I was at Bicester outlet village yesterday for a bit of pre-Christmas shopping.We actually let the kids have a budget and choose what they wanted. This seemed to work.
With a Jack Wills store there, offering much of their clothing for over 40% off list price, we knew we were onto a winner.
It was quite busy, which you’d expect, but there was only one store that had resorted to getting people to queue up to even get into it, and this was Superdry. It only opened on Wednesday last week and it has been rammed solid ever since. By making people queue they give the people inside a better shopping experience and create a scarcity marketing rumour that what is inside is soooo cool that you have to queue to even get to see it.
Finally getting to the front of the queue at the Bicester Outlet Village Superdry shop
Again it was 40% off list price throughout the store but starting from a lower price than the likes of Jack Wills, they started to look like immense value.
It seems that everything in Japan is cool for kids these days and Superdry is one of those brands that seems to inherently understand both scarcity marketing and offering great design with great value. It’s not surprising they are so popular.
So what did the kids buy?
It was no shock to me that the perception of Superdry being cooler than Jack Wills hit home (as it had a queue), so they spent all of their budget in there and are now giving us a hard time over not having the chosen presents until Christmas.
So does this mean that Superdry is the coolest brand in Britain?
It does for me, sitting here writing this in my new Superdry shirt! (yours for a bargain £20.99)
Ten brands that will fail – starting with the dodo
In an article written by 24/7 Wall Street, there is a great article about the ten brands that will disappear in 2010.
Now for UK based businesses, they will not be as familiar with all of the ten brands but the lessons are pretty much the same for any dying brand you can think of the world over.
Adapt or die.
None of these have adapted fast enough, so they’re all dying.
Lets deal with each in turn
1. Newsweek
It’s printed news. The end.
The fact that you are reading this on a blog and I read the original article on another blog just goes to show that we are gathering most of our information online these days. It used to be that the credibility was offline in print, but that just isn’t the case anymore. There’s good stuff in both and crap in both too. The man problem is that advertising has followed the readership and not many of the old media barons have worked out how to monetize the new media platforms, because Google seems to own the space at present.
2. Motorola
I’m surprised it’s lasted this long really. Back in the mid 90’s I had an original Nokia Orange phone (that was in the days when they didn’t even have model numbers) and we needed two more mobiles, so we bought Motorola MR1’s (luggable rather than mobile) as they were half the price.
Big mistake.
Non functioning menus and useless interface. It was so hateful, I smashed it against the wall to give myself an excuse to buy another Nokia.
Any Motorolas I have seen since, seem just as bad.
3. Palm
Not since the Palm pilot and the shortlived ‘Pre’ have they had anything the market wants. When did they last produce anything innovative?
4. Borders
All a bit pointless. They stood for nothing and offered worse pricing than Amazon and less loveliness than Waterstones. They reminded me of how WH Smiths have been for the last ten years and I could never really think of any single occasion when I would need to go and buy from them. So I didn’t. It appears that few others did either.
5. Blockbuster
How have they survived this long against the marching digital army? If I want to watch a film, do I pay the same amount and watch it now on Virgin or Sky or drive down into the town and hire one, only to be bollocked for returning it late?
For a brilliant exchange of letters and emails between David Thorne and Blockbuster, have a read of this. It’s brilliant!
I’m sure we’ve all tried the monthly subscription thing where we can pick films and they send them to us, but it’s not actually that spontaneous is it? On a Monday, you can’t really say whether you’ll feel like a ‘romcom’ or a thriller on Friday night can you? Its a model that suits them and not us, so will never take off really big.
6. Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac
It’s named after a front bottom and a burger. Enough said.
7. Ambac
Never heard of it, sorry to see you go, It’s been a blast.
8. Eastman Kodak
To me, this is going to go down as the biggest brand ever to fail. They let the market swamp them by not seeing the digital revolution. They used to be innovators and now are in danger of being totally unknown by a new generation.
They have tried to move to digital products and even to printer paper, but the market just isn’t convinced.
I will be sad to see this go. But I will make a prediction. It will go bang and then someone will buy the name and after a few years, when they have shaken off the years of debt and structure problems, it will come back with some small innovative products that will take the market by storm. It is just too good a name to allow it to die forever. Give it ten years and it will be a force again.
9. Sun Microsystems
This isn’t one I can talk about with any authority, but for any brand to have the name of a type of computer that was superceded ten years ago seems to be a problem to me. Microsystems were the babies to replace mainframes in the 80’s weren’t they? So what relevance do they have now?
10. E*Trade
Again, I don’t know much about these other than they are some of the eejits who lent money to people who shouldn’t be getting it. Surely if they had no income and no way of repaying a loan, you shouldn’t lend them money?
Maybe this is a bit simplistic of me, but just because it has the word ‘E’ on the front of it, doesn’t make it a good business. They deserver all the failure they’re getting. Bye.
Summary
There’s no really surprises to me here. Bad businesses that haven’t evolved are failing.
I run a small design business and have done for over 18 years. It’s called Purple Circle. What we do know is very different to what we did then, because the market has changed massively. If I was still trying to sell pasted up artwork on bromide and magic marker visuals all round, do you think they’d still be buying?
No me neither.
So why have all these businesses assumed they could do the same?
I am open about the fact that I am a bit of a geeky bloke. I like to repair things. Actually I Like to take things apart and see how they work and as I have got older I have become (slightly) better at getting them back together and working again.
So if something breaks, I always start from the position of seeing if I can repair it. We all know this is a more environmental route don’t we?
But when my almost new Morphy Richards slow cooker crockpot broke (because you can’t use it on the hob to get it going – doh!!), I thought it would be a simple case of buying a new crockpot and that would be that.
So I stumbled around the Morphy Richards site and spares are listed as accessories there. It’s a ceramic pot. They break. Surely they should describe it as a replacement? I did eventually find one at £15.86 with the benefit of free delivery.
Buying spares and accessories from Morphy Richards
Spares 2 Go had one at the bargain price of £42.63
Buying one from Spares 2 Go will cost you twice as much as a new unit
And Buy Spares had one at the rather more attractive price of £15.99, but by the time you added £4.98 shipping, this came to a less attractive £21.97
Getting closer. This part only costs a bit more than a whole new unit
And then we come to Amazon. A new one, from stock with free delivery for £19.99.
Amazon come in with a bargain price of £19.99
How do they do it?
For an extra £4.13 over the cost of the cheapest delivered replacement spare part, I get the whole of the rest of the unit in a shiny box with a new warranty all delivered to home within 3 days. So where is my incentive to repair?
I don’t want to turn this into a rant, but for any brand owner, it has to be a better long term proposition to make us stay with them by incentivising a repair.
I could just have easily gone away and bought another brand and all of the retailers have some stupidly priced products in the run up to the winter months.
If the price of the biggest and most breakable part was around half of the lowest price you could by the whole unit from scratch, there would be no debate, you’d get on and stick with it. But when it is virtually the same price, however well intentioned your repair/environmental principles, you’d be silly not to take a new one.
We don’t know the brief and the client seems pretty game if the comments on this BBC News article are anything to go by, but this work is just bloody awful.
Bad typo, terrible fishy graphic and just Another case of yet another pointless place brand that will do nothing for the seaside town of Ilfracombe and even less for the design industry, other than to make it a laughing stock again.
So I thought it would be nice to share a few more howlers with you.
I'm not sure what they do, and I don't wish to find out either
In any language this is just wrong. How on earth didn’t they see the problem with this graphic. Perhaps they just got the quality of work they deserved?
Again, culturally this may be right, but it looks wrong to me
As above, i’m not sure what they do. I ca make a guess, but i’d probably be wrong. It’s truly horrible in terms of work but if happy penises are your thing then it is bang on brief.
What's the matter with the sex of the child anyway?
Who’s to blame here? The designer, the client or the sign maker. Anyway it doesn’t matter now but this is another awful example of a total lack of care for your work. Even the worst typographer in the world couldn’t seriously produce work this bad could they?
Mending computers is p*ss easy
Another penis inspired logo rolls of the production line.Anotherhappy client pays his money for appalling work to make us smile.
The logo for the Arlington Paedophile center
The last and one of the worst examples today comes from Arlington. Funny, funny, funny. Was it a joke idea for a client the designer hated that they accidentally approved?
Well it went to far. They used it and now it’s in the public domain. Oops.
I love Ilfracombe, we used to go there when I was a kid, and I love the art and grace of logo design. This really crappy place brand/logo does nothing for them, it just makes them look a little bit silly.
Purple Circle had another good night at the Cream Awards last night with another Gold for Nottingham Community Housing Association Annual report, NCHA United.
NCHA Annual report, built around the design of a 70’s football programme
We also got a bronze for the work for Nottingham Hoods. They are the new basketball team for Nottingham, where the client liked the design so much, he had it tattooed onto his arm.
Matt, modelling his shiny new Hoods kit
You can see more of that work here. and their Manager Lee English getting his tattoo here.
Overall, that is our 11th and 12th awards of the year, so a pretty good year.
If any of you know me, you’ll know that I’ve been a struggling smoker for most of my adult life. It’s my own version of scarcity marketing, in that I find it quite easy to give it up for a month or so, and then think I’m missing out on something, so drift back into it and the cycle begins again.
I recently wrote a piece here about Knob Creek and their restricted supply which is pushing demand (and prices) up.
Well now, Marlboro are doing it with their website. You can only access this site if you are USA based and are prepared to add your social security details and full address to prove you are over 21 years of age (even though you can buy them at aged 18 years)
The very frustrating Marlboro website that i can get this far into, only to be told that as I don't live in the USA and can't prove i'm 21 or over, I can't access!
They don’t have a UK page at all. You can only get past the first page if you can say what state you are in and then give them a real zip code (rather than a series of random numbers).
And, according to their figures, its working wonders. The more we are told we can’t have something or shouldn’t do something, the more we strive to do/own it. It’s our own rebel reflex in action and I’m convinced its part of their plan. They make it seem like it’s really worth getting onto and then make you really jump through hoops to get registered.
It’s working so well they are now getting 1.5 million unique visitors a month and I haven’t got a clue what they are all dying to see, because I can’t get onto the site to find out.
Clever, very clever. But very frustrating.
If anyone can get in, can they let me know how they did it?
I know I’m going on about Apple at the moment, but they do seem to be in my life a lot for all sorts of reasons.
I read today on Brand Channel that Sony are trying to become a ‘lifestyle’ brand alongside Apple. In the article Sony’s Executive VP Kazuo Hirai said that if they can offer movie downloads, game downloads and other entertainment, this would be a point of difference that is not available anywhere else.
What?
Sony are officially a Kevin Roberts Lovemark. One of those brands that we love over and above all reason. But this is evidence to me that they have totally lost the plot and are not just following the (Apple) market leaders, but they are a mile or two behind. Sony, when they launched the Walkman, created and defined a sector from scratch with the world’s smallest cassette player.
Apple’s iPod then came and took the whole sector from them, when they redefined the portable media player sector.
Sony have 33 million PlayStation users across the world, all of them plugged in to a wired or wifi’d world. It would seem a far stronger bet to build on this as a point of differentiation than trying to do it through their Bravia TV, Cyber shot cameras and e-readers, which are all a bit ‘me-too’ at best.
If they created a rental or fractional ownership system for games, entertainment, movies and music via the PS3, they would be onto a far more differentiatable (if there is such a word) product and one that has 33 million headstarts.
Otherwise for me, its Apple all the way.
I can imagine Apple launching a wifi TV – they already have a device that slings your picture from your mac to your TV, a wifi camera (that will be the iPhone 3gs then) and you can already read books on the iPod Touch/iPhone.
Sony have become a follower. They used to be radical. Lovemarks do radical things. Sony need to do something radical again, or they are in danger of us falling out of love with them little by little.
One week. Three different examples of Apple getting their act together in terms of their customer services.
Apple are in serious danger of becoming mainstream at the moment. They seem to be on everyone’s shopping list and the research recently showed that more houses that have some wealth are choosing to add macs to their home computing set-ups. I wrote some more about this here.
What normally happens in line with this growth and move to mainstream, is a level of corporate arrogance that starts the beginning of the end for any brand. But Apple seem to be behaving slightly differently, with three examples that have happened to me this week.
1. My laptop broke
This has never happened to me before (yeah yeah yeah, I believe you). So I rang my old friends at Jigsaw who supplied it and they asked me to send it over for a free check to identify the issue. They went through it’s history and advised that it was just under two years old, so out of warranty. As the screen was totally dead, this sounded expensive.
The next morning, they called to say that it was a graphics card that had gone. Ouch. That sounds even more expensive. They went on to say that a few of them had gone wrong recently and Apple weren’t happy with this, so would be replacing them free. Result.
The machine was returned by taxi the next day in full working order again at no cost, even though it was out of warranty. Wow.
2. I couldn’t install Pages
This is part of a longer story but I am testing iWork and Pages (Apple’s version of MS Office/Word) in order that we switch all of the Purple Circle machines over to it, next time we need to upgrade. The cost difference for this with 30 licenses is £510 from Apple to £7950 for a Word upgrade. Who says Apple is the expensive option? Pages isn’t perfect, but it is very easy to use and with a more powerful dictionary, will be a better product that Word anyway. I had previously had the trial version downloaded and then wanted to install the full version which I had purchased, but every time I tried, it kept on saying my trial version had expired. aaaargh!
So i called the FREEPHONE number on the pack and spoke to a lovely person in Cork (just across the water from my family in Crosshaven), who spent 22 minutes talking me through solving the issue, which she did first time, again at NO cost to me. Wow two.
3. A broken Ipod
My Godson James had a problem with his iPod and took it back to John lewis from whence it came. After two weeks of sitting on it, they declared it broken and have just given him a brand new one for nothing. admittedly within warranty, but still a new for old replacement without any undue delay.
We have been huge fans of Apple since they declared they were going to be different with their unbelievable SuperBowl TV ad in 1984. It was at the time, the best ad I had ever seen and still enthralls me now. It was one of the reasons that I entered the creative world as I wanted to be associated with this sort of brilliance.
I liked it so much, I thought I’d share it with you again.
Apple are breaking the Microsoft monopoly and they are doing it by producing better products and caring more about their customers. Any brand that does this deserves long term success.
This is a set of guidelines released by Apple in December 1996 as to how you should go about building the perfect website. They still seem to ring rather true today, and if applied would improve many current websites.
The Apple guide as to how to design and build a website from 1996
A few of their lessons that they go into in some detail.
Take Advantage of Keywords
Provide a Directory of Your Site
Show Users Where They Are
Minimize the Need to Scroll and Resize
Avoid Dead Ends
Include Links to the Key Locations in Your Web Site
Use Familiar Terminology
Define a Language Style (or Use an Existing Style)
And many, many more good points
They do say however that you should Keep Pages Short, which is great in theory but perhaps not the best thing to do in order to make yourself as SEO friendly as you can be.
Considering this is nearly 13 years old and was sent to me as a piece of good practice, there is an astonishing amount we could still learn from if we implemented half their ideas today.
Johnny Lyle's new brand thinking 