Dennis Demori

mansitrivedi:

The Era of Relationship in Branding by Bob Garfield, Doug Levy AdAge

Excerpt:

Welcome to the Relationship Era. Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling position. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element.

Begin with a simple experiment. Type “I love Apple” into your Google search bar. You will get 3.27 million hits. If you type “I love Starbucks,” 2.7 million hits. Zappos: 1.19 million.

“I love Citibank” gets you 21,100. AT&T Wireless: 7,890. Exxon: 4,730. Dow Chemical: 3. Out of 7 billion human beings, three! Just to put that into context, type “I love Satan” and you get 293,000 hits. Now consider that in the past 12 months, Citibank, AT&T Wireless, Exxon Mobil and Dow have spent $2 billion on advertising. How’s that working out for them?

The methodology here may not be especially rigorous, but the results dramatize two immutable facts of contemporary marketing life:

1. Millions of people will, of their own volition, announce to the world their affection for a brand. Not for a person, an artwork or a dessert but for a product or service. Congratulations. People care deeply about you.

2. Whether you like it or not, your brand is inextricably entwined in such relationships. If you were to type in “I hate Exxon,” you’d get 2.16 million hits—not counting the “I hate Exxon Mobil” Facebook page. Though people are listening less to your messages, it doesn’t stop them from thinking and talking about you. And each of those expressions of like, dislike, ardor or disgust has an exponent that reflects the outward ripples of social interaction.

In short, as you have realized but most likely not come to grips with, you are being evaluated 24/7 in countless conversations that have zero to do with your ad slogan. On the contrary, they are about your brand’s essential self—which behooves you to think very hard about your essential self.

This has ceased to be an option. History has made that decision for you.

heyitsnoah:

AdFreak: Starbucks logo: timeline of future redesigns

Brand Mapping As A Consumer Insights Tool - PSFK

conradlisco:

Utility Versus Futility

There’s nothing better than the feeling of creating something groundbreaking, innovative and unforgettable. It’s what we set out to do for our clients on a daily basis. But in doing so, we sometimes forget what groundbreaking, innovative and unforgettable means. We get so hung up on glitz and glam, awareness and awards that we lose sight of consumers (the people who we expect to use, share and love what we made). Remember them?

The problem is propagated by the industry’s “new as newsworthy” approach to creation. Just “new” isn’t necessarily newsworthy (or good newsworthy anyway).  That’s not to say that new isn’t newsworthy…not at all. Instead, it’s about celebrating the right things and calling out the wrong ones.

We should first and foremost help brands create utility, not exercises in futility.

Utility – the state or quality of being useful; usefulness

Futility – The quality of having no useful result; uselessness.

Technology makes solving old problems with new solutions both easier and harder. Easier because we have more to work with, more at our disposal. Harder because there are more things to goof up, more ways to confuse versus compel. Like IDEO’s Human Centered Design, creating useful mobile and social solutions starts with, well, humans.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a process and a set of techniques used to create new solutions for the world. When we say solutions, we mean products, services, environments, organizations, and modes of interaction.

The reason this process is called “human-centered” is because it starts with the people we are designing for. The starting point of the HCD process is to examine the needs, dreams, and behaviors of the people we want to affect with our solutions. We seek to listen to and understand what they want. We call this the Desirability lens. It is the lens through which we view the world through the entire design process.

Avoiding futility also means knowing when to tap into new technologies and when to let them mature. Augmented Reality is prime example right now. AR continues to be the talk of the town, with links and write-ups about its implications. I agree that AR will be huge, and hugely useful. But when brands ask about it, and want to use it, I work hard to help them uncover what they’re really asking for. Sometimes the solution is still AR, but sometimes it’s not – it’s something much more simple and that has much higher penetration.

At the end of the day, when we start with users (humans) in mind, the ideas that follow will likely yield better results. Usage will go beyond trial, and users will spread the word – which is pretty useful to brands too.

Image via

heyitsnoah:

chartreuse:9gag:

Company Logo Smackdown

Reminds me of Brand Tags Battle Mode … Have been thinking about doing a brand tournament for awhile, I should really get around to that. Here’s the current battle mode leaderboard:

1. Pixar has 472 wins out of 556 (84.89%)
2. Google has 587 wins out of 695 (84.46%)
3. Adidas has 576 wins out of 686 (83.97%)
4. Apple has 586 wins out of 700 (83.71%)
5. Nike has 612 wins out of 747 (81.93%)
6. Coca-Cola has 628 wins out of 768 (81.77%)
7. Lego has 597 wins out of 732 (81.56%)
8. BMW has 594 wins out of 731 (81.26%)
9. YouTube has 603 wins out of 748 (80.61%)
10. Ferrari has 569 wins out of 714 (79.69%)

paigecalvert:

msg:

@Jetblue understands twitter at its core.

They could have not responded to this twit but instead responded with wit

Meaghan loved the response so much she decided to share it on her tumblr page which then ended up on the tumblr popular page, which ended up here.

You cant buy that kind of advertising with money @Jetblue did however buy it with 72 Characters!

via www.suckatlife.com