Brand Orienteering

On 11th November we were visited by Owen Stevens for a half day work shop. Owen is a one man branding consultant and his company brandorienteering.com is responsible for consulting companies on there branding style.

His original emphasise was to make us aware of what good branding is and its trigger points. Essence: Heart and soul of the brand underpins brand vision, usually in no more than 3 words.

Promise: Benefit to customers that sets your brand apart. Benefits being emotional and harder to copy. Its a relationship between you and your customer that you have a promise with the that you will not break.

Brand Personality: Arguably the most important aspect of branding and covers many topics.

Trusted; examples are ethical, sincere, dependable and honest.

Exciting; Lively, inventive, fresh and inventive.

Leading; deep, assertive and powerful.

Sophisticated; polished, sexy and smooth.

Rugged; tough, active and durable.

Owen went into detail of the importance of the awareness as designers of these various topics within branding. He stressed that engagement with these topics are paramount to having a successful relationship with the branded company you seek as a client.

We then engaged in an exercise in teams of two the sought to find a different creative channel to produce a response to a project that we are currently working on. We were required to respond to a questionnaire that firstly asked us to look at actors and actresses and what a cross of them would produce as a country name. Ours became Stiller Gaga.

We then had several more questions to answer on that country for example what language would they speak, what would there customs be. A very left field approach I believe but one designed to make one think outside the box with continuously unpredictable results.

Much was covered in this half day work shop and there was more than enough to take in and consider. It was a refreshing different approach to an area that I have not previously covered in any detail and an eye opener on the subject of branding.

Here is an extract from brandorienteering.com web sight offering a little more insight into their philosophy and approach to branding.

Equity For Punks

The average UK supermarket now has 30,000 lines (twice as many as 10 years ago). In the USA you can choose from 53 varieties of Crest toothpaste.

Stuffed to the gunwales with choice, customers are increasingly losing their appetite for the ever-growing menu of product benefits and price deals on offer – 3000 advertising messages per day and that’s just for starters. Churn as it is aptly called in marketing circles is on the increase. While the supermarket shelves are bulging with new product lines brand loyalty is shrinking faster than an MP’s expense account.

Amid the seemingly endless choices in reality we have less choice. BMW’s might not break down but neither do Skodas. Lancôme and Clinique offer innovative anti-wrinkle formulas but so does Boots own skincare range. According to food experts Scottish Salmon sold at the no frills supermarket chain Lidl tastes as good as, if not better than, that sold at Harrods.

Fortunately the answer to this increasingly worrisome problem, assuming you are not an MP, is right beneath our noses. In a world overflowing with apparent choice the brands that catch our eye and ultimately get us to stick around for longer are those that offer values over value for money. In a material world meaning comes at a premium. What customers are really looking to have the answer to is not what it does or how much it costs but, what does it mean about me?

It’s not what you do but who you know

Social networks, those giant free flowing entities whose statistics read like country populations, Facebook garnered 100 million users in 9 months, have revolutionized the way we communicate and do business. Yet despite all the talk and the investment many companies continue to act and behave like closed social networks.

Keeping us at arms length they are happy to tell us about their products and services but other than a cursory… we are passionate about; tomato sauce, coffee, toothpaste… fill in the blank space… do we really know who they are and what they stand for? Let’s face it would you really want to strike up a relationship with someone whose main and only passion was tomato sauce?

While these brands, and they are still in the majority, are content to plug the same old message sticky brands have been able to take full advantage of social media. Inviting consumers in to share their values sticky brands have redefined how they engage their customers. Like all good storytellers they don’t tell us who they are they show us.

Car brands, with perhaps the exception of Honda, have been slow to pick up on this one. A report by the New York Times points out that “only about 20 percent of car shoppers stayed with the same brand when they purchased a new vehicle.”

While the other car companies spend their marketing budgets on promoting their hybrid, “green” diesel, “smart” and aspirational qualities Honda has developed a series of commercials that feature a selection of Honda owners with the message “everyone knows somebody who loves their Honda.”Customers are invited to participate in the Honda Facebook experiment.Honda provides the common interest to bring their guests together, and talk about what interests them the most – and that’s not Honda.