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Great branding is more than a logo. It’s more than a list of acceptable fonts, too, or even some 100-page PDF containing everything from measurements on proper margins to deep verb-subject-adjective explorations on writing the proper "voice." Great branding is really the DNA of product or company, manifested through various media in ways that the public can recognize and understand.
With that in mind, above is a collection of our biggest branding stories of 2014. It’s not just a highlight reel of great branding. You’ll see some of that, of course, but you’ll also see some of the worst branding of 2014, too, along with essays on branding from some of the best names in the business....
There have been several pieces of research released recently that have examined what consumers believe to be the top attributes for brands to display. New studies issued by Mindshare North America and Cohn & Wolfe add to that body of research, which seems to agree that honesty and authenticity are important attributes, particularly to Millennials.
A quick review of some of the relevant takeaways from the earlier research shows that....
Many agencies have launched their own incubators and accelerators in the past few years. Learn about 16 cool products agencies have launched.Agencies have, within their walls, some of the most brilliant creative and strategic minds. But these creatives are subject to the volatile business of agencies: Project work that comes and goes, relationships with risk-adverse clients, and billing rates that are stagnant.Agencies believe they are in the services business, so that is what they do. But in reality, they have the knowledge, expertise, and experience necessary to create products, services, and software.That's why so many agencies have launched their own incubators and accelerators in the past few years....
It's the great American pastime.
No, I'm not talking about baseball. Or stuffing your face with apple pie. Or arguing about politics with your family over Thanksgiving dinner. No, I'm talking about the great American pastime of buying stuff.
Unlike those other pastimes, however, which have remained relatively unchanged over the years, the way we buy has evolved considerably. For example ...
In 1914, you might've been tempted to buy a (non-branded) pastry after noticing a delicious smell emanating from the local bakery.
In 2014, you might be tempted to buy a Pop-Tart after seeing a commercial for Pop-Tarts on TV, or after reading an article about Pop-Tarts on The Wall Street Journal website, or after hearing about (or attending) a Pop-Tarts-brandedsummer concert series....
Ah, slogans: Those easily identified and often game-changing phrases that can come to symbolize a brand for an entire generation or more.
There are a few legendary slogans in the annals of time: From Coca-Cola’s “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” and the famous “Got Milk?” campaign of the 1990s, to Nike's “Just Do It” and, of course, “Where’s the Beef?” from Wendy’s.
While slogans have the potential to take a brand from relative anonymity to household status, they also have the potential to confuse and alienate audiences with vagueness, wordiness or confusing verbage.
Rebranding is never any easy decision, but in some cases, it’s the right thing to do. In this post, we’ve highlighted 11 of the most-needed slogan makeovers of all time....
The correct visual use of your typefaces, color palette and images together is an imperative part of the brand development process. Branding is a specific trade, with devotion to the art of cohesion brought together by psychology and science. It doesn’t matter if your brand is a large-scale company or a part-time passion, the importance of branding consistency throughout your marketing can not be faulted.c
We give you some awesome insider tips to help you look at your brand a little differently, and potentially start creating your very own guidelines....
These days, we are constantly being sold products and experiences but now, companies are getting more trixsy.
...Over at AdWeek, David Gianatasio writes that advertising and television shows (and music videos) are getting more integrated by the day, especially since consumers are so good at tuning out what we don’t want to hear. When was the last time you clicked a banner ad or a sponsored tweet or Instagram post? Never, unless it was by accident and then you were pissed about the seconds you'd never get back.
In response, advertising agencies are finding new ways to woo us with funny commercials or, say, placing their products in the middle of Top Chef, instead of, say, having Halle Berry mention the brand name of her lipstick on the Today Show....
You've logged countless hours on the Internet, in front of a television or just participating in society—absorbing ad messages wherever you go. Branding is everywhere, whether you like it or not. We descended upon the signage capital of the world, New York's Times Square, to test passersby on their knowledge of some of the more famous taglines in American culture.
Take a look above, and see how they fared. And see how you'd do. Pop quiz, hot shot!...
...Style guides can save you time, money, and tons of frustration down the road, making your marketing materials easier to maintain and create. Consider it like an extension of well-commented markup; it gives you instructions for exactly how things should be done, and sometimes even insight into why.
If you’re not convinced you need one for pretty much every brand or company you work with, or if you’re not sure how to create one, read on….
Bob ‘The Ad Contrarian’ Hoffman opened the 2014 ITV Spotlight Lecture last March – a debate on the failed predictions of advertising experts over the past decade, with particular focus on the social media marketing of brands, to wit: ...there are people in our business who believe that consumers are ‘in love’ with brands. They believe consumers want to have ‘relationships’ with brands. they want to have ‘brand experiences’ and be ‘personally engaged with brands’.
These people actually believe this. You go to their Twitter profile: ‘I’m passionate about brands!’ You’re what? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.
You’ll like Bob....
As marketing professionals, we often look to the trendsetters in the industry to understand how to improve upon our own efforts.
...Of the top 10 most influential brands globally, publishers like The Wall-Street Journal, Financial Times and Mashable make up half of the list, underscoring the value of content in engaging customers. Technology companies make up the second largest industry represented, with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM andSalesforce.com leading the way.
What do these leaders have in common, and what can you take away from their efforts and apply to your own content marketing? Three simple practices: - They continually update users on industry news. - They release new and engaging content tailored to specific audiences. - They add their voice to relevant conversations that their audiences care about....
...Millions are spent on content creation and propagation across many channels and media. Multi-channel marketing concepts can be fitted to this alternate use case by helping brand marketers understand the contribution of content investments to an engaged audience of individual consumers. It’s like placing iBeacons on branded content such that marketing spend can be optimized around the messaging that connects best with consumers. Metrics such as open rates and website visitor dwell times become indicators of content quality comparable on a relative basis.It takes a blend of informed creative brilliance and technology enablement to pull this off – key is informed.
To these ends, it’s essential to reign in the insights digital channels capture to fuel a profile of individual consumers that lives, grows, and evolves just like the person it describes. These insights help both agencies and brand marketers inform brand storytelling with knowledge of their consumers beyond superficial characteristics. In this way, you could say consumers help write the story....
...Brand is the story you tell and the position you occupy in people's minds. Do they file you under "high-end bespoke couture"—or "fast fashion?"
There are markets and target audiences for everything but it's your job as a business owner or marketing leader to be crystal clear about the image for which you're aiming and how that influences everything from pricing to distribution to customer experience to—yes—visual identity....
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Last year, I shared Brand Keys' Robert Passikoff's 14 Brand Trends for 2014. This year, Robert again put together his proposed trends for the upcoming year. He again shared his thoughts on the numerology, as well, this time, obviously focusing on 15: In numerology 15 is the combination of the number 1 (representing leadership and forward movement) and the number 5 (numeric for business and finance), thus 15 becomes the fusion of leadership and forward momentum for brands and marketers. Let's see what Robert predicts for the new year.
What do brands like American Express, Coca Cola, Mercedes and Neiman Marcus have in common?
Even though they are all from entirely different industries, they have one thing in common; they took notice of the power of content marketing and have the wisdom to take full advantage of it. Over 200 retail brands have gone out of business over the past few years due in part to procrastination when it comes to stepping up their marketing to keep up with today’s competitors who are catering to consumers who use the internet for just about everything today, including making a buying decision, whether it’s products or services....
For large companies and multinational corporations, rebranding can be a slippery slope. Design trends change with time, so logos often need to be revisited to keep a company’s brand fresh. Because a good logo is so iconic, companies must strike a balance between contemporizing their brand while staying true to the original design.
The following are 5 logo redesigns that divided audiences and stirred up no shortage of controversy....
Like it or not, your surroundings inform the special little bubble you live in. Just when you thought you couldn't be stereotyped, well, here are some handy maps that define each state by the brands they Google the most.
The results are pretty fascinating, too, from the obvious to the surprising. I had no idea Grand Marnier was so popular in Delaware, or that American Eagle was so in vogue among West Virginians. Less surprising results are Microsoft in Washington and Disney in Florida.
Where it gets super interesting is when competing brands bubble up in adjacent states, like Jose Cuervo and Patron in Arizona and New Mexico, or Dodge and Chevrolet in Montana and North Dakota....
Surprised? Curious? Or does it just sound stupid!?
Since times immemorial, a brand-human interaction has gone way beyond the typical sale-purchase transaction...
Let us look at some examples. KFC serves vegetarian, Barbie now wears a saree, the ever American Coca Cola is now India's 'Thanda' and so on, the list could be endless.
So what is happening here? It is the power of human behaviour and preferences which is proving itself to be the bigger brand which all these commercial brands are trying to lure. And why does that happen? Because people empower brands with insights by way of explicit & implicit feedback and their preferences reflected in their purchase or advocacy decision....
Brand teams are quick to rebrand when they hit a rough patch. But they sometimes forget that a brand is more than a company name, logo, tagline, or ad creative. And that a shiny new brand identity won’t automatically solve all of the problems of the business.
The marketing world is littered with failed rebranding initiatives (from the Gap to Tropicana) that illustrate one simple truth about branding. A company doesn’t own a brand. It’s consumers do. Giving a brand a new coat of paint (or dressing it in sheep's clothing) won’t change consumers feelings and expectations of a brand....
What is so mesmerizing about the Trivago Guy?
One of the most unexpected marketing success stories in recent months has been the ascendance of Trivago, a Düsseldorf-based travel search engine.
Some data from researcher YouGov's BrandIndex shows Trivago has come out of nowhere to become as well-known among travelers as Priceline. Some 29% of 3,200 leisure travelers polled by YouGov recall seeing an ad for Trivago — the same amount as Priceline. Expedia got 19% in the same poll. Tripadvisor, which recently launched a $30 million ad campaign, went from 5% to 15%, which is about half of Trivago's score....
There are nine strategic and tactical mistakes that can effectively kill any chance of brand elevation.
To have one of them uncorrected is bad. Three or four will drag your brand down and give your competition plenty of room to steal market share. Five or more of these is disastrous and will effectively kill your brand faster than a roomful of politicians.
(The original draft of this list first appeared in one of my Fast Company blog posts, but I’ve updated it here to add that much more horsepower to the immediate usefulness of these nine points.)...
Perhaps we don’t have that much in common. Ah, but we do. Personal brands are we. Our agendas may differ—better job, more clients, book sales, or (your goal here)—but we seek the same things: recognition, respect, influence and success.
You, my friend, are a brand.
A photographer. Life coach. Presentation expert. Alternative energy entrepreneur. Website developer. Skin care clinician. These are six simplified profiles of clients who have hired me recently to help them create more effective online marketing by developing their personal brand....
The brands that crush their competition are those who understanding that strategic branding goes much deeper than pretty visuals and responsive code. Branding is layered, sculpted, and tested.
To create a layered, brilliant, and competition-killing brand, three things must align. - Understanding of your brand (internal beliefs and communications)
- Understanding of your best potential audience(s)
- Understanding and differentiating from your competition
Combined, these elements create brand magic. To see these three things in action, keep on reading. Below I’ve curated some brilliant companies that are great at differentiating themselves from their competition....
THEME#7 OF POST SERIES ON HUMANIZING BRAND STORYTELLING
Not all brand stories are created equal. Nor do they have the same social value. The traditional process of brand storytelling that uses advertising, collateral, digital etc., is a process owned and led by a brand/business and their agency partners. Such forms of brand communication will usually attempt to talk “to” people through an out-bound (push) marketing approach (see Theme #2 regarding Mass Media Push).
Contrast this to brand stories born externally, crafted by people about brands, and in collaboration with brands. These stories are usually inspired by direct experiences, emotional connections, and engagement opportunities that allow people to be heard, and/or co-create directly with brands themselves. The outcomes are people-powered brand stories that represent a new form of value, or social currency.
As more than 80% of all online content is now user generated, the value of user generated brand stories will only grow exponentially. The social currency value of content will ultimately depend on the perceived authenticity of the story itself, and the share of human versus manufactured voice, within brand communication....
...Think of your brand’s logo like that crazy shirt. You want it to stick out in people's minds, allowing them to recall your brand later on.
Maybe it's something unique in your logo, or something awesome your brand has done. Either way, your logo should be front of mind for your audience, and associated with your brand and product.
Your logo says a lot about you, and can be very powerful. Have you ever wondered why Coca Cola rarely changes their famous red logo? Or why Pepsi spent a lot of money rebranding back in 2008? What about the highest valued brand in the world? Take a look at some of the most well known logos and brands in the world, researched and compiled by RubyMediaCorporation, and see what the hidden meaning behind each one is....
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Continuing my curated series of worthwhile "best of" posts from 2014, this one from Fast Company takes a look at some of the wins and fails in branding. Enjoy it over a relaxing eggnog.