Cock flavoured seasoning - Hmm, I don

And what is that at the bottom right of the label?

Updated

I have just read the instructions on the side of the pack and it comes with some helpful tips. Apparently….

“Cock flavoured seasoning is a versatile ingredient. You can use it to prepare marinades, gravies, soups and stews. You can rub it on chicken, fish or meat, let marinate and then roast or grill”

So now we know.

This is a guy called Paul Bennett speaking at the Economist Conference and it as changed (again) the way I look at things.

His four words:

People

Authenticity

Service

Simplicity

Can be applied to any business in any field. If you get them right, you can create a clearly differentiated successful business and a successful brand.

Stick with it as he does come across as a bit superior and has one of those funny mid Atlantic accents. There are a few more killer points that come across to me too.

1. Play well with others. We will achieve more by working as a collective and working together.

2. Be transparent and listen to feedback. If you have things to hide, customers will see it and tell others.

3. Look for people with passion behind the eyes.

Just brilliant simple stuff. There must be a part two as it does end a little abruptly though.

1. Decide whether you are a person or a business
Twitter is used by three distinct groups: Celebrities, who like to talk about themselves and the everyday trivia of their lives; Businesses, who are talking to their customers and trying to build rapport with a younger audience and by Individuals who often use it to share gossip and news amongst their own group – like Facebook but without the pictures. An on line version of texting between each other on their mobile/cellphones.

2. Choose a good name to work with
Like creating a brand for yourself, you need to start with a good name. If you’re a business, it makes sense to choose the business name and if you’re an individual, use your own name. I simply can’t understand why someone would want to try and build another brand with a random name. It’s exactly like splitting your spend and your time across two different brands and halving its effectiveness.

3. Personalise it with an icon and all your info
When you sign up to Twitter, you have the ability to personalise your information in the Profile panel. There is lots of talk on the Twitter forums (fora?) about not following people who don’t bother with an icon for themselves as they’re probably spammers. If you’re going to do it at all, do it right and that means adding in your own URL, your own or your brand’s icon and by being as interesting and engaging as possible with your 160 character introduction.

4. Choose your tone of voice
If your brand has tone of voice guidelines, STICK TO THEM! Just because you’re speaking in a different medium, doesn’t mean you need to start being all chatty and inappropriate. If you’re an individual, decide whether you want to be friendly and engaging, cold, useful but clinically efficient or some combination. But whatever you decide, write it down as your agreed tone and stick to it in every tweet.

5. Choose your area of expertise
It’s the same for what you say as to how you say it. If your expertise is in mortgages, then why would you have any credibility talking about advertising? Decide what you are going to speak about, again, write this down and agree it with yourself or fellow contributors and then stick to it. If you are shouting about any old subject, you’ll get seen as a loudmouth rather than an expert and people will lose interest in what you’re saying all too fast.

6. Follow back
The reason I follow no celebrities at all is that none of them ever follow you back and I care very little about their trivia. Why should I care about what they’re saying if they don’t care about my thoughts? This has been escalated recently by Twitter introducing ‘lists’. Organise your favourite tweeters into lists, so you can see what they’re saying even if you’re not constantly monitoring their every tweet. This can be by subject, area of interest or even geography.

7. Tweet things that you like and that others can learn from
“Waiting for a train to Nottingham“. “On a train to Nottingham“. “Arrived in Nottingham“. And so on and on he went. The most dull set of tweets I‘ve ever seen. There were nine in total all involved this boring man’s journey to and from Nottingham. Another person, in my own industry, I used to follow said “I have to stand up from the table to let my colleague go to the toilet.” Who cares? Why should I waste my life looking at his pointless tweets? Think about what you’re saying. How will your audience learn more about you and what you do by reading what you’re writing? Would you ring someone and tell them what you’re tweeting? If so, go with it.

8. Twitter is a conversation
It’s all about dialogue, not diatribe. If you speak loudly at people, no-one benefits. Think of Twitter as a conversation and allow others to speak, retweet the things they say that you find interesting and do them the service of acknowledging when they have been kind enough to retweet your thoughts. Just because it’s online doesn’t mean you can behave impolitely. If someone serves you, you would normally say thankyou. Behave online as you or your brand would offline.

9. Build a like minded community
If you’re interested in branding and marketing, then don’t follow someone in California who is interested in real Estate or Madcap MLM schemes. When I follow someone, it’s because I think we can learn from each other. I always turn down people who are talking about things I don’t care about. It does mean I have limited myself to around 3,000 followers, but it also means that they have something to say that will be worth me hearing and that they may benefit from my own thoughts and ideas.

10. Keep listening, keep talking, keep tweeting
Stick with it. It’s a frustrating time when you’re trying to build a community. It doesn’t happen overnight unless you are a porn spammer or someone using a ‘foolproof system’ that follow millions of people and bombard them with irrelevance. But if you’re working to a plan and set aside a little time most days to work on your Twitter account, it will grow, it will be useful and it will be fun doing it.

See you in the Twittersphere.
http://twitter.com/johnlyle

Starbucks existing logo

As a brand man through and through, I have to comment on the new branding for Starbucks.

So, i’ll nail my colours to the mast and say, that I like it. I like what they’ve done and I like their thinking, but i’ll show why and what the risks are.

1. I like it
It’s an evolution. You can see from this graphic that it is the fourth major variant since they started 40 years ago, but none have thrown away the heritage, just moved them along to reflect their current needs. That’s good thinking and good branding.

Starbucks Logo - An illustrated history

They clearly cut down the number of lines they run, when they dropped spices and tea from the logo to concentrate on coffee. Well, that worked didn’t it. they are a global phenomonem that some may find addictive.

2. It allows them to go into new product areas

This is where the risk lies. Most brand owners think their brands are very stretchy and can work on anything, but very few can in reality. being known for one thing doesn’t make you cool or credible in another. Look at what happened to Porsche when they introduced the more affordable 924 (that they are apparently considering again!).

I can see them doing spices, some cooking products yes, but hardware for cooking, no. Beer, no. Wine, no. Ice cream, yes. Sweets, maybe. Beyond that, i’d be very doubtful it would have any real brand power.

I’ll watch to see what products they are trying, so if you see any before me, feel free to send them across.

Nottingham's perfect market economy in the old days - if a seller sold bad product - everyone knew

I’ve written a few pieces recently about consumer power (and blogger power) and wonder whether we are reaching the position of a perfect market economy. That is the previously theoretical situation, where all the buyers having all the information to buy identical products.

When I studied economics at school the section I was most fascinated with was the perfect economy.

And I think that we’re almost there, because that’s the Internet now isn’t it?

All the buyers have all the information and almost all retailers are selling identical products.

And, as the theory of the perfect economy states, if all the buyers have all the information and the market is selling identical products, then people will always buy from the lowest price supplier. This has to be true, doesn’t it?

Well, no. they’ll buy from the one they trust the most, as long as the price is there or thereabouts.

My mate and business guru Andy Hanselman once said to me that ‘advertising is the price you pay for being mediocre’.

He’s right.

Products and services rise from mediocrity by being exceptional, by being differentiated and by being well branded.

So rather than the internet killing brands, it’s offering them the most incredible opportunity. A world at their feet, that’s theirs for the taking.

It’s the perfect market opportunity.

A version of this article was first published as The Perfect Economy and branding? on Technorati.

Sorry to make this the third video in a row, but this is a super piece of brand repositioning. Thanks to Kelly Herrick of Abacus for sharing it – I certainly wouldn’t have seen it as I simply can’t bring myself to sit down and watch X Factor. Yeo Valley would hardly have been described as a happening, trendy and even cool brand, but they may do now.

But this is really clever. It works the organic angle, the natural, the beautiful people and youth all in one ad. My only complaint is the terrible dubbing of the girly farmers voice.

if this doesn’t help their sales and be a comparitive brand reposition to that achieved by Nick Kamen all those years ago with the Levi Ad, I don’t know what will.

They deserve all the success they get.

Monster Energy Logo - Monster energy drink is every teenage boys drink of choice

Monster Energy is a fizzy drink, that is squarely aimed at teenage boys. This video uses a Ford Fiesta – admittedly suped up to 650bhp that is being driven brilliantly around a deserted track. This is a car that is achievable and almost desirable by teenage lads.

Every other frame has the logo on it. and it’s living the brand in implying energy, outrageously energetic behaviour and pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable.

Clever stuff Monster Energy brand people.

Puma reinvents the shoebox, with another box

Well sort of. Click on the above to link through the video as it wont let me embed it here.

This great little video shows the length that Puma have gone to in order to completely rid themselves of the wasteful box for shipping the range of cool shoes. But having gone through a 21 month consultation process, they have radically reinvented something they are calling a bag, but still looks remarkably err, Box like.

Its saved them lots of litres of water in production, 65% in cardboard use and lots of MegaJoules in energy, but I can’t help feeling that whilst it is a big step forward, it isn’t really big enough to be that significant.

Yes, its smaller and it looks pretty good, but they have tried everything to come to the conclusion that a sort of box is still the best method by which to ship shoes.

What it is a brilliant example of however is reinforcement that good/great design and good environmental practice for any business in any sector pays for itself.

Whether they have moved away from a conventional box or not, they have saved a fortune in production costs – that you can guarantee will not be passed on in lower prices. That for me makes it, with some reservations, a good job well done by the teams involved.

Bic logo

Bic is one of those brands that is easy to belittle or even ignore. As they are doing most of their work in the lower end of the markets they address, it is easy to overlook them as a real brand. It’s a shame they don’t own their own domain name, but at least the existing owners do offer a link to their site.

But they are a real brand revolutionary. They have been delivering brand consistency since they formed in Clichy, France in 1945.

But I’m going to put my reputation on the line and say that I think they are a quite remarkable brand and many others could learn from them and what they do.

If I was going to summarise their brand values in a few words, I would describe them as Orange, practical, simple and functional.

None of their products seem complicated, all seem to work very well for what they are and all offer tremendous value for what they do. They haven’t been chasing upmarket like others and as such, haven’t lost their way in the process.

I was in Barcelona airport a few weeks ago and my eye was drawn to a Bic Phone. A bargain at 29 Euro and it came fully charged and with 12 Euro of credit on it. Even better was the fact that it was linked to the Orange Network! It looked like a good little phone and in an emergency (or an Ashley Cole) would be a good way out of trouble.

The Bic Phone - an orange disposable wonder for the philanderer or terrorist

So what else do they do?

They still have their pens, but these are increasingly nice to use and don’t seem to be as orange as they once were.

Bic Orange pens - the staple of any pencil case

They also still do a great line in lighters. Looking at their history, these were introduced in 1973 and still seem to dominate most newsagents counters. Again, lots of new colours and styles have been introduced, but they are still a sensible, functional purchase that few could regret.

And perhaps their most famous emergency purchase was introduced in 1975 (they were pretty productive years for the Bic design team!) and is the Bic Razor. I was forced into using one the other day by having left my own in our holiday house, and it was actually okay. I was expecting to have my face lacerated like a dog had been gnawing at it, but it was a nick free shave.

Bic Razors - Orange, simple, cheap and effective

I know Bic won’t be everyone’s cup of tea as there is simply no Kudos in owning Bic, but as a brand man, I see an awful lot of bad brands out there and the Bic logo, the Bic product offering and the whole Bic brand ethos seems to have remained quite remarkably stable since they first started.

I wish them many more successful years.

One of my team just pointed me towards this as a new TED video and I have to say I was totally enraptured with it. The opportunities for this are absolutely endless. The biggest issue we ever have with any technology is the number of wires that come with it. On our recent holiday to Andorra, half my hand luggage seemed to be full of plugs, wires and different little gadgets.

The technology itself is not that new, just this commercial interpretation of it. It was actually proposed by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago!

This has the potential to safely end all of this hassle or wired connections and the sooner we see it commercially, the better. ANy brand that can launch the wireless charging phone has to be onto a winner. The wireless TV would be fab (I already have a few wireless radios – but they still need to be plugged in to charge them!), but trying to find wireless surround sound speakers that don’t need constant charging is something I have been looking for, for years.