Processing the brand idea

It is understandable that even if they get this, most companies are not ready to go for it. The excitement and the anticipation for their own brand is just too overpowering. I often experience clients overwhelmed when they’re talking about their brand. They know what they want to do as a service and they have a pretty good idea of services or features they are going to involve with their offer. But if you ask them “what distinguishes your brand from others?”, you can hear the crickets chirping.

Hence the idea of a process: a workshop or just a good meeting, where we’re together processing the brand will result in finding out what this brand is really standing for. It’s the pathway to a good brand strategy.

Is there no shortcut?

This is the question I hear quite often, and again, I understand the motives for it. Yes, you can quicken it up, but you can not override the process. Even if you’re designing just the logo, you have to think about brand values, whether you want to or not.

If you try skipping this step, you are basically letting your gutt feeling decide what your brand is standing for. Which can be a good thing once you have processed the brand idea and you have a pretty good imagination of what it’s standing for. But if you haven’t done that, you are looking at pretty colors and fonts, nothing more.

The role of a logo

I believe the role of a logo is overrated. A logo has often symbolic meaning, more for the organization carrying it than for the people it is catering to. If you think about it, the functional role of a logo would be recognition. It should serve as a an emblem saying “this is from us”. Nothing more, but nothing less.

I often refer to brands like persons, because that’s how people are treating them. A logo is like a signature, it is not the signing person itself. A logo alone doesn’t represent the brand.

The effect of misunderstanding or simply overrating the role of a logo comes from our current state of design- and lifestyle culture. Logos are experienced to have a lot of power in a world of media omnipresence, but in reality, their true influence is just happening if they are standing for a really powerful brand. If Nike didn’t have its brand history, it would be a mundane logo.

I often experienced that in the process of creating their identity, as in becoming who they are and what they are standing for, companies and startups are struggling with their personality. They are immature and haven’t figured out yet who they really want to be. And you know what? That’s totally normal. If a brand is like a person, it needs to go through puberty, just like everybody else. But in this important process your brand is finding its identity. It will happen a lot that your identity is questioned, from the outside and from the inside out. A brand that went through a lot of trouble becomes a stronger brand. Look at Apple: It took a “Think different” campaign to strengthen the brand, to bring it back on track, the track that was its nature. What most people don’t see is how this campaign enforced the brand from the inside out.

Can’t we just do the logo?

Sure you can. You can do anything in design. The question is if you want to make a quick buck or if you want to create something you can put in your portfolio, and it doesn’t stand out for its glitter but for its stronger qualities.

An even better question is, do you want to do a service to the people using the brand’s products?

History proves, a logo doesn’t need great design to make a brand successful. If the service or product is great enough, it won’t matter what the logo looks like. Truth is, some things don’t need to be very well done to last for a while.

If you want a logo people remember, three qualities of a logo will always remain important:

1. It is recognizable
2. It is unique
3. Once you saw it you can draw it

I have to admit, the last one is a tough one these days. The logo explosion world-wide seems to be flattening any option to find a unique shape for your logo. None the less, the rules of good design won’t change. They’re founded on psychology and cognitive science.

Giving shape means excluding options

The process behind good branding excludes options before it results in finding the most valuable one. Good design leaves things out, as many as possible, before it adds something. A soap bubble in the air is round, because it’s the most efficient design for its formation.

It’s quite easy to explain “I chose blue, because it is a calm colour” for an example, or “I chose an asterisk, because it is used for annotations”.

It is by far harder to tell why you excluded an option than why you chose one.

The issue with quick-and-dirty design solutions is, the decisions have no source, so they are just explanations and make the branding process irrelevant: anything can be right, but nothing would be wrong.

Preferring quick and dirty

My friend’s client chose to go with a different consultancy. They came up with a logo, despite there was no branding process behind it, and at first glance it looked okay. It features a blue word in a washed out typeface, complimented with a red asterisk sign.

Why did they choose this font and not another one? Why is the asterisk red and typography in blue, why not the other way around? Why has asterisk a chewed look to it? The positioning at the end and not the beginning of the word, was there an idea behind that or not? The asterisk may work if you explain it, but what if you don’t?

In the description of what the logo should communicate, one line was standing out: “Typeface and colors communicate: fun, humor, leisure, accessible”.

I remembered that was what my friend’s client regarded as their brand values: “fun, humor, leisure, accessible”. What a unique set, don’t you think? Any typeface/color combination has the power to communicate this, if you just explain it. Lime green/rusty red, pink/egg yellow, orange/blue can all be fun colour combinations.

If you are explaining design choices, the question is not why you made a choice, the question is why you withdrew an option.

For every logo design one needs to answer questions, and it’s easier to do so before you start looking at fonts, colors and elements. Of course you can find your way gradually when it comes to drawing a logo or finding the right font. But at this point you should already know where you are heading. The worst you can do is start finding explanations when you are looking at a dozen of logos. You will end up comparing one logo with another, and your only measure for distinction will be “I like it” versus “I don’t like it”. That’s hardly a good process of logo selection.

Free of charge

My advice for all startups, ventures, companies and organizations looking for a logo is:

Forget the logo. Think about the brand first. It often doesn’t take more than a couple of hours and you don’t have to be afraid you won’t find anything. There’s always something that makes one brand unique. If your logo is more important to you than your product, something’s wrong with your brand. It may be you need more time for this than you thought, but that means you’re just not there yet. Don’t underestimate the power of experience. In the end, a shortcut now may cost you the momentum of a lasting impression for your brand audience.

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Technorati Tags: Brand

Technorati Tags: Brand

Technorati Tags: Brand

My former client wis.dm saw itself as contender on a take of Facebook. Now, one year and six months later, the scene is name-dropping Myspace and Facebook in one sentence. Facebook has become the leading platform among students, whereas wis.dm, well, is nowhere compared to Facebook. Which may be the reason why they changed their product idea just recently.

My consulting for wis.dm (which they politely listened to but didn’t apply) included to incorporate platform connections to Flickr, Twitter etc. Two weeks ago Facebook released new “Facebook apps”, which are exactly that, on a greater scale. You can add content and mashup the stuff you’ve already got on other platforms.

Back to Coca-Cola and their stuck-up marketing thinking. The problem with these big brands is, their owners don’t like the new Web. They don’t like the people either, who don’t want to be consumers anymore but just people. Now they’re trying to cope with a changing situation, but honestly, they don’t really get it. I think it will take a little longer until the generations have replaced the old-school members on the corporate management board.

Online communities are based on people, not on the brands they use. If you’re smart enough, you can be a brand that provides the space people want for their activities. But ringtones isn’t really an activity, is it.

Technorati Tags: Brand

Technorati Tags: Brand

Swiss TV history

As former Rediffusion (until 1994), Cablecom has written history for Swiss TV. For generations the Cablecom had served a balanced portfolio of available channels, ranging from foreign German, French, Italian channels, the four Swiss language areas, as well as additional international channels from the U.S., the UK and Spain. You had news channels like CNN, NBC or n-tv. You had Cartoon Network and Turner Classic Movies. You had SWR and WDR, German channels with great documentaries, as well as BBC Prime, which I don’t need to introduce.

Since about a year, Cablecom has started to erase these channels from their service, while maintaining the same fee they charge for this decreasing content.

To the average Swiss TV consumer, this is a blatant abuse of trust and consumer liablity. I am certain Cablecom strategists thought about the company finances, about one-directional marketing, but as much I am assured about their incompetence in marketing, I am equally convinced they did not foresee the power of this ultimately bad brand experience they create. A brand, you see, is not made by the company who represents it. A brand is basically built and carried by the gut feeling of the people using the company’s products. And if the company is behaving in a way that hurts the customer experience, the customers will go away. I am writing it in such clear and simple lines so Cablecom can get the message. Because so far, they obviously haven’t been listening.

Price is not the reason why I’m making the switch. It is mainly because I am done with Cablecom. If you are watching TV in Switzerland, on more than one channel you get a line scrolling over your screen in large font size, plainly informing you that this channel you are watching is going to be discontinued as an offering by next week. They have done that with three channels already, and they aren’t stopping it any time soon. I am sure they slowly cut off the air, until every subscriber of the regular TV offering will have switched to the more expensive “Digital TV”.

How to deconstruct a brand

Let me make a daring prognosis here. If Cablecom continues to progress on its course, they might lose more than the brand liability of its customers. The company might see a drastic erosion of their customer base, as more and more consumers will spread the word and switch to alternatives, such as using a dish antenna and a satelite receiver, or simply switching to Bluewin TV. Consequentially, Cablecom’s fate may be even bancrupcy, if they continue with this chosen course.

Cablecom offers a helpline, 0800 66 0800, to offer consumers a contact point for more information about the closing channels. Of course the real value for that so called helpline, for Cablecom, is to advertise to its subscribers to switch to their “Digital TV” offer. This phone call used to cost 1.95 per minute. The Swiss government had to force Cablecom to make that phone call free of charge. You can call only from 8 AM to 5 PM, which covers the time no one who has a job is at home and able to make that call.

Personally, I am not alone with these feelings. In the past six months, with the increasing number of channels disappearing from consumer TV screens and communities like French and Italian speaking foreigners in Switzerland forming resistance along with Swiss citizens , Cablecom’s reputation has been falling from the sky like a meteorite.

Professionally, because I am a consultant with experience in the areas of brand building and user experience, a story like this makes my heart bleed. Seriously, I don’t get how blind a company can be, completely ignoring its customer base. I don’t blame Cablecom to want to make customers switch to the new offering. It is a normal marketing strategy. What makes this case bad is the arrogance and ignorance they put behind this. This has been going for almost a year now, and the bad press and increasing resistance from consumer groups has had virtually no influence on Cablecom’s behavior. If a company acts that stupid, not getting what is going on in the market they serve, then in my opinion, it doesn’t deserve to be successful.

Markets are different than they used to be 30 years ago. Consumers are not consumers anymore, they are participants who choose in what they want to participate. Let’s sit back and look at this unfortunate case of brand desctruction in a year from now.

Additional Resources

20Minuten: Cablecom: Der grosse Frust der Gemeinden
20Minuten: Diese Sender darf Cablecom nicht streichen
Swisscom Bluewin TV
Cablecom

Technorati Tags: Brand

If Communication Arts would take seriously what is going on in web design, and if they would focus on real design issues, they would have to consider other elements than pretty pages. They would have to look under the hood of how something is made (which is the actual design process), considering things like W3 standard compliant code, or accessibility. Because considering accessibility of a website is a part of the design process.

I just browsed through the list of past years winners of the annual contest of Communication Arts. And to be frank, it made me shake my head.

Two out of three websites awarded by Communication Arts were made entirely with Flash, and the first thing the first page does is running a script that blocks my entire screen. Blocking a screen when opening a page, taking up its entire space, is considered intrusive behavior. It is bad for the user experience, a design flaw that should not be tolerated. Websites doing this should certainly not get an award for ignoring the user’s preferences.

The list goes on. If you browse through the websites awarded by Communication Arts, you’ll find all sorts of strange candidates. But nothing that is really innovative or noteworthy in terms of good design. Maybe pretty design, but that doesn’t necessarily fulfill the circumstance of “good design” for me.

I don’t know if Digg.com ever participates in such contests. But they should get an award for best user interface of the year. It’s really a big improvement on many levels, if compared to the previous version of Digg. Their new design serves its purpose perfectly, and it puts the user experience in focus, without being obtrusive.

How come Communication Arts is so disconnected from what is really important in interactive design? The reasons may be historical. They were first all about graphic design, which covers mainly print. In print design you have never to think a lot about taxonomy, standard compliant websites or anything close to user experience.

Everything in traditional graphic design is focussed on impression, not the user experience. Letting go of this concept of design, that impression comes before the user experience, is something the old league of designers has a hard time with. If you were free to use any color, shape, font, position, cropping any picture you like, adjusting it with absolute accuracy, then it’s hard to understand what is so different about designing something that’s used interactively.

Designing for the web includes interaction, which is in the very name of Communication Arts’ contest. It requires considering contributions from people. It requires flexibility in thinking, and a lot of it. It requires you to let go of the idea you can control everything.

I guess Communication Arts, or the people behind it, are still driven by this old spirit. And the old spirit is not something we should get rid of entirely. It just hasn’t anything to do with what interactive design is about.

Or maybe they should just make a name change for the contest. From “interactive design” to “lovely pretty looks on the web”.

Resources

Communication Arts
Communication Arts Interactive Design Contest

Technorati Tags: Brand

A short while ago I subscribed to one of their offers to buy a Google link for me. A Google link sponsors your website, by putting your link at the top of a search containing the keywords you defined. Anyone searching those keywords will see your link atop in a list. Ziki enters your first and your last name as a search pattern by default. You can’t change that.

Now, when you do a search for Henning von Vogelsang in Google, you will get the Ziki link first, on top of the search list. It will also show up at the right side on each following page, if you go to the next page of your Google search results.

Of course, this also helps Ziki to promote themselves as a service. But it’s a clever, two-directional way to market yourself too. Because if you add your other online profiles to Ziki, everything becomes accessible under one roof.

I think, if someone hears your name and is looking you up at Google, this is a good way to cover their interest in you. Sure, it will first lead them to your Ziki account, and not necessarily to your business website in a next step. But it works like a portal, in a way doing a job like Facebook or LinkedIn. It may not be as advanced as those, but acquiring new contacts in your network is mainly about getting in touch, and getting a feeling for the person you are looking for. In this sense, I think Ziki is doing it right.

It’s an interesting concept that Ziki is spending money to promote you. They give you something and get something in return: traffic and exposition, which will lead to more members. It is a typical example of a marketing strategy of the 21st century.

Resources

Ziki

Technorati Tags: Brand

I think this all makes perfectly sense. You probably came to the site because you wanted to look up a place. Your main interest is to look up information about a trip you are planning on, or to look up a couple of places you had in mind. At the same time you don’t mind being allured to look into other places, because the site applies a well balanced mixture of push and pull. Commercial offers live in harmony with folksonomy.

Before creating a website like TravelPost, you have to ask yourself a couple of simple questions. And you have to be not afraid of the answers. Take them as your road map for marketing, branding and usability. Being honest to yourself and to your client can actually give you an advantage when your site hits the market of competing websites.

What are the most important questions?

1. Why do people come to travel-websites? To book a hotel right away, or to spend time traveling before the actual trip?
2. Before they will book a room in a hotel or resort, what will convince them to choose this particular offering over a different one?
3. Is pricing the only or most important issue for your visitors?

Pricing has a certain relevance if it comes to city traveling, weekend trips and short business trips. If you are traveling to a foreign country and you are staying there for more than one night, you want something decent, reliable, comfortable. And you care more about “what can I do in this neighbourhood” than about low rates.

Conclusion

Combining folksonomy with brand values is what makes the true art of creating conversation websites. The example of TravelPost shows how you can build a solid foundation for your branding platforms, by using best practice in design, user experience, and most of it all by not being afraid of putting people’s opionions and commercial offers on the same page.

Being unobtrusive and not pushy about your offers is paramount. People have a tendency to accept ads (text and links) more easily once they are allured by your site content. Microsoft’s Expedia, for an example, is considered a leader in travel websites. But if you compare the two examples, which one appears friendlier to you?

On Expedia, the most prominent element is “Plan your trip, book a flight and a hotel”. That might be of importance to me at some point, but I first want to find out about the place I’m visiting. I could look it up at Wikipedia, but given its straight forward name, I would expect Expedia to give me all information I want, providing a great travel experience in itself.

Resources

SimpleBits has helped redesigning TravelPost and creating a better user experience
Microsoft Expedia
TravelPost

Technorati Tags: Brand

Apple is an extremely focussed, minimalist-style company. It has a strong focus on direction and is obsessed with purity and simplicity, mainly because Steve Jobs and Johnathan Ives are Zen-driven gurus. If the CEO says “We have a simple product and I want a simple packaging”, there is no room to argue about that.

Besides, Apple has a different market position than Microsoft. Microsoft creates mainly software products (I think their only hardware is a mouse), and naturally, Microsofts software is placed on a shelf of boxes where thousands of other titles are competing. So in that same shelf, you would never find an iPod placed. A software packaging is also very different, it has indeed bulleted text, it has features, vendor logos — Apple software products are not much different in packaging from other vendors. It is still a little bit cleaner though.

The iPod is iconic, it stands out by itself as a product already. It is featured in Apple Stores mainly, or third party stores dedicated to Apple products, or at least in a corner with Apple products. People buying an iPod are getting one because they were looking for that Apple boot or that Apple Store. Standing in front of a shelf filled with Microsoft software boxes, these people simply don’t think about iPods.

It is also true that Microsoft has a different selling philosophy than Apple. Microsoft allures people by making them feel secure that they choose the right product. Microsoft’s brand language is “Look, I’m the mother of all software. I am the de facto standard, so you can’t go wrong with me!”. Looking at it that way, everything Microsoft adds to a packaging underlines this approach.

Technorati Tags: Brand

One would assume that more variety in music and greater choice of download services would be a good thing for the industry, all to the consumers benefit. Wrong. Truth is, this does nothing for the people. In fact, it’s just another try to push them away from buying iPods, and chosing Microsoft-technology based music players instead. Which is fine. But they are specifically excluding iPods to use the new music service.

“The biggest paradox is, the people who are most likely interested in an MTV-branded music experience are also probably the demographic that has the highest interest in the iPod,” was a quoted statement from Michael Gartenberg, vice president of Jupiter Research.

Any possible benefit for users aside, just from an economic point of view, this makes no sense at all. The iPod owns 78% of the portable music player market and iTunes has an 80% coverage of all download services market share.

In the end, nobody wins. Microsoft seems eager to not lose more ground in the consumer electronics market, before they even had a chance to conquer it. Over the past few months they have been sitting there, paralyzed, stunned, watching the iPod bubble grow to an extent when it really started scaring them. No wonder they think it is URGEnt to do something. At first, the iPod was seen as a belittled attempt from an outsider computer company to fulfill the needs of a few nerds listening to an exotic music format called mp3. At the time when the iPod was introduced, mp3 was still cited in conjunction with software piracy and Napster, then a peer to peer download service. When the success of the iPod became clear, it was still regarded as short term phenomenon, not meant to last for longer than a couple of years, and still aiming for gadget loving people.

Now it has become clear, the iPod has substantially changed an entire industry, even more so, it has changed the way people live and experience media.

The content offered by Microsoft and MTV (actually Viacom) is yet to be seen, and the quality of this content, or added values for the consumers benefit are unknown. URGE is scheduled to launch in 2006. It’s a mystery to me how they intend to make profit, let alone survive, in a market dominated by the iPod, completely ignoring one of the most basic and profound business rules: supply and demand.

I think a major mistake of computer companies and entertainment giants is to regard this market separatedly, with an inwards oriented view. In order to overcome the iPod dominance, anyone entering this market will have to look at three points:

1. Provide an integrated hardware- and software solution, either by inventing a new, better media player (the hard way) or by making your service seamlessly work with the iPod (the soft way)
2. Make sure that your system provides a straight forward interface, consistent, with a no fuss user oriented experience and design
3. Here comes the tricky part. Add something valuable to the service, something Apple does not provide. In other words, make it better than iTunes. That involves ability to listen to what people ask for and expanding your service according to their needs, not the ones of entertainment corporations. Innovation is a tough one, I know, but Apple has proven it works well

Innovation doesn’t always mean you have to find a new feature, or invent a new product. Sometimes things are encountered by the people using your product. Just take a look at how Apple integrated podcasts. They did not invent them, but they recognized the importance of podcasts as soon the trend emerged from its grassroots grounds, and made it a consistent part of the iTunes experience, in a very elegant and seamless way. Did I mention the word podcast has been added to the Oxford Dictionary last summer?

Technorati Tags: Brand

A popular (but still good) example is the iPod phenomenon, combined with podcasts and soon also video content. One could argue that Apple spent a lot of money for advertising and marketing. I don’t have access to the numbers, but it may be true that worldwide spendings haven’t been low. However, a colored background with a dancing silhouette is not what makes the iPod superior in the eyes of the average consumer. What counts is, one, is it simple to use, two, can I handle it with my PC or Mac, and three, is it cool because all my friends envy me? Yes, the huge success of the iPod can be reduced to this three question formula.

Do the math. You can apply this formula to other things. Like every simple formula, it isn’t that simple anymore once you start looking at the details. But that doesn’t change the simplistic principle. If a product performs well in a market, it is not because a company wants it to work, it’s because the people want your product.

With core, I am just restarting a process. I am still far away from mass popularity, not to mention being known within the communications field. Perhaps I’m idealistic too, thinking that my clients really care for a “better philosophy” behind my venture. Never the less, I had success with it already and it seems that utilitizing my big picture of the communication market is paying off finally. I get contract jobs combining both, advertising work and web projects.

To give you something to remember core, I made the background pictures you see on this site available for download. There will be more in future, but this set of pictures should get you started. I have been told they look gorgeous and fresh. After seeing these pictures during six weeks of corebasis.com development, I haven’t gotten tired looking at them. I also use them as my own desktop background, wallpaper in Windows lingo. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

The clue: No logo, no forced branding, just the bare fruits, veggies or whatever has a real core. Because the message is in the picture.

Resources

core Images

Technorati Tags: Brand

Technorati Tags: Brand

If I do the math right, Google is about to become the internet, at least that is the impression of an average person (read “not a geek”). Google’s brand awareness has risen in the last couple of years. No longer is it just a search engine, it started spreading out, acquired blogger.com, plunged into the digital image business with Picasa and lately it started buying lots of fiberglass installations all over the U.S.

While we don’t know on what Google’s plans are, it becomes pretty transparent through its actions what the longterm goals are. It is almost as if you could have a glimpse at their business strategy for the next five to ten years.

Google is an extremely dynamic, and at the same time intelligent corporation. Its very structure, from the core to the outside, through its employees and operations, it shows youth and flexibility, and an unsatiable hunger to learn and adopt. Unlike giant companies like Microsoft, who were part of the desktop revolution, but that took decades, Google is very much aware of things at stake. The Internet is moving rapidly, and you can either float with the stream or give it turns. Meanwhile, Google has gained enough strength to be a huge player. It’s aiming to become the biggest of them all.

I must say I am impressed not about Googles market performance as much about the intelligent branding pattern behind its moves. Apparently, Google sees the connection between real life and Internet, between markets and people, between hardware and software. It is not running from one strategy to another, or trying to mimic its competitors, like Microsoft does with Apple. Clearly, Google knows it has big brand equity, and it is undoubtly making large attempts to become the mother of all internet to the average user.

How does that work? Indulged in blog spheres and technology news, we tend to forget this fact, but the truth is, the average person on the street knows about Google, and people also know about what they can do with computers, but they have no clue about merging communication behavior patterns and what is happening on a social level. They don’t look at the bigger picture. To the majority of people, the internet remains to be this giant free network, an incredible world of free offers and online shopping. A beast that apparently feeds itself, a bottomless source that can not be drained. It is as if the internet is to become a mirror to life as we know it, and people are just at the verge of realizing the power of what they can do online, on a social level. We tend to look at chat, websites, email and online services separatedly. But yet we’re using all these things seamlessly. It is all in the flow of a natural evolution of communication that’s happening right now. And we are not changing the way we communicate consciously, but it is changing us, sub consciously.

No, this is not about Google Adwords on every fridge we open, every car we drive, or appearing on cell phone screens every time we want to make a phone call. This is about growing the right connections in peoples heads. We are currently raised by mother Google.

Every time we think “Communication”, be it with a cell phone with VOIP, email, chat, websites, whatever the future may bring, Google wants us to think “Google”.

Resources

Google: Google’s Company Mission
CNET Blog: Google WiFi in New York?
CNET Blog: Google cracking classified market?
CNET Blog: Google to buy classifieds firm?
CNET Blog: Google’s hot year
Forbes: Google’s Brand Leveraging Is ‘Undeniable’
Forbes: Google Wants to Expand Offline Ads
Forbes: The Maknig Of A $2 Billion Brand
Brand Strategist Jennifer Rice in Corante’s Brandshift: Humanity: From Processes to People
Brandchannel.com: Google, The Infinate Quest

Technorati Tags: Brand