Category: brand values

Brand Experience, brand values, branding

Writing for brands – creating connections

One Day by David Nicholls - Err, wow.
One Day by David Nicholls – Err, wow.

I’ve read two books in the last few weeks and both have been absolutely amazing, phenomenal, beautiful pieces of writing – But only one of them actually made me truly upset – and it wasn’t the one I was expecting.

So I set about thinking why this could be?

And I believe it’s all about the connections you make with your audience.

The book ‘One Day’ by David Nicholls is an everyday sort of tale about a couple who never quite get it together and it revisits their life over 20 years on the same day. A unique concept, beautifully described, starting off as they met on their last day of college. It’s ‘what could/should have been’ throughout the book.

The second Book is a far weightier subject matter and is ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak. A story narrated by the character who is ‘Death himself’ and telling the tale of a young girl struggling with life and literature through the war torn German city of Molching during the Second World War.

Both are beautifully written. Both paint great big expansive pictures in the way they describe the scenes and both are worth every moment you will invest in reading them.

But I only connected with ‘One Day’. maybe I’m shallow and divorced from the realities of Nazi Germany, but I never quite connected with the characters, despite being captivated by the story.

So, when I write for brands now I’m trying to think about it from their viewpoint. How can I create connections, get inside their minds and think what they’re thinking. If we can do that, we can create amazing brands.

Updated

I thought a lot about ‘The Book Thief’ last night and another layer of the writing drifted into my thoughts. I guess it is the first time I have seen or read a story like this from the victims point of view. We are taught a lot about The War in school and standard British history and my visit to the Holocaust Museum in LA was still one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, but this book paints the picture of deprivation and fear for the everyday german souls. Those that would normally get forgotten for being on the ‘losing’ side. It makes me wonder whether we are actually winning any form of war on terror, or just beating the normal people to death, when we should be waging war on their governments.

brand values, branding

How trends and creativity become contagious

This is a brilliant little film that really looks into how trends take off. It references Malcolm Gladwell and his Tipping Point theory. It is beautifully filmed all over New York and makes so much sense throughout. It’s creative, well thought through and relevant – without being up itself.

The killer point for me in the whole 13 minutes is the supposition by Jon Cohen, CEO of Cornerstone that any brand needs to be based on passion. I agree 100%.

The other great point is that what influences one person will just not be the same as what influences another. So we have to be individual. Create things because they’re great, not because the research said that they would be broadly acceptable to a mass audience. That’s a way to run a big brand and try not to mess it up too badly, but certainly not a way to create one in the first place. If everyone else is zigging, then zag.

Briliant, brilliant, brilliant.

And thanks to my mate Patrick Chapman, Marketing Director of WDA Automotive for pointing it in my direction.

brand values, branding

Vegetarian Shoes – brilliant promo video

I have to confess I thought this was a joke when I saw the domain name. But I had a look at their promo video and I think it is great. Funny, quirky and nowhere near earnest – as you would probably expect it to be.

I don’t know what the shoes are like, but I have noticed that they do offer a resoling service which is a great idea.

To compare another great south coast brand, when Body Shop started, they used to offer a bottle refilling service. Just send the bottle back to them and they’ll refill it for much less than the price of a new one. Once Body Shop stopped doing this, they lost a big part of their soul. I hope the Vegetarian Shoes people learn from this mistake and stick to their brand values.

brand values, branding

How to ride a Giraffe – By John Timpson – Mini review

How to Ride a Giraffe - By John Timpson

I was given the book ‘How to ride a Giraffe – By John Timpson’ by the people from the rather excellent Real Business magazine and so thought it would be well worth a read, but I have to say that some of the first chapters really bored me – the history was fascinating but it was all a bit self congratuatory. But then it got to Chapter seven ‘Only great people need apply’.

In this chapter, rather than looking back at what a clever bloke he is, John Timpson opens up about the recruitment of Timpson’s staff. His conclusion is that if they had only tried to recruit cobblers, they would have had a choice of 30,000 people or so, but by aiming to recruit people with the right attitude, they had a far wider choice and they could easily teach them to mend shoes, given a year or so of training.

This is something that is very easy to overlook – particularly when times are tough. We are in danger of reverting to type and taking on people who are a safe pair of hands and can be dropped in to do a safe job for the business. But this can only ever put you in a holding pattern. Safe people will only ever maintain or slightly decline your business. Stars make it grow.

If you look at how US basketball teams recruit, they look for giant kids. This is their version of buying the hardware. They know that again, they can teach some (or maybe even many) of them to play basketball – ie, adding the software. You can’t teach a kid to be a giant, just as you can’t teach an experienced cobbler to be a happy person with a customer service attitude, so buy the hardware and add the software with good training and mentoring.

I’m reserving judgement as to whether the whole book is worth reading, but so far, this chapter alone makes it well worth the effort.

brand values, branding

Best Buy in UK – Well no, not really

I don’t want to appear like a freaky TV pricing groupie, but I got an email this morning from Best Buy. The US phenomenon that was going to take our market by storm when they opened in Lakeside shoppping Centre.

Forgive me for being underwhelmed, but like the sad act I can be at times, I price checked them against my usual suspects Dixons and John Lewis. And guess what?

They’re really a worst buy. It’s £319.99 at ‘best Buy’ with a normal warranty.

Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from Best Buy
Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from Best Buy

It’s far cheaper at Dixons at only £274.72

Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from Dixons
Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from Dixons

And an excellent value £296 with a not quite free five year guarantee at John Lewis.

Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from John Lewis
Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV from John Lewis

We are now working in an almost perfect market, where all the buyers have all the information and the lowest price wins all the business. For me that means you choose whether it is worth an extra £22 for a four year extended warranty (it clearly is here!) with John Lewis.

Best Buy? Brand values that deliver what they promise?

You judge for yourself.

Updated

Now, i’m not going to suddenly claim to be the people’s champion, but I did notice a rather large spike in my traffic to the site yesterday and, guess what? Best Buy have reduced the price of the Samsung LE32C450 32″ LCD HD Ready TV to  a more reasonable £278.99. A reduction of £41 or in percentages, 12.8%. Is that the power of bloggers like us who Andrew Marr likes so little, or is it a pure coincidence. Again, you be the judge.

Blogger Power - the newly reduced Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV
Blogger Power - the newly reduced Samsung LE32C450 32" LCD HD Ready TV

 

brand values, branding

Howies and the slow drift down river

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I love the Howies brand. A year or so ago, I described them as a star brand. But a little before that I had been very critical of them for missing their target audience (by miles!) with their hand me down range. Well it seems like i’m not the only one that is thinking the same way. I have a watch on ebay to see what comes up from lots of the brands I love and when I saw this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

A treasured collection of 29 Howies catalogues dating back to 2002

My first instinct was to want to buy them as they grace the shelves beautifully of any designer. But when you scroll down and see what the seller fuzzywiggins has said, it makes you realise quite how far the brand has drifted down river from where it used to be.

29 Howies Catalogues From 2002 to Autumn 2010 If you know Howies you know these are so much more than just clothing catalogues, they're loaded with interesting stories and info... These books contain the story of how a once ethical and environmentally sound clothing company catering for active types morphed into purveyor of £200 chinese jeans for the middle aged bourgeois hobbyist. Enjoy the tales of the joy of canoeing to work, or building a half pipe in the back garden. Better still the exhilaration of travelling around Ireland in a V8 powered Winebago (Go Wales' Bio diesel fueled van must have failed its MOT?) Like the sea, Howies...
29 Howies Catalogues From 2002 to Autumn 2010

This description crucifies them for what they have done with the brand. These catalogues are clearly being sold as the owner of all of them has so totally fallen out of love with what Howies do and what Howies now stand for. I have to say, it is now some time since I bought anything from them. I just wouldn’t pay £200 for a pair of jeans – by anyone, let alone £200 plus for a waterproof mac.

My advice. Buy Timberland out. They must realise they made a mistake with a little provincial company like Howies. Let Howies go back to where they were, what they stood for and what we all loved about it. Howies has sadly become a pseudo corporate business, whereas before they just made beautiful clothes that really lasted, for people who were into skate, surf and biking.

Update

An almost complete Howies catalogue collection that sold for £51 on ebay
An almost complete Howies catalogue collection that sold for £51 on ebay

They went for £51, which seems like an awful lot of money, but they do represent some of the best pieces of design for print that i’ve seen for many years.

Shame they sold their soul on the way there.

Brand Experience, brand values, branding

Spain is beautiful – but bust

Spain at it's best - sun, sea, sand, empty beaches and back to it's old laid back self
Spain at it’s best – sun, sea, sand, empty beaches and back to it’s old laid back self

I wrote a piece last year after I came back from a Spanish holiday, saying that Spain had sold it’s soul and gone against its own brand values of sun, sea and fun in favour of profit.

But my experience this year gave me a vague glimmer of hope.

Most of the prices seem to have dropped in the restaurants, the cabs and the beach bars. A meal for a family of four has fallen from €100 to nearer €80. Lunch in a beach bar can be easily taken for less than €40 and the people seem to have got friendlier again. Less in search of profit and far more able to smile. Perhaps they’re resigned to the fact that their business is on the verge of bust. There are hundreds upon hundreds either gone or clearly about to go.

New build apartments are still all empty, although the prices have fallen from €220k Euro last year to a little over €120k this year.

Local figures being quoted are that of the 4.5 million properties on the Costa del Sol, only around 20% are occupied at any time – and you can tell by how deathly quiet it is. The traffic is lighter, the beaches are quieter, even the shops are quieter.

But where they win is in the places that aren’t built up. Those that haven’t been built all over still have real charm and the most fantastic food. Yes, Puerto Banus is vile, showy, ludicrously expensive and not for me – it’s not a coincidence that it has the word anus in the middle of it you know –  but drive ten miles down the coast beyond Estepona and you are back into places where the Brits and Irish haven’t yet built all over and destroyed.

I genuinely think that Spain will do a ‘Greece’ and go bust, for the rest of Europe to bail out. But if you rent somewhere on the beach, buy the local food and wine and enjoy the sun and laid back atmosphere, there are still fewer places in the world I’d rather be.

This year, for the first time in many, many years, I didn’t want to come home – and that’s what Spain should be – and always used to be about.

brand values, branding

The X Factor effect and how brands need to recognise the changes in youth behaviour

The X Factor effect and how brands need to recognise the changes in youth behaviour
The X Factor effect and how brands need to recognise the changes in youth behaviour

I’m 44 years old and grew up in a village outside Plymouth in Devon. Having moved there from Oxford, it never felt like to most cosmopolitan place but I don’t think my childhood years were that different to millions of others of my age.

But young people today are totally different in some of the things they think are normal.

When I was on holiday recently I was talking to a good friend of ours Chris Bentley who lives in Kent.

What we noticed was that when we were kids, if you wanted to speak out loud in a language lesson (only French and German in those days) and try to put on the best accent you could, then you were seriously weird.

But now kids seem to love languages. Listening to my 12 year old son taking care of all the ordering for us on holiday and priding himself on the Spanish accent would never have happened when we were kids. Just use English louder was far more normal behaviour.

And then there’s singing and dancing.

I recently went to an School X Factor event where 13 finalists, who had been whittled down from many more entrants, were prepared to stand in front of all their peers and sing their hearts out. The standard was amazing.

Again, if you danced at a school disco as a lad, you would have been lynched.

But any brand needs to address these changes. Staying cool is tricky at the best of times, as tastes and norms change so completely over long periods. Even Google is being pegged back by the US investment market as it is not showing the growth it once was and is being overwhelmed by Twitter and Facebook in many areas.

Apple are now the most valuable brand according to the same Fortune article, but can even they keep it up for another generation?

So whilst looking at how your brand presents itself, sometimes it’s not just a design change that’s needed, it’s a cultural, brand definition change.

And that’s far more scary.

brand values

Anywhere, better, best – in an age of austerity, it just makes sense

New Orleans floods from the air - the perfect place to show the concept of anywhere, better, best in action
New Orleans floods from the air – the perfect place to show the concept of anywhere, better, best in action

I’ve just written a bit of our latest thinking on the Purple Circle blog. You can read that here in full.

It came from Kelly Herrick, but in summary, our thinking goes like this.

If you were in New Orleans when the floods hit, you needed to get anywhere to save yourself. Up a tree was okay for a short time. It was about survival.
When the water subsided and you could get to safety, a better situation was in a football stadium with hot water and a bed for the night.
When you eventually were rehoused in a new and safe area, you reached the best position.

In some ways, many companies and brands are in the same position. Parts of what they are doing are in the anywhere section and parts are in the better, or maybe even the best, so why change all of it at once?

But have a read and comment away if you disagree.