Two Cents

Marketers and Advertisers alike go to immeasurable lengths to create moments of engagement between consumers and their brands. There’s no argument that the emotions and associations these moments foster are paramount in building that ever elusive brand loyalty we all strive for.

So how do we engage the consumer? Simple, get them involved! Customer loyalty is experience based, not product based. I doubt any of us underestimate the power of online for just this reason.

But why limit experiential design to online? What other opportunities exist? Personally I believe the most fundamental of all brand touch-points arguably commands an even more powerful experience. I’m talking, of course, about packaging and the point of purchase.

Packaging delivers the brand and product straight into the consumer’s hand – it’s the perfect, tangible representation of both.

Take a quick trip to Chermside Westfield on Saturday morning and you’ll notice two things:

1. Despite slowing economic conditions and reported downturn in retailer’s takings, shopping is still one of Australia’s favorite pastimes.

2. Most packaging design is as commoditised as the product it contains.

Without the inclusion of unique brand characteristics that are relevant and desirable to the consumer, packaging is not the effective sales closer that it should be. What if more packaging was designed from an engagement or experiential perspective? Would it be more compelling to consumers? Would it drive higher sales and increase brand loyalty in today’s “fickle” market?

I had planned to use MOR, Australia’s first beauty brand nominated for lovemark status, as an example. However, while researching MOR, I stumbled over an interesting example from America.

Method.

A brand that has even inspired fan sites.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Method’s packaging is that hidden behind all the hard, clean lines is quite a credible ‘green’ story, yet they chose not to make ‘green’ their main selling point or even a differentiator at shelf level. Instead, they went for a ‘good design’ strategy, a platform that’s much harder to emulate than the competitor’s eco credentials. Of course they don’t hide their green-ish story, they just dodged the obvious, you know, putting a tree on the bottle or whatever.

Method knew that “people wanted cleaning products they didn’t have to hide under their sinks”. The ‘good design’ strategy is doubly beneficial considering that products which are made to be seen are picked up and used more often. More product used, faster repeat sales (to the tune of $100 million in Method’s case, not bad in a slow-growth category).

Packaging designed from an experiential perspective can be amazingly compelling. Take a look at this incredible upcycling example that expresses the idea to the extreme:

Garbage of New York City – Justin Gignac has sold over 1000 trash cubes of selective New York City garbage worldwide for as much as $100 each. The sealed box comes signed, numbered and tagged as ‘Garbage of New York City’, a small sticker records the date the trash was selected for the cube.

Just imagine what we could do with a product that isn’t rubbish!

The hot topic over breakfast this morning was the new internet search facility, Wolfram Alpha.

Discussion soon ensued around the service’s name. Next time you want someone to do a search to answer a question, are you going to ask them to ‘Wolfram Alpha’ the question? Seems a bit clumsy to me. Google have well and truly nailed it – how many times do you get asked to ‘google’ a topic? And where do you go to undertake the search? Google.

As my other half and I chatted over weet-bix, it got us thinking, what’s in a name? This is what we came up with:

When unique brand names become household names, through mainstream acceptance and popularity, the line between ‘who’ and ‘what’ can become blurred. On one level, it’s the ultimate compliment when the public refer to a particular brand name as if it were the generic term within a given category. Some examples being: Vegemite; Kleenex; Aspirin; Band-Aid.

However, generic acceptance is also a two-edged sword, a blessing and a curse, because massive brand recognition would no longer translate to sales if the company was to ever lose control of the brand name, for example, exclusivity over the very word itself. When a trademark loses its legal status, can it become a free-for-all?

Perhaps the ultimate marketing success is when a specific brand name makes the shift from a noun to a verb. When it’s no longer enough for someone to simply be ‘using’ that brand. After all, what could be better than someone actually ‘doing’ the brand? This kind of public perception is at least more likely to retain the original company’s customers through constant reinforcement of the name and by ‘the act of engaging with the brand’. Some well-known examples of such verb shifts are: Google; Napisan; Xerox; Hoover; and Photoshop.

Got any other examples? What do you think?

Last night I was lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation to the Australian Marketing Institute in Brisbane. My chosen topic was ‘Branding in the Interactive Space‘ – a topic very close to my heart here at BCM.

I really wanted to put together a presentation that demonstrated exactly how brands are enhancing their brand in the interactive space. I started by building the case for interactive in strengthening brand metrics – thanks to the IAB’s Sultana Bran study, we’re more certain than ever that interactive can impact on consumer sentiment like all other forms of media. Following that, I talked about how engagement happens online – via knowing your brand, and having great ideas that result in amazing interactive experiences. Finally, I demonstrated the importance of simply listening to the online conversation about your brand, and influencing it where appropriate.

I really enjoyed giving the presentation, and many thanks to Kevin and Jo here at BCM for helping me pull it together. The preso makes more sense with the notes, but you’ll have to click through to Slideshare to read them, just select the ‘comments’ tab below the preso. If you have any questions, please just drop me a line in the comments.

I was very pleased to present at the 2008 Email Marketing Summit on the Gold Coast last Friday. The topic of my presentation was ‘using email to enhance your brand’ – I have embedded the slides below.

In putting the presentation together, I tried to avoid being too technical (I presented at 3pm on a Friday, after all, and I didn’t want anyone falling asleep). Instead I talked generally about the role of email amongst other channels, gave some practical tips on enhancing your brand through delighting the recipient, and discussed the future role of email amongst emergent competing technologies.

The best way to view the presentation is probably to link through to Slideshare and view it in conjunction with the speaker’s notes, as I left most of the content OFF the slides to try and increase attention

Enjoy!

Ask anyone over the age of 25 if they remember a range of hair care products by the name of Salon Selectives, and chances are they will. They might even be able to recite a few bars of the uber-catchy jingle that was omnipresent in the products heyday in the late 1990’s.

But have you seen Salon Selectives around lately? I doubt it. Salon Selectives has been dormant ever since it was bought out by Unilever in 1996 and gradually pushed to the back of their product range – and then off the shelves forever.

Well, not quite forever. River West, a company based in Chicago, makes a living out of reviving dormant brands – and having some success. Along with Salon Selectives, they’re also in the process of reviving long-dormant brands with wide familiarity in the USA, like Nuprin, Underalls and the coffee brand Brim (which retains 90% aided brand recall despite being off the shelves since 1995).

In a recent article in the New York Times, River West explained how they are taking brands that are memorable, that “evoke a past that never was – that was morally superior or simpler, an era of better craftsmanship”. But in doing so, they’re also attempting to attract younger customers who have no familiarity with these beloved brands. Their challenge, they claim, is to “balance that familiarity with something that makes the product seem fresh and novel”.

Quite the challenge – and it does make you wonder if there’s any Australian brands out there waiting for our own River West to revive them.

If reviving dead brands seems adventurous, how about creating a real brand out of a fictional one?

Brawndo was a completely fictional sports energy drink from the cult 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy – but it’s now a very real product sporting the same attributes (bright green colour, abundant electrolytes) as the fictional version. Omni Consumer Products, under license from 20^th Century Fox, has already sold 10,000 cases and counting of Brawndo.

A little closer to home, some might remember the South Australian Brewing Company’s cheeky attempt in 1996 to market Homer Simpson’s favourite brew, Duff Beer – which was put to a quick halt by 20^th Century Fox’s lawyers. Cases now sell for thousands of dollars per six-pack.

And finally, whether they’re dead, semi-fictional, successful or otherwise, an online experiment called Brand Tags is aiming to uncover mass perceptions of some of the world’s most recognised brands. The idea is this – you’re presented with a brand, like Google, and you’re asked to type in the words you most associate with that brand. They’re then added to the tag cloud. Similarly, you can be presented with an unbranded tag cloud, and asked to guess the brand. It’s a fascinating insight into consumer perceptions – check it out.