Joyous Christmas and Happy Holidays

Wishing you all a Happy, Merry Christmas

Christmas is here again. From the Websnacker and his blogging crew, we thank you for your love and wish you a joyous Christmas, fun filled holidays and a smashing New year ahead! And remember, keep readin' so that we can keep bloggin'! Cheer on!!

Live Hard or Die Tryin'

You only live once so live it well

Happy Eid Wishes !!

Wishing all readers and fans, a safe, happy and blissful Eid! Let the feasting begin!

Dirty Minds!

If You've Got One, You'll See It!!!

Life is Short - Live Your Dream!!

Real Needs and Real Wants!!

A Schematic Food for Thought! Dig It!!

Branding, Identity or Logo! What Is It Really?

Isn't It Time We Decoded Branding Correctly?

It is a great, huge disgrace that the word 'Branding' has been so overused in recent years. More and more agencies (small and big alike) and clients tout the ‘Branding’ word about as though it were going out of fashion… which of course, some people would like it to do.

But the fact is that many of these so-called proponents of Branding simply don't understand what a brand is, or how Branding works. Branding has come to mean very little to a lot of people, largely because it is so regularly misunderstood, and is used so vaguely and liberally. The word 'Brand' is often used interchangeably (and incorrectly) with words like 'identity' and 'logo', and clients who simply need a visual identity are tempted to request a Branding programme because, quite simply, it's been the buzzword of choice for the past couple of years.

A brand is like a unique individual personality. It is the sum of a great many parts, and is made up of an elusive set of characteristics and traits, all of which combine to provoke an emotional response from anybody who comes into contact with it. A person's personality is made up of their attitudes, their values and their beliefs. And the way we perceive someone's personality is influenced not simply by what they say, but by how they say it, what they wear, what they look like, how they behave and more.

The subtleties of perceiving someone's personality are just as evident when it comes to perceiving an organization or their products and services. People have personality traits, organisations have brand values. But they are the same things. Think about Pepsi, Apple or Porsche and the chances are you'll have a fairly similar view of each of them to the guy next to you. This is no accident. These brands have been carefully and skillfully managed to be consistent – wherever you come across them.

A brand can be a valuable business asset, increasing loyalty and revenue from customers, increasing share value and reducing staff turnover, whilst at the same time paving the way for future business growth and roll-out of related but separate sub-brands. Get it right, and your business can flourish. Get it wrong, or mistakenly think you are creating a brand when you are simply designing a logo, and you will be back at the drawing board much sooner than you wanted.

When Ford bought Jaguar, its physical assets were estimated at only 16% of the total value, and when Vodafone, the world’s largest telecommunications company bought Orange its physical assets were estimated at just 10%. The purchase values were therefore largely the result of an intangible set of assets which an accountant might describe as 'goodwill'... and which we would simply call the brands. Vodafone has since bought over many brands including most recently Hutch in India for similar reason while Tata Motors took over Jaguar from an ailing Ford in 2 June 2008 for around £1.7 billion.

As soon as Branding sorts out its identity crisis and is recognized to be more about personality and culture than a simple logo and typeface, the world will be a better place - not just for brand-driven agencies, but for clients and business the world over. Like it or loathe it, 'Branding' as a concept is here to stay, so isn't it about time we started using the term quite correctly?

Making Advertising & Marketing Work!

This is my concluding post on Simplicity in Marketing

Why Experts Matter
A qualified corporate messaging process drives the dialog so that the visuals, language and information hierarchies are designed in concert with the product or service. Thoughtful design of content should begin earlier than many corporate executives and entrepreneurs believe. It isn’t just make-up to apply after the real thinking’s done. When experienced content designers are part of a strategic planning team, they can influence explanations for greatest success. They can provide the context to build the relationships between breakthrough ideas and the way they are expressed to the people who will buy them.

Whether homegrown or outsourced, your business needs a team dedicated to scanning for patterns and trends, and forging connections between ideas. They will also facilitate the integration across mediums that will bring together the systems, structures and processes in such a way that choices and solutions are connected, linked and cross-sold. A great marketing team is the liaison between the products of business and the minds of the consumer. It must understand both before it can serve
either.

Particularly in this tight labor pool, a competent external marketing partner can be as important to business success as financial and legal counsel. Assuming a venture has an innovative product idea and business model, a great executive team and enough financing to get traction, it still needs the packaging that will take it to market effectively. An experienced agency (like us) can provide critical bandwidth and brainwidth extensions to ensure that a company’s look, feel and messaging resonate the personality an enterprise wishes to own in the marketplace.

Blending Online and Offline Worlds
Although brands and identities must be integrated, many messages that work great in print suck on web pages. This is a topic onto itself, but here’s the top layer.

Print requires great attention to one-dimensional design and layout. Each view is a discrete canvas. Information elements are static and can explain and enhance each other predictably. Web pages, on the other hand, are a dynamic scrolling experience that place greater significance on navigational feel. Relationships between information components are fleeting.

Print can be visually stunning and still accommodate substantial text. It appeals to the eyes. Web pages are compelling for their interactive engagement as much as their content. They appeal to the hands. Why does everyone need to print stuff out? It is actually quite difficult to read online (never mind the iPads and the eReaders.)

The infinite navigational dimensions of the web, current bandwidth limitations and differing desktop environments mandate fewer and smaller graphics, shorter text and simpler typography. While effective print design is grounded in highly refined best practices, web design is still infantile, with huge upside for marketers who get the interactive value and simplicity thing figured out.

To be successful in today’s energetic marketplaces, companies must project a integrated message across all communication materials – corporate identity, packaging, advertising, promotions and web presence. Companies must quickly amalgamate all of their core messages into a single, powerfully unique selling proposition in order to convince impatient, value-minded consumers. But the approach must be optimized for the delivery channel. The implementation techniques are very different.

Why Simplicity is Paramount
Simple means clear, consistent and easy to find. It all starts with leaders who aren’t afraid to think independently. To explore and map new ways through unchartered physical and virtual spaces so that people, actions and events can be connected in creative, compelling ways. It ends with those same leaders being willing to hear and communicate truth. It involves calculated risks. It requires the insight and courage to involve communication specialists in the development of business strategy.

The leader’s objective is to build a “landmark,” not just become “scenery” in a target market. Landmarks are easy to spot, but often endure on the basis of considerable underlying complexity. They don’t necessarily have to be large in stature, but they must be unique in appearance. They are always enduring and prominent. They are obvious.

The return on simplification is huge. By providing the right information the right way at the right time, messages resonate and trigger responses that deliver actual sales and maximize valuation. By distilling content, leaders are able to spend less to build and sustain differentiated brands. Investing in a singular positive image that is optimized for each medium has leveragable impact across the company’s entire portfolio.

So go ahead: make your long, long story short and bring your brand alive.

Distilling Your Brand’s True Brew

This post is a continuation to my earlier post on Simplicity in Marketing.

Creating a Simple but Effective Blueprint
Distilling the real essence of your message is an intense process that requires quality input, an understanding of goals, analysis and tough decisions. It involves regimented facilitation, real-world testing and expert packaging. There is no magic off the-shelf blueprint that allows you to make the intricacy transparent. However, brand specialists and expert knwoledge can assist with the refinement process – providing the steering tools and structures to aid and accelerate it. Beyond packaging the ideas for ease of consumption, these objectives can enable your company to swiftly convert a business model’s strategic objectives into actionable and profitable milestones that drive momentum, orchestrate positioning exercises and test acceptance.

Most executives want their company’s marketing and advertising messages to be “stylish, sophisticated or professional ” and if possible, “clever.” too. This pasteurized checklist is at the heart of what is leading many competitors toward a fruitless state of uniformity. They’re all saying the same things and trying to lead the customer to the same conclusion.

Eager to demonstrate their “proof-of-authenticity,” many of these same executives are afraid to leave any spec for scrutiny or proof point out of their sales proposition. The extensive detail is perceived as validation. This “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” approach is an easy way out. And, its net effect is usually the exact contrary of what was intended. This plain vanilla granularity just causes more puzzlement that doesn’t help in any sales conversion or market expansion. Besides, there is brand degeneration resulting from decentralized company silos – corporate divisions and operating units which propagate self-styled messages, positions and identities, often ill-timed, hastily designed and poorly executed.

Think Smart and Work Hard
Product Differentiation and Service Demarcation is often the result of simply noticing what your competitors have overlooked and providing that instead of everything else. Think of the Apple iPhone or Gmail. A lack of sacrifice represents unripe positioning.

If your message designs are based on what really interests people, and how they can talk to each other and make easy comparisons, you will find that you can say a lot less. Strive to find and use the language and questions that real people use.

The Truth is Out There
Let your hair down for a second: When you visualize the triumph of your business, is it based on the way things ought to be or the way things really are? The act of arranging information for simplicity then becomes an act of brand and market insight.

Amidst a flood of new age propaganda and mega-efficient delivery mechanisms, human communication is still very much grounded in some enduring truths, and the maxim that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it is indeed one of them.

While technology is changing exponentially, the hearts of the people using it are inflexible to transform. Most of what’s being sold today as new insight is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we’ve had for centuries but perhaps not acknowledged. The trick is to admit it and leverage it to your advantage. Candor is a guiding principle and Authenticity provides understanding that transcends spin and packaging. As experience counts, you could also learn from the marketing gray hairs who’ve been through a business cycle or two.

Give What the Audience Wants
To see sales patterns and develop a marketing message that incites a desired result, start with age-old human nature, not cold corporate logic. Hence, the content of your brand message must communicate genuinely in the language of the intended audience. For a brand or image to break through the information overlaod and market sauration, it must be based on what the target audience perceives as indispensable and relevant to them. What they want to know and need. Not what you feel is imperative or exciting to them.

Technology can help and create exhilarating opportunities but it can also overwhelm us with choices. Codifying, collecting and making everything accessible in nanoseconds is less important than describing how it’s used – the application context. Instead of speeds and feeds or the rate of data, concentrate on describing your brand’s spirit and how it relates to your audience, reflecting on the people connection and your brand’s heart.

If you wish to harness technology efficiently, improvise all the time and focus on the things that happen behind the patented breakthroughs. Recognize that the real goal for the technology is for it to be as transparent and useful as possible.

Content is still the King (and the Queen too)
Content is and has always been the language of customers. And as mentioned earlier, remember to always communicate from the intended listener’s point of view, not your company’s. Start your brand messaging where employees and customers meet, work backward from their needs. By the way, cracking the code on your customers’ needs and priorities can’t be accomplished “inside”. The key lies outside your business and perhaps outside your industry.

If all else fails, revert to the inevitable and basic questions of your customer: How is your product useful to them? What value does it provide? What’s truly in it for them?

In this sense, your content should be much more than words, pictures and voices. It should evoke emotion – a deeper connect. It should be simple, insightful and compelling. And, it is perhaps Content - the one thing one can't teach a computer to generate, so there is a uniquely human dependency. Respect that. After all, the content you develop is what will help you bond with your customers and if driven right, help you achieve world-class results.

The Evolution of Online

It was once a universal truth that online advertising plays poor relative to the creative nobility of the advertising & marketing agency world. In creative terms, online is considered perhaps less a poor cousin and more dwarfish stepbrother with one eye blind, hearing impaired and a speech impediment. For this reason, the Internet was once viewed solely as a place for direct response campaigns, and certainly not to be trusted with building a brand or driving awareness.

But the ugly duckling is slowly becoming the swan as it moves out of its infancy, and starts having cool haircuts and trying to find a girlfriend. With this, the online creative scene is finally embracing the power, vigour and sexual allure that relative youth can bring, while its daddy reaches for the vitamin pill and looses all sense of rhythm. But what’s behind this blossoming of online? Now that it’s come of age, what is the proper pursuit for a medium that for so long could but crawl, dribble and manage a few simple words like “click here”?

It all comes down to people. The people doing it, the people paying for it and the people consuming it. The people doing it are better.

There was a time when online ads were largely produced by designers who, despite being good designers, were not ‘creatives’ schooled in conceptual thinking. “Knocking out” a few banners as an afterthought, based on whatever design concept they’d used in the header of a client’s website lead to ads devoid of an idea and unable to communicate a proposition to an audience. As creatives replace designers in digital agencies, this problem fades.

The slow down in the advertising market as a whole has benefited digital agencies. Good planners, account people and creatives have begun to consider online as a career option - with the industry growing, a future online looks more secure than in traditional agency roles. The more good people, the better the level of work, which in turn attracts bright graduates to the industry. It’s still the case that most creatives looking for their first job favour big ad agencies, but the reality of life in a traditional shop is often frustrating for creative free spirits. Top accounts being bagged by senior teams and internal competition gives rise to a viper pit atmosphere. Within the online space, there’s room for bright young teams to work on edgy ideas for major brands from the off – and with the relatively fast turnaround on digital projects, they aren’t stuck servicing the same account day in day out. All this makes for a creative vitality producing better and better ideas on the Internet.

The people buying it understand and appreciate it
Agencies can’t take all the credit. The increasingly savvy marketing manager is embracing online as never before and there is something of a “viral” effect taking place as web-literate decision-makers move jobs, helping grow online budgets in companies that once overlooked digital entirely. And with the legendary measurability of online including SEO and SEM, the talented marketer has the tools to persuade boards to release cash.

But it’s always been measurable. What’s changed is that strong brand building creative ideas capable of motivating customers are offering brands the ability to gain unprecedented consumer insights. It’s no exaggeration to say this is transforming the way brands market themselves - FMCG companies now have tangible relationships with the customer unmediated by the big multiples. This is nothing short of revolutionary and is slowly beginning to release the kind of budgets that provide scope for bigger ideas.

The people buying it have the money for it
Marketplace factors that have threatened traditional agencies are benefiting the upstarts. Audience fragmentation on TV, longer working hours and the break down of traditional demographic groups all benefit a highly targeted medium like the net. So while budgets have gone down in the last one year, the proportion of spend online has gone up 50% year on year since 2004. Meanwhile, increasingly brand literate consumers are demanding new things from their communications.

The people consuming it are responding positively
With broadband users accounting for many home Internet connections, an assured good experience means that consumers are spending more time online in greater and greater numbers. The internet now accounts for approximately 10% of all media and news consumption3 and within certain demographics, the Internet is almost the only place to guarantee a satisfactory ROI – the average 21-34 year old spends over 28 hours a month on the web. The more time consumers spend online, and the more money they have with them, the more online as a branding medium becomes relevant. As we know from the offline world, it’s a great deal easier to inspire loyalty and sell premium priced products to consumers who engage with the brand.

From passive to interactive real-time communication
Online excels at engagement - interrupting someone with a 60 second TV ad, does not compare to the possible “time with brand” achievable online. The best online campaigns can capture attention by interruption with a 10-20 second ad and keep that attention with entertaining and informative content on a brand site. The end point of this chain of engagement could be a data-capture opportunity or a purchase, but the motivating factor for the customer is entertainment and information. If the creative standards are high enough en route, the customer may spend up to 15 minutes with your brand before going back to what they were doing.

Using time efficiently with brand
With an entertaining brand experience a good digital agency can keep a consumer engaged. But the key to understanding the potential for brands online lies in what a business can do with that opportunity. Until the Internet arrived, brand communication, driven by TV ads was characterised by the passive consumer receiving messages. It was a one-way process and the advertiser had little genuine insight into response. In order to combine brand experience with consumer insight, DM was brought into the mix. The draw back with Direct marketing is that high creative standards tend to be prohibitively costly for all but the highest ticket purchases (cars, etc). Now that the Internet can deliver on the creative impact and audience reach necessary for brand advertising, its unique strength comes into play. The web combines the reach of TV with the targeting and consumer insight of traditional DM.

In order to benefit from this powerful combination, businesses must embrace a communications process that recognises the importance of a seamless, entertaining journey from ad to transaction. It’s not sufficient to rely on highly creative advertising that simply sells “off the page”. Effective digital strategies require a combination of creative ads with engaging websites, insightful information architecture and business processes geared up to receive and understand the information customers are prepared to give as they interact. Done correctly, joined up branding becomes a virtuous circle where valuable consumer insights are gathered at each part of the customer journey and are fed back into the creative process to develop a more and more engaging brand experience.

The future & beyond
Those businesses that embrace the power of the Internet as a branding medium now will make considerable gains in the future. Higher speed broadband (2MB speeds and upwards will be the norm) will enable companies to deliver richer content and in so doing they will be able to harness consumer interaction more easily. As web use becomes ever more convenient, consumers will continue to spend more time online and will look for brand propositions that deliver entertainment, service and convenience. Brands that understand the importance of a consistent two-way relationship and have the crucial business processes in place, will benefit from a trading environment that brings them as close to their customers as a medieval merchant once was.

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Viral Fever Blues

I am sick with a mysterious viral infection that has worsened day after day – for the last 14 days and it continues to aggravate – spoiling my work, my daily dose of ‘hi-bye’ emails, web surfing, googling new discoveries, reading illicit stuff, Jay Leno, HBO and a whole lot of intensely important things of my everyday existence.

One of my favorite daily rituals consists of waking up early each morning, brewing a big cuppa of hot herbal tea and returning to bed for about an hour to sip my Camellia Sinensis while reading the printer-fresh copy of the daily newspaper that lands on my doorway during the early hours of the sunrise. It's a calming little routine that gives me the chance to shake off the previous night's sleep (or no sleep) while catching up all the news, gossips, events and scoops of the (hopefully) new day ahead.

Lately, I confess, the financial news has been rather bewildering. On one hand, vapid tales of a total economic slowdown and mass layoffs have become a regrettable staple of each day's news. Yet at the same time, I keep reading reports and studies of how Creative agencies like mine which also employ temporary workers are magically faring quite well amid all the downward slump. What a piece of crap!

As one reporter wrote "Part of the advertising industry's elasticity can be credited to the increase in demand for highly skilled professionals, who hitherto were not part of the temporary employment pool." The article went on to cite data from some acronymistic trade association which indicated that temporary design, editorial and media staff were among the fastest-growing categories this year, based on industry profits. Wheh!

And then, of course, there are articles like the one I read this today morning, which says that shopper confidence worldwide increased during February indicating that positive consumer perceptions of the current economic meltdown were increasing far faster than actually expected for the next six months or so. One more piece of crap!

Faced by these assorted and utterly confusing pointers, I have realized it’s pretty pointless to complain and an apposite time to stop my insane grumblings, view my viral sickness as a holiday break, stay at home, savour my camelia infusion, listen to soulful music and Seize the Day. After all, its free, doesn’t bill my credit card and should probably reinvigorate, refresh and rejuvenate me for all the uncertainties ahead. And thank god, this is no crap!

Ambition in a Bottle

Yesterday, I found myself sitting across the lunch table with my friend - a successful product designer who's been hired as a design specialist by a celebrated perfume brand, headquartered in Spain.

The problem the brand was besieged with, my friend explained, was how to create a new Perfume bottle (and a Deodorant canister) that would appeal to young 30something people who are career oriented and work for high-energy new economy startups, people who work from home and on the move using an assortments of tech gadgets almost as frequently as they work from traditional offices. Thus far, he added, the perfume industry has taken this notion of ambition and personal mobility quite literally and the aim was to create new aspirational scents housed in trendy tech-tinged bottles and cans that boosted their confidence and conveyed a unique differentiation.

My friend said that he was cynical of this approach but, he admitted, he didn't really know where to start. It's one thing to evaluate critically the current thinking, he confessed, but another thing altogether to know how to actually improve upon it.

In an effort to be helpful as I come from the same league, I suggested that the consumer ‘wants’ aren’t always really about the brands you own or in this case, how the perfume bottle looks at the shelf. Rather, it's about ideas and the sublimal connection, something much more than just who the consumer is and what he/she does for a living. It's more about being true to the individual and having that truth reflected in the products we design and the advertising we create.

We both agreed it was a tricky goal and I'm not sure how this might eventually influence my friend’s thinking, but I believe that it can only lead in the right direction and hopefully, the right fragrance in the right bottle!

Positive Consumerism

In Advertising and Marketing, Does any one care for the Consumer?

What on earth is Psychology doing in Marketing? Psychologists are, of course, strange mortals who are treated by others with, occasionally, well-placed cynicism. Let me tell you, if you are ever trying to get rid of someone at a social gathering or are trying to make them edgy, try telling them you are a psychologist or a psychiatrist and watch them suddenly change posture, scratch their ear fiendishly and finally retreat at speed to refill their already-full glass.

But Psychology is not a black art and it’s no secret that the Marketing and Advertising world is full of psychologists, amateur or otherwise. Coming from a totally different background to most agency staff, I tend to look at things from a different point of view. And I suppose that's why I am constantly perplexed why the personal likes and dislikes of clients have such a enormous participation into the final decision making process.

You may, or may not, be aware of the expression 'Social Loafing’. This is a phenomenon which occurs when you have a large number of people working towards a common goal and, together they are less productive than they would have been if they had been working as individuals. Now, if a psychologist was to decide to conduct research into the details of ‘Social Loafing’, the last person they would ask to identify the variables that impact on productivity is the boss (or the client). This is because the boss/client will have every kind of preconceived idea which will colour their judgement. You get the idea. The objective way to do it would be either to observe dispassionately exactly what is going on or better still, talk to the people and see what they say.

So why is that the personal preferences of clients and agency personnel for that matter get built into the process that arrives as the final creative execution of any promotional marketing or advertising concept? After all, the target audience is rarely the board of directors on the client company. And when you look at the people who make the final creative decision, they all have different agendas. The Marketing Manager wants to sell something that is original and stimulating, inventive and chock full of freshness. The Advertising Agency wants to win awards and design/produce something that makes the rest of the world sit up and take note.

But what about the end Consumer? Do they really care if the advertisement/promotion is nominated for a "Best Sales Promotion" or "Best Advertisement" award? Does it matter to them if the advertisement promotion is held up as a signpost of the way in which the industry is heading? It seems to me that no many occasions it's the down-to-earth and sensible approach which wins the day. Take for example, the ‘buy one, get one’ promotion which offers an extra product free.

Added value is hardly original but, after all, the shopper buying the product, actually likes the product so what better incentive could there be than to give them more of the product they like? And before agency staffs hang their heads in despair, there is no reason why a tried and tested technique can't be give extra creative sparkle. It’s proven psychological fact that most people would choose a $50 bill today rather than a $100 bill promised next week. So maybe the creative/advertising industry should be looking in greater detail at what the consumer actually wants rather than what both the client and the agency, want the customer to want. You get the picture?

Note: At our company Ideasonic, we ensure that the Customers needs are addressed first, coupled with our creative juice and the clients requirements.