Posts filed under 'brands'
Choice editing at Rough Trade
From Rashbre Central
Joe Ballantyne writes:
I was browsing in the wonderful Rough Trade record shop in Notting Hill the other day, and I noticed that they’ve started an ‘album club’ service. For a monthly fee they send you a new album, chosen from a selection and tailored around your musical preferences.
At first glance, this looks like a rather counter-intuitive business decision – half the fun of going to Rough Trade is about rummaging around the racks in search of lost gems. If CDs arrive on your doormat every month, even with Rough Trade packaging wrapped around them, there’s less chance of randomly coming across a few titles that you feel you may just have to take home. It also seems quite old-fashioned, in an age when music distribution is increasingly digital and consumers are supposed to be sovereign.
However, the idea of the album club seems to fit into a wider trend we’ve been observing recently – ‘choice editing’. Consumers are exposed to an ever-growing selection of goods, services and brands (and the number of CDs released every year remains high despite falling sales) – but at the same time there is some evidence that we’re less interested in spending time sifting through them. Making choices takes time and energy – both resources which we are short of. The choice editor becomes an trusted (and expert) friend who can cut through the market noise.
Perhaps in future, it won’t be endless choice which is going to be seen as a luxury – but rather, being able to pay others to make our choices for us. But only a few companies have sufficient credentials to earn that trust.
The picture – of Rough Trade West in Talbot Road – is from the Rashbre Central blog.
1 comment 20 October 2008
Talking like children
Jake Goretzki writes:
I couldn’t help noticing recently just how widespread ‘childlike Innocence’ in visuals and creative has become in UK advertising. This was brought home to me sharply last week when I collected a friend’s elderly mother at Gatwick. She’d flown to the UK from Bosnia, and seeing the billboards at the railway station, remarked with mild horror that ‘your banks even have advertising for children here!’. Looking again, it occurred to me just how much of today’s communication, stylistically, might be thought at first glance to be aimed at the average 8 year old.
I’m talking about simple, bold colours. Geometric shapes: circles and squares. A degree of studied low production and naivety too – some ads looking like screenprints or even potato prints. Lots of cutesiness too, through cartoon and animated characters. Cutesy animals, bunnies and teddies scurrying everywhere.
This may be nothing more than a current fashion in print advertising, reaching across campaigns and agencies. Fashions come and go: an earlier one was ‘punter + message on cardboard sign’, stolen from DA Pennebaker, last used by Apple Mac but also favoured by banksn. Another is ’subversion of everyday lettering’ (one of the thrills of Photoshop), where lettering on photo-real shopfronts / street signs / embroidery is altered to carry the message and force a double-take (last seen in UK anti-smoking advertising and still going strong).
For all the ubiquity of this style though, ‘childlike innocence’ clearly strikes a chord with consumers and chimes closely with several current trends. It reveals a lack of patience in consumers’ ’stop go lives’ for complexity, heavy copy and detail. It also reflects a caginess about risk and uncertainty, particularly potent in the realm of financial services, which means that clarity, hypersimplicity and even innocence can reassure. While this might seem to be a great opportunity for marketers and communicators grow up and ditch the bunnies, in recessionary times ‘talking to you like children’ begins to feel even more resonant. It’s a cosy bedtime story and a tucking in.
1 comment 29 July 2008
Brand impressions
From Brand Tags
Giles Powdrill writes:
The new media and marketing strategist Noah Brier has recently launched a simple, but fascinating website, brandtags. Its premise is “that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.” Users of the site are presented with logos from different companies and invited to type in the first thing that comes into their head. The results are then displayed as a cloud, where the relative size of the words reflects the number of times it has been typed in.
Whilst ostensibly a bit of fun, the results are both revealing and potentially unnerving for brand owners who have spent time, money and effort to convey a certain set of attributes, only to then see their brands assessed in such a raw (and realistic?) fashion.
The site is a great example of the sort of visual and engaging research application which will surely become more commonplace as we enter the next phase of web development. It is also a long way from the traditional questionnaire typically used to measure brand awareness and perceptions and a useful reminder that methodologies will evolve just as fast a brands do.
The picture at the top of the post is a selection from the brand tags generated in response to the ‘International Olympic Committee’. There are also some more sympathetic responses in the full list.
1 comment 17 July 2008
All together now
Jo Phillips writes:
When she spoke at the Booksellers Association conference last week Michelle Harrison, one of our Directors, implored the industry to think harder about how to sell books to consumers who are showing signs that they prize collective experience far more than they used to. This extends beyond valuing such experiences over material things (e.g. a book) to valuing the shared experience above the individual experience (e.g. reading a book in the bath). Whereas five years ago people were telling us what they wanted most was a bit of ‘me-time’, now it seems above all what we value is quality ‘we-time’.
As we move into the summer season in the UK this desire to get together is evident in the huge growth in festivals of all kinds and scales – last year there were over 550 of them and nearly two thirds of adults have attended a live music event in the last three years. Booksellers are in on this act – the Hay Festival, which starts today, grows larger every year (new for this year is a link up with a prison broadening its base further). Book clubs are also growing in popularity. But these are still niche audiences among book-buyers.
The need for social innovation is a challenge to many industries that have focused on benefits for individuals. It may call for turning the category on its head, as Nintendo Wii did by sidestepping the industry competition for faster, bigger, better graphics to focus on enabling living room fun between friends, or through product innovation, as Walkers Sensations did by creating the sharing crisps opportunity.
Add comment 22 May 2008
Different day, different hat
['Measuring cups', (c) Christine U'ren]
Becky Rowe writes:
We all live our lives on different planes and engage in diverse activities. As a consultancy we call this repertoire living – the idea that people are not defined by one interest, one value or one perspective, and instead engage in what can sometimes seem contradictory activities, often switching roles in a moment.
The starkness of the different roles I play came to the fore recently, when almost exactly 24 hours after the Millennials breakfast briefing I found myself in Oldham to interview two 19-year-old single mothers about their precarious financial situations. This is repertoire working in extremis. When we think of the Millennials in terms of marketing, we think of bright young things, Topshop shoppers, chatting away on their mobiles, playing on their Wiis – the children of affluent Britain. The reality of living at the other end of the spectrum hit me hard when I interviewed these two young women.
They shared with me how they manage their day-to-day lives on £60 a week. They dream of going to college to further their education and get jobs (one wants to be a social worker, the other a nursery teacher), but can’t afford the £3.90 bus fare it would cost them to get to college, let alone the additional money for childcare. They feel everybody hates them and judges them:
“I would stack shelves, sweep floors, make tea. I don’t want to be on benefits, but nobody will give me a chance. They turn me away before they have already seen me.”
These Millennials aren’t the target audience of big brands. They aren’t the most articulate or the most entrepreneurial. They are not ‘doted on’. I got the impression that our research interview was the first time anyone had listened to their perspective on anything for a long time, although what they said was sensible, interesting and practical.
Yesterday my work was about selling more computer games or jeans. Today it’s about the future of two desperate, young mums. I feel lucky that I get to wear so many hats in my professional role, but on this occasion, the contrast was disheartening.
The picture is by artist Christine U’ren, from her ‘Still Lives’ series. This picture, along with more of her work, can be found on her website.
Add comment 2 May 2008
Flying the flag (post 2 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
In the first half of this post, I wrote about flags as brands with an army and navy – but still in need of relaunching or repositioning from time to time. When they do work, relaunches are marvellously transformatory. Imagine Canada with this blazer badge of a flag (below) – unbelievably, this survived until 1965. It seems to convey the notion of Canada as some kind of British backwater. How could it ever have stood out? The Maple leaf on the other hand is ownable, differentiated and unifying. That said, of course, Quebec might beg to differ – anyone for a rebrand?
Canada Pre-1965
Canada Post-1965
Add comment 22 April 2008
The frenemy of my frenemy is my, err?
Alastair Morton writes:
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s CEO, has long recognised Google as a frenemy (part friend, part enemy). On one hand Google offers communications agencies the chance to buy interactive ads for its clients but, on the other, Google makes no secret of its intention to allow anyone to buy ads for themselves, thus disintermediating agencies.
Google has now announced that it will cease to restrict keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This means that surfers who key-in a trademarked brand name such as ‘O2′ may also see rival brands (Orange, Virgin etc) appearing in the search results alongside those for the brand they had sought. It seems that Google is now a frenemy of brands – providing access to huge audiences but potentially eroding brand equity – as well as of communications agencies.
And in all of this, is Google making any real friends? Well, consumers apparently. Matt Brittin, Google UK director, claims that ‘we are making this change because we want to give users greater choices to help them make informed decisions.’ But there is a problem with this line of argument. Our Planning for Consumer Change (PCC) data shows that more than half of UK consumers, and nearly two-thirds of those aged 15-24, feel that there is sometimes so much choice nowadays that they can’t make a decision. To borrow from Barry Schwatrz’s critique of the notion of choice [article here, opens in pdf, see video here] “choice maximisers” may welcome greater information, but find it harder to ‘maximise’ – while ‘choice satisficers’ – usually happy to make a ‘good enough’ choice – will feel greater pressure to maximise their choice from all the available options. Both groups are likely to be more frustrated.
In truth, many consumers actively use trusted and recognised brands and providers to sift the choices which face them. Whether or not Google’s intentions are admirable, I have a feeling that this change will have more effect in growing their ad revenues than in helping consumers manage their already complicated decisions.
Add comment 10 April 2008
Working at authenticity
Becky Rowe writes:
We held a breakfast briefing a few days ago to talk about what Millennials – that fast emerging 16-25 cohort – want. Yannis Kavounis (our Director of Innovation and wannabe Millennial) suggested that the answer is authenticity and innovation. Innovation is easy to understand but difficult to do well – putting customers first, pushing the boundaries of technology, re-mixing and recombining the old to create something refreshing and new all sounds pretty easy – but turning that into sales can be a minefield. In contrast, authenticity is both difficult to understand and difficult to do – juggling honesty and transparency, and staying true to the brand, whilst taking into account environmental and ethical concerns while keeping an eye on the bottom line. It requires a significant shift in the way the most companies do business.
They may be difficult to achieve, but there are rewards to be had. The interesting thought of the day for me was that the Millennials’ interest in these two qualities are levelling the playing field between big and small companies. The days of the big brand reaping the rewards simply for being big are over – it just isn’t enough anymore. But it seems that the days of Naomi Klein’s No Logo may have passed as well. For Millennials, it isn’t about big brand versus small brand or good versus evil. It is about how well a company (big or small) can deliver on those two core values of authenticity and innovation. So the new marketing battleground isn’t about the ‘coolest’, but about the ‘best’.
The big companies obviously have a head start and could win by throwing money at it, but trying to change the shape of their existing business models, may be more of a challenge. The smaller, more dynamic companies are likely to have less likely to be constrained by ‘the way we do things around here’, and could win by being better at spotting opportunities, but may not be so good at thinking through all the implementation issues. The Millennials seem happy for either – but whichever way you look at, they want you to put some effort into it.
1 comment 9 April 2008
Barbie knows no bounds
Sarah Davies writes:
On a recent visit to the US I was stopped in my tracks by an enormous pile of Barbie branded cereal boxes, on offer at 2 for $5. I was so mesmerised by this spectacle that I felt compelled to purchase a box. To the disappointment of my two daughters, I didn’t buy the cereal as a gift to add to their burgeoning collection of Barbie merchandise, but rather as an example of what can only be described as irresponsible marketing to children.
Does a brand like Kellogg’s need to go to such lengths to sell its products? Close inspection of the box reveals a long list of additives and general ‘nutritional’ profile of the product. The pieces of ‘cereal’ and marshmallow bits look more like sweets than breakfast food.
In an age where childhood obesity and diabetes are on the increase, it seems hard to justify using Barbie to encourage children to eat such things for breakfast. But on second thoughts, perhaps this is all a storm in a teacup? Reassuringly, on the back of pack, Barbie is able to share her ‘fab tips’ with children, telling them to “Live active” and “Keep it green”. So that’s alright, then. But it’s hard to tell which brand is being damaged more by this co-marketing venture.
Add comment 19 March 2008
What the Premiership learnt from Formula One
Andrew Curry writes:
I hope I’m not too late to note a fine article [not currently available on the Guardian's own site] by the Guardian’s Richard Williams on how England’s footballing Premiership has, in its plan for overseas league games, followed a global marketing blueprint first laid down by Formula One. Williams suggests the three steps to sporting franchise heaven go like this:
- Step One: Secure the commercial rights to the sport, including the right to sell broadcasting licences, income from which will dwarf the sale of tickets and perimeter advertising.
- Step Two: Use the television ratings to encourage the acquisition of teams by people more interested in global brands and markets than in the sport’s traditional audiences.
- Step Three: Clear out the traditional schedule to create new opportunities in new markets, if necessary by threatening to remove existing events completely.
Williams also suggests that there’s a fourth lesson that the Premiership’s Richard Scudamore has learnt as well:
“Saying the unsayable out loud is more than halfway to actually getting it done, as long as you have the money on your side and are prepared to take no prisoners.”
Given the money at stake, the current crowd of owners, and the track record of the Premiership over the last fifteen years, you wouldn’t bet against it pushing the plan through. But there are a couple of differences: formula one is still about individuals (we remember great drivers like Senna and Fangio), whereas football is about teams and their history. And football is far more rooted in place than motor racing ever was.
1 comment 15 February 2008
