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.
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.
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…
The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.
Krulak refers to General Charles Krulak, a general who theorized that with the new era of cell phone cameras and online social networks, the field soldiers would have more impact on how the military is perceived than anyone. This is an important insight in a war where part of the mission is winning over hearts and minds. One soldier who act biligerantly towards a local can permenantly damage a brand.
The same is true with your business. Someone who woke up on the wrong side of the bed can have far reaching impacts in your brand. That could be a You Tube video highlighting your poor cleanliness. Someone could upload a photo to Facebook of one of your servers yelling at another customer. Someone could tweet about how one of your customer service representatives giggled when they described their problem. We h
But this problem is also an opportunity. With great front line people servicing customers, you brand can be enjoyed by customers and can grow and spread. Someone can share on Facebook a great experience with a phone centre agent that tirelessly worked to solve their problem. Someone can send a picture of the beautiful meal they were just served. Someone can write a 5 star review on Yelp based on the friendly staff of your bakery.
How to get there is to hire the right people and get them excited about your brand and about doing their very best they can for their customers. We are going to be doing a set of posts on Internal Branding, but if you are looking for guidance on this Zappos is the model.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Firebrand Creative develops brands that people are proud to be customers of, employees are proud to work for, and you are proud to build. Brands that add value to the world by uniting like minded people through products that inspire passion. What we call Brands-on-Fire are more efficient, are more profitable, and are more fun to run. We help all sizes of businesses through our blog and creative services.
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