One of the biggest areas of work for me at present is delivering a brand experience for different brands. It’s about living your values through what you do, how you do it and who you do it for.
Hot Wheels is a brand to admire as they are so clear and consistent in what they do. We all had the orange track in our bedrooms as kids and made our toy cars do all sorts of impossible things. Well, now they have taken it one stage further, by bringing their brand to life. Literally.
Enough said.
I was looking at some mobile usage stats for a client of mine last night and I couldn’t help but notice how much RIM (the operating system for Blackberry is falling away). Research by Gartner shows that whilst it’s still hugely significant, it’s falling off fast. And, this got me thinking.
We have no Blackberries left in our house. All have suffered white screen of death or just been quietly replaced in favour of iPhones. Please don’t accuse me of being an Apple Fan Boy, as I have been using their computers for well over 20 years and have never owned a PC.
But, I wonder whether to survive, RIM, the owner of Blackberry, have to ditch their esoteric and unreliable operating system, in favour of the lighter but increasingly popular Android system – which is growing the fastest.
This would be a huge change and it would bring the market back to being a fight/choice between a few key operating systems, but it would shed a huge cost for RIM and give them the chance to bring their brand back up on the back of decent, usable handset design. It feels to me more like they design within the capability of what their system can deliver, rather than what customers want. This is never sustainable. Designing Apps for RIM is a nightmare and I guess fewer and fewer will bother to do it and just build for Android and IOS.
It may be an old argument, but it’s not one I’ve seen before for RIM. For me, it gives them a far better chance of survival.
We once had a client tell us that it was impossible to differentiate in his market (he sold tiles). He told us bvery clearly that it was all about price, price, price. As you can imagine, we didn’t quite agree with him.
Well, know, some 15 years later, it looks like we have been proved right after all.
This new survey in Marketing Week about the top global brands shows an amzing statistic or two.
Brand seems to have now become more important than anything in making a purchase decision.
Making a decision to buy on price alone has declined in the past 10 years from 16% to 7%, while deciding to buy on brand alone has increased from 43% to 59%.
So it’s no longer price, price, price. It’s brand, brand, brand.
When I was at college studying marketing, this was a classic piece for us to learn. Maslow proposes that as we grow and attain civilisation and wealth, we move up the hierarchy of needs.
But I think the model is still potentially relevant, just far more muddled than it used to be.
Replace the Physiological needs with getting the mortgage paid and staying out of fuel poverty and you cover a very large proportion of the population.
But what has changed in my opinion, and what matters to people who control brands, is that he progression through the hierarchy is no longer, well, hierarchical. I believe many people now jump from the bottom right to the top. I’ll explain.
For many this is as good as it’s going to get. If you have ever read the book ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ (you should) the reason for all his pain and violence is that even though he is from a normal middle class family, that just wasn’t enough. He wanted recognition too.
Change the word ‘recognition’ to ‘self worth’ and you have an important jump.
If this is as good as it’s going to get for many. They still want more. They want to know they are doing things with their life that have worth, that makes them feel good about themselves.
So for me, it’s an early trend. More people doing more good, creative and artistic things – not for profit, but for self worth.
So if you own or control a brand, it’s time to start thinking what’s in it for them. How can they feel better by hanging out with your brand.
Howies summed it up years ago in a mailer, when they asked whether I just had enough stuff. In truth, we all have enough stuff, so what I’m saying is that we need a little more thoughtfulness as well.
You may have seen this little story bubbling under over the last week or so but it says an awful lot to me about brands and their respective behaviours.
In brief, Brewdog were at the British Institute of Innkeeping awards and fully expected to win the title of Bar Operator of the Year. They were on the top table and their name was on the trophy. It was that nailed on.
But when the announcement came, it wasn’t Brewdog, but someone else. They were surprised to say the least and when they saw Brewdog’s name on the trophy, rightly refused to accept it.
The independent judges couldn’t believe it had happened, but what did happen.
Well, it appears that Diageo, wanted any winner but Brewdog, so told the local BII team that if they won, they would withdraw any sponsorship in any BII event for the future. Strong arm tactics to say the least, so they panicked and gave the award elsewhere.
But social media has real power these days and the story came out anyway, but so did all the backlash against Diageo.
So what does it say about these brands?
Diageo, is old school. Flawless, never makes mistakes and wants to control every single element of their brand and who it hangs out with. They rather forgot that you don’t decide how your brand is perceived, your customers do. It shows to me the fear they are facing with craft beers, low run, carefully produced products that are worth paying a premium for.
For Brewdog, it can be nothing but good news. Look what happened when Radio One banned the Sex Pistols. It launched them! So the Punk beer brand is banned by the establishment.
I was in Brewdog Nottingham on Saturday afternoon. It was busy, the beer was good. A victory for Punk.
Thanks to Brewdog shareholder Lisa Harlow for telling me about this story.
Tesco as a business isn’t doing badly. It’s profits are still huge, even if they are slightly down on previous quarters in the UK.
But for me, this is masking a much bigger brand problem and that is because nothing they offer is special any more. They don’t make customers feel valued, they don’t surprise or delight us, they just keep chipping away at prices by chipping away at suppliers who have no choice but to chip away at the quality.
We have always believed that the way a brand should behave is to decide a price and then see how good you can make the product for that target price. To me, Tesco look like they are aiming to produce all of their goods as cheaply as possible and not seeing how good they can make them for the money.
This is a short term profit boost that leads to long term decline.
Look at the section with motoring and cycling products. If you are even slightly into either pastime, you will see that what they are selling is utter crap and not cheap either. This is one tiny category in a huge store, but it’s reflection reaches far and wide in perception. If everything in the store is as badly produced and as nasty as this, why would I trust the brand overall?
Unless they up their game, start focusing on quality again and start treating their customers as intelligent individuals who do have a choice, this will be the first of very many profit warnings to come.
This is a little piece I wrote for Angels by Day, our favourite day nursery, a few years ago. In the end it was heavily edited as it was perhaps a little scary for little people to cope with, but here it is in full. I think the logic behind it still makes lots and lots of sense.
Hello I’m an apple. A lovely Bramley Apple.
The nicest apple in the whole wide Veld.
I’m so tired. I just feel horrible and battered and bruised and awful. I haven’t always been like this, so let me tell you a little about my life.
I was born about three months ago in south Africa in a beautiful warm sunny place in a shady orchard with a lovely river running at the bottom of the garden. I was sure my life was going to be idyllic. I remember when I was just a blossom having big plans to be the tastiest apple the world had ever seen.
When I started to sprout, I was sprayed with this nasty chemical stuff. They told me it was to protect me and help me grow, but it just made me smell funny and feel all dirty. After this I went on a bit of a growth spurt and pretty soon was one of the big boys.
And just as I was starting to feel like a leggy teenager all spotty and gangly and a bit too big for my body, this massive machine came and pulled us off the tree and well fell into a huge washing machine. We tumbled about for ages and ages and I thought we were being washed, but when we rolled out, I had this horrid waxy stuff all over my skin. Eeeugh!
I fell onto another big conveyer belt and shot along bashing into my brothers, cousins and loads of apples I’d never even met before. It was very scary. I just wanted to go home to my simple life.
Suddenly we shot into a spinning machine and were all wrapped in a strange blue paper, a bit like toilet roll but harder on my young fresh skin and I was thrown into a box in a little solitary compartment that didn’t quite fit my shape properly that made me really uncomfortable and my bottom ache.
But then it got worse. They started to chill the box down until we were all shivering with cold.
I don’t remember much about the next few months other than it was dark and cold and we rolled about with the movement of the sea and the bumping of some different lorries and trucks. For the whole of this time we were freezing, dark and very lonely. I couldn’t believe my life could get any worse…
…but it did.
We were thrust into the light feeling travel sick and awful and thrown onto a shelf ready for the lovely humans to come and eat us.
But back to the present day, you’ve seen what I’ve been through and how hard a life I’ve had. My vitamins have gone, I’m waxy, tired and horrible. I’ll never live up to my potential taste. Eat me if you dare, but I bet you wouldn’t swap my life for yours.
The nicest apple in the world
Hello I’m a Bramley apple. I heard about my cousin from South Africa, the poor thing, he has been tortured for his whole life and I look at how I’ve been brought up and feel so sorry for him and the poor people who have to eat him.
I grew up in Southwell, just North of Nottingham. The farmer who looked after me was a lovely man. He let me grow up slowly and nurtured me with natural and healthy food so I grew big and strong and tasty – in my own good time.
I can’t wait for the day when he’ll pick me to be the one for your tea. Believe me I’m ready. Its what I’m trained to do. You see I’m fresh, naturally strong and the kids will just LOVE me.
This weekend was a milestone for brands everywhere. One of the strongest – Brand Beckham – admitted they had made a mistake when they wore their matching leather suits to a Versace party in 1999. According to Vogue David said “I look back on some stuff and think I can’t believe I actually wore that,” he said. “I have no regrets, though – I knew at the time it was good!”
This may not sound too significant at first glance, but I think it is. I really think it is.
In those days, long ago in the life of brands, when glossy and shiny was the norm over today’s more matt black world, brands needed to be flawless. In 2001, this song by The Ones confirmed it.
So what can we learn?
Well, according to Trendwatching.com, brands now need to show their flaws for their fans to continue to love them. Flawless is no more and brands, flaws and all are where it’s at.
So for me, this move by the Beckham’s only serves to show what a brilliant brand strategy they have been running for years and that it’s an early sign that brands with flaws win.
I’m not sure if I have seen such a seismic shift in brand thinking for years and I think it is so significant a change that it will affect every single brand in the developed world over the coming years.
It’s a big subject, so i’ll be adding more to it soon.
(Thankyou to HolyMoly for the use of the Beckham picture)
There is an old saying in the design community that changing a logo if you change nothing else is as useful as rearranging the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. I wrote about this in 2010 when Waterstone’s unveiled their less than radical new logo. I was slightly less thann complementary about the work itself and the reasons behind the change. You can read that here.
But it would appear that they have now made things even worse by going back to the old logo, without the apostrophe.
Now i’m not going to get as pathetic as the Daily Mail with their typically over the top three headlines about it;
Move sparked outrage among customers – Really. That is utter crap. Who cares that much? Perhaps if some of the people who are so outraged by the lack of an apostrophe went into Waterstone’s and bought a book or two from them, they wouldn’t be in this much trouble.
Punctuation experts say it’s ‘grammatically incorrect’ – Yes, it’s a logo, a name of a business, not a piece of work being peer reviewed by academics. Advertising generally has always played a little fast and loose with punctuation. the ‘comma and’ or starting sentences with an ‘And’ debate came from the creative industry.
Twitter users warn the change is another step towards the ‘extinction’ of the apostrophe – Who cares? There are bigger things to worry about.
But the fundamental point is that Waterstone’s still haven’t changed their business and this sadly will do absolutely nothing to halt their slide. I am a very big book fan and consume books by the metre but I buy very little from Waterstone’s. Waterstones or even waterstones.com.
Unless they can engage us again, all the rebrands and debrands in the world will do nothing to stop this lovely old tug boat from sinking.
I was lucky enough to be staying in Holt last night at Byfords Posh B&B (which is fabulous) and had a bit of time to kill, so took myself off to find a haircut. Looking quite unassuming in the centre of the brilliant little town was the Tonsorial Artist. And I have to say it is the best barbers experience I have ever had.
Firstly the music. Laid back and cool music by the Skatalites and two guys working there with luxuriant facial hair and a total focus on doing a great job.
I had my meagre barnet tidied up by the slightly scary looking Doug, who was great, incredibly knowledgable and he gave me a great cut.
All this and it was only £11.50 – admittedly more than I pay at my local barbers, but it felt like a real treat.
I love places like this and I would love to get my hands on their brand to do some work with – It would franchise out beautifully and would have people queuing out the door if it was done as well as they have delivered their outlet.. People who are doing great work and clearly differentiating themselves in what must be a quite crowded market.
If you’re ever in Holt, stay at Byfords Posh B&B and get a hair cut by the Tonsorial Artists.
Johnny Lyle's new brand thinking 