Firebrand

People have relationship with brands not only because of what they offer with their product or service, but also how being a part of that brand makes them feel. Brands that have strong personalities are the ones that capitalize on this. Whether this is the fun, playful, young-hearted Disney brand, or the macho, competitive, manly brand of UFC. People feel they have the personality traits of the brand they are using or affiliating themselves with.

This was confirmed once again with a study from the Journal of Consumer Research (see this article for more details). In the study, participants were asked to…

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Microsoft unveiled their new Xbox design this week at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), the gaming convention. The new hardware is packed with a 250 GB drive, and Wifi (a long time coming.) But what I want to focus on is what is on the outside. The old design was done by the industrial design / branding firm Astro Studios; a firm I am a fan of and take inspiration from. I don’t know if they deigned this case as well. Let’s analyze the industrial design:

- This is clearly is under the same line of thinking as the…

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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.

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.