see a trademark symbol, I immediately glaze over the preceding text.

You know what I am talking about. It only happens when you are not engaged with the company or the information. In a body paragraph on a website there is something in Title Case with a TM at the end. Like if I was talking about Firebrand and then I had something like The Hottest Resources For The Hottest Companies (TM). You would just do a mental eye roll or shoulder shrug and say to yourself “not another cheesy marketing tag line… Oh brother.”

Here is a good example.

I see 5 trade marks on that page, which is 4 more than I think there should be. I think Minute Maid has a good brand, and to protect their promotions I know they need to use trademarks like that. But do we really need a symbol beside every instance of something to eliminate every false interpretation of the trademark? It seems antiquated.

In an age where being precieved as genuine is goal number one, our intellectual property tools are actually hurting as much as they are helping. Time for some new ones maybe?

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

Join the Firebrand family – Please Comment or Email.