Category: branding

brand values, branding

VW Advertising through the ages

VW_logoVW ads were one of the reasons I joined the design industry. I always thought they were brilliant, even when I was growing up – way before I understood the power of branding, brand values and the actual effect they were trying to create with the VW = Reliable link.

So here are a few ads. Starting with my favourite of them all that is a new US ad.

And then followed by the oldest one I could find. This was written by David Ogilvy – My all time advertising hero and writer of the most influential advertising book of it’s day called ‘Ogilvy on Advertising‘.

When you consider the age of this ad, it is remarkable how many of the visual cues are still used today by the latest generation of VW ad designers.

Think Small - an Early ad by David Ogilvy for VW - Look at how similar the design is to the VW ads of today!
Think Small - an Early ad by David Ogilvy for VW - Look at how similar the design is to the VW ads of today!

And then one from the 80’s era of shoulder pads and visible wealth with Paula Hamilton as the star of the show

Then a more recent one again that is quite clever and funny, but showed how they were playing the quality and reliability theme out. Maybe to the point of doing it to death.

branding

Carluccio’s Nottingham – A review or two

Carluccio's Nottingham - Lovely simple, light, airy, friendly, tasty, Italian food
Carluccio's Nottingham - Lovely simple, light, airy, friendly, tasty, Italian food

I had been quite excited about Carluccio’s opening in Nottingham and managed to miss the opening night, but have now been and sampled their lovely food.

I went yesterday with my mate Tim Garratt (Nottingham’s most prolific blogger) for lunch and it (not he) was gorgeous and great value. It was also packed by 13.00 with people waiting for seats when we left.

We both had two courses from the fixed price menu of a bruschetta to start and then some chicken in breadcrumbs thing to follow. Gorgeous, simple food without any pretention but the sweetest tomatoes you will try this side of venice and for me, the nearest I have found anyone coming to the quality and tastiness of the bruschetta I had in Rome some years ago. With (soft) drinks, bread, coffees and service it all came to £34.00. Not bargain bucket stuff, but really good value for such a lovely meal, with quick friendly service.

So I’ve been again today for a brunch. That was maybe even nicer. Scrambled eggs with mushrooms on gorgeous oil soaked italian toasted bread. Three of us went and all had similar versions of an italian brekkie and it came to £27.00. Again not for nothing, but worth every penny.

We left around midday, just as Jamies up the road was opening. They had a queue. I’m still to try it for myself, but the light friendliness and tasty food of Carluccio’s will be hard to beat.

Jamie's Italian Nottingham - A queue for opening
Jamie's Italian Nottingham - A queue for opening
branding

A five year prediction for professional services 2011-2016

I did a presentation today to some lawyers and an architect at the PM Forum in Nottingham and it was great fun, but in doing the research for it, I was able to learn an enormous about and now feel confident making a prediction for the future structure of professional services businesses. So here goes.

Over the next five years, many creative companies, architectural practices, website producers, project managers, QS’s, writers, translators and any individual who is able to essentially sell themselves directly to their contact list, will do just that. There will be a huge splintering of bigger firms to create hundreds and thousands of sole trader/micro businesses. The excuse may well be more time with the kids, but it will be as much to do with security. Taking the responsibility for earning your own income and choosing your own work.

I also believe that the legal profession will work counter cyclically. When the effects of ‘Tesco Law’ come into play in October 2011, there will be a race to create bigger and bigger firms to be able to compete with national priced legal businesses such as Quality Solicitors. As was discussed today at the PM Forum, this will be far more scary to those lawyers who sell to consumers, but the effects and the price knock-on will doubtless hit the B2B market too.

So in five years time, the law firms will probably begin breaking up again understanding that consumers want a more personalised service. The little splinter businesses working from home will realise that they are working mainly with one or two key partners and will join forces to create micro companies again. This will trigger a new wave of mergers and acquisition in all these sectors. Big firms will be back, but not until 2016.

There will be huge opportunities for branding and creating differentiation in every sector and it won’t all be about logos.

It should be an exciting ride.

brand values, branding

Paul Bennett – Ideo – 20 minutes to change your thinking

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.

Part two

It took a while, but I found it, so here’s part two

Brand Experience, branding

Admiral Insurance – Brilliant again

Admiral_insurance_logo
Admiral Insurance – Looking out for their customers

It’s going to sound like i’m in the pocket of these insurance types as I am again impressed with the customer service from Admiral Insurance. I wrote about their brilliant call centres here.

My mate Tim Garratt has had nothing but trouble with his.

But my experience is totally different.

I have just put my personalised plates on my new car. That should be simple. But I had to take them off my old car and drive a different car in the meantime and also happened to change my wife’s car at around the same time too. So that was six calls in less than three months.

So on Saturday, I knew what to expect. The lady who answered in the UK call centre called Victoria didn’t dissapoint. I knew the script. “You do know Mr Lyle that there will be a £17.50 admin fee to cover the cost of the change?”

I said I did as I had paid it five times in three months.

“Well I don’t think you should pay it again then”, said our hero Victoria. “I’ll just speak to my Manager”.

A few moments later, she comes back on and confirmed that I had more than covered my admin fees and they would waive any fee this time.

They did the change for free, but in the meantime got a very happy customer who was clearly smiling down the phone.

I have said many, many times before that if you want to create brand loyalty you need to surprise and delight your customers. Give them things they’re not expecting and generally try and stand in their shoes.

Admiral are doing this incredibly well for such a big company. As long as the renewal cost is there or thereabouts, will get my multi-car policy business next year again.

branding

Debranding cigarettes

Celebrities smoking ad looking rather uncool doing it - In fact they all look rather haggard and pinched
Celebrities smoking and looking rather uncool doing it - In fact they all look rather haggard and pinched

As a former smoker who started when I was very young, I can’t help but think that the government have got it 100% totally wrong by aiming to remove all the branding from cigarette packaging and driving them under the counter.
Don’t they realise that all they will do is make them cool again?

Most normal people have got bored of smoking. It’s just not that much fun for the obvious downsides, but now it’s getting naughty again i’m quite tempted to start again.

Martin Lindstrom’s brilliant book Buyology proved scientifically that smokers were actually turned on by the ‘smoking kills’ symbols’ on the pack. it triggered a reaction of almost religious fervour.  Driving them under the counter should have them foaming at the mouth and salivating at newsagent’s windows. Pavlov’s smoking dog.

Call me a cynic if you wish, but again, this allows the government to stand on the high ground and claim ignorance.
Banning smoking in public places did nothing to the rates of smoking, it just closed lots of pubs and working men’s clubs. It removed liberty and choice whilst at the same time keeping up the tax revenue from smoking. Smokers more than pay for the entire NHS and have the advantage of dying younger, so it is not in the government’s interest to actually stop people smoking, but it helps their perception if they appear as though that’s what they want.

This move will do the same as the smoking ban and should even encourage a few more kids to give it a try.

According to the BBC this morning, 200 people a day die from smoking related illnesses every day, so they need to recruit 200 new smokers to replace them. I think this should keep them nicely on track.

If you want to stop kids smoking, you would be far better to show very uncool people smoking and looking haggard or maybe even tell them it’s good for them, like vegetables.

Thanks to wow.ie for the image

branding

Start with Why – By Simon Sinek

This is a TED lecture by the amazing Simon Sinek That my friend and former colleague Hannah Pearce pointed me towards.

I sat and watched this on Sunday and ignored everyone who tried to talk to me whilst it was on. It’s 18 minutes very well spent and will change the way you look at creativity and designing brands, businesses and products.

His belief is that all innovators think in the same way. They start with the ‘why’, rather than start with the ‘what’. So in effect, they design the idea or the reason before they begin to design the product or service that comes out of the process.

A few highlights.

1. Apple Computer are a company that start with why. Their ‘why’ happens to be to challenge the conventional way of doing things. Their ‘how’ is by designing beautiful intuitive products and their ‘what’ is computers, MP3’s, phones and all sorts of electronic gadgetry. Perhaps this is the reason I have my doubts about Apple at the moment, maybe they have been focussing a bit too much on the ‘what’ and not enough on the ‘why’.

2. If you hire people for the ‘what’, they will work for your money. If you hire people who believe what you believe, you are hiring the ‘why’ and they will work with blood, sweat and tears. This backs up what I said back here completely in my John Timpson book review.

3. When Martin Luther King had 250,000 people to hear him speak, you will notice that it was his ‘I have a dream’ speech, and not his ‘I have a plan’. Modern politicians with their twelve point plans for success seem to get it wrong  time after time after time, because it is never about the why, always about the what.

It’s really worth a watch. But do it with a notebook, like I did.

branding, Social media

Kids and social media

I thought I was pretty handy at understanding social media, its uses and its relevance to brands, but compared to my own kids, I officially know nothing.

I was watching my daughter the other day and she was tapping away at her phone. I asked what she was doing and it turned out that she was negotiating via Twitter with the CEO of BooHoo.com to get him to supply her a t-shirt for her to use in another of her projects.

The other project is promoting my son’s music career that he is building slowly via YouTube. Between them, it turns out they have been seeding the links to the videos on Justin Bieber fan sites, Robert Pattinson fan sites. She has also been asking cast members from Coronation Street to retweet the links and stories she has been placing.

It’s this total lack of fear and ability to build connections that makes social media exciting, interesting and relevant to any brand, big or small.

I’m not going on any training courses again, i’m just going to watch the kids.

branding, Living without an iPhone

Living without an iPhone – a social and business experiment

We all have too much stuff in our life. Too many possessions, too many media choices and too many ways of accessing any piece of available information from anywhere in the world.

And I’ve had enough, so i’m making a change to the way I run my life and the first stand will be against my beloved iPhone.

I am on 24/7. always checking mail, checking share prices, checking scores and checking things I don’t really need to know.

A book I read many years ago by Isaac Asimov called Azazel, stuck in my mind. I’ve blogged about it here before.

By being so on all the time, i’ve lost my downtime, my time to think, my time to learn and understand. People expect an instant response, but instant isn’t always best, it’s often quite glib, so I want to change.

For an initial one week, my iPhone is staying at home, switched off. I’ll check my emails when I am in front of my computer and i’ll try and deal with them first time.

I’m going to spend tomorrow getting rid of all the emails in my inbox. Currently 70 in number – Most of which need some sort of action. On Sunday, i’ll be into the new regime.

I’ve been a bought a new phone today. The simplest and cheapest they had in the shop. A Samsung GT-E2121b at only £9.45. A bargain from Phones 4U. Sold to me by a young lady called Adele, who thought I was a bit simple when I told her my plan.

Adele from Phones 4U Nottingham Victoria branch - Complete with perfect sign above her head
Adele from Phones 4U Nottingham Victoria branch - Complete with perfect sign above her head - That's the bloody point - I don't want emails on the go!

I’ll try and update the blog every day to let you know how I get on with it.

brand values, branding

Safari, Firefox or Chrome

Google Chrome - Better than Firefox and Safari? - certainly less crashy and slow
Google Chrome - Better than Firefox and Safari? - certainly less crashy and slow

 

I’m a bit of an Apple fan and believed they could do no wrong, but their battle with Adobe over Flash is killing them slowly and by a thousand small steps.

I don’t want Flash on my iPhone as I agree it may well slow it down even further, but I do want a browser that works.

I have had so many hanging pages in the last few weeks from Safari that I have completely switched to Google Chrome as my default Browser.

There have been a few of the most committed fans getting twitchy. Not least Tim Garratt when he got stiffed over his .mac account.

I do use Firefox as one of my browsers, but only so I can keep my shared Google calendar open as it uses a different user name and password to my other accounts. Maybe it comes back to connections again, but I never really connected with Firefox.

But Chrome is good. It is now much faster than Safari, allows clever plug-ins and seems to never crash. Even with sites that have Flash embedded on their front page.

Is Apple losing their grip? or is Safari due a major upgrade.

If you want to see a brilliant Google funded experiment with the power and processing of Chrome, have a look at this site. Put in your home Postcode, wait a few minutes and sit back and enjoy. The first few minutes are dull and then it will stagger you.