1066 Blog

Nom de Guerre

A newly announced credit card has set a new a record for Longest Product Name.

"Asiana Airlines American Express Card from Bank of America".

Too Much Touch

Our favorite handset maker, HTC, may be painting itself into a brand corner, WM Experts calls out today. The company has a slew of new products coming to market, including a highly anticipated Android phone. And yet they may be relying a bit too heavily in the Touch ingredient brand.

Named for the gorgeous TouchFLO interface, the Touch brand is being slapped onto every new phone that the company has in its pipeline. Its all too common a marketing mistake--create a solid product or ingredient brand and then "love it to death". Moto's RAZR is the classic example of the risks inherent in this approach.

The situation is particularly problematic for HTC because they have built so little equity into their product brands that the ingredient becomes a key (and ultimately meaningless) product handle. Their announcement May 6 in London should shed more light on their plans.

Better to be true than right

At the risk of treading into the overheated realm of politics, we were intrigued by The Atlantic’s article on what could be described as the Clinton brand. Putting aside the political analysis, this article points to larger shifts in branding that business marketers should pay heed to. Reading the article through the lens of Clinton as a proxy for Fortune 500 brands and the Obama as a proxy for start-up/disrupters, we can take away two important and game changing insights. First, loss of control. The ability to establish messages from on high and manage them through communication channels is becoming very difficult. This, traditional, approach to branding depended on a highly centralized and structured information distribution system. The internet has completely changed that and turned communication channels on their head. Second, authenticity. It is better to be true then right. Disingenuousness is becoming the worst branding liability. And yet, conversely, the marketplace is becoming more tolerant of mistakes.  In fact, an honest mistake can even reinforce the credibility of your brand. (e.g. JetBlue’s admission of fault during the canceled flights fiasco). Politics isn’t known for being a source of marketing innovation but in this election, corporate marketers are getting a taste of what’s to come.

1066 one of BtoB Magazine's Top Agencies 2008

We were quite pleased to discover that we've been selected as one of BtoB Magazine's Top Agencies 2008... an illustrious group ranging from small (us) to huge.

Magenta Day

In one of the more bone-headed things that a mobile carrier has done in some time, T-Mobile yesterday asked Engadget Mobile to stop using magenta in their logo. For those of you who don't read Engadget, it is one of the, if not the, most influential tech blogs out there.

Today Engadget (along with a half dozen other mobile blogs) have turned their site magenta in playful protest.

Motorola Press Coverage

Have had some nice media coverage of the Motorola brand situation.

Brandweek, The Chicago Tribune, eBrandMarketing. It's nice to get a story picked up!

Who Keeps the Motorola Brand?

Big news day for Motorola with the announcement by CEO Greg Brown that they would be splitting off the company's mobile handset business. As we have covered before, this news the latest in a series of shake-ups, mix-ups and screw-ups that have dropped the tech giant to a shaky 3rd in the market for cellular handsets.

Brand issues often arise in M&A situations where the merged entity has to weigh the market equities and decide whether to keep one of the pre-existing brands or create a new one. This process is often fraught with emotion as loyalists on both sides make claims as to their brand's predominance.

Motorola's breakup brings the company face-to-face with a corollary challenge: which of the two emerging companies gets the Motorola brand and how is the other company branded? In the early part of the decade, Accenture and BearingPoint brands were born out of similar splits. Freescale Semiconductor was created in 2004 after the spin off of Motorola's semiconductor business.

It seems fairly clear that the handset business needs the brand more than does the  set-top box/modems side of the house. At the same time, neither side can afford to lose any advantages.

As it splits, Motorola will need to think creatively about how it maximizes the brand assets it has. One possibility would be to use the "Moto" brand -- a cornerstone of the handset advertising campaign and a recognizable brand in its own right -- as the new handset brand. This raises questions about global applicability of the Moto brand, and yet desperate times call for desperate measures.

Of course these are also emotional times at Motorola. Senior management is going to have to keep a cool head and get some good counsel.

Tracking Brand HTC

As close-readers of this blog will remember, at the end of last year we picked HTC to be Brand of the Year 2008.

In the spirit following up that bet, a couple of interesting developments this week:

New website: HTC has revamped its website which was definitely overdue for a change. The new site does a much better showing off the company's fantastic product line (although it could use some more QA). I have been a member of the "eClub" for a while but its not particularly active. Perhaps this web relaunch will re-engerize their efforts to engage customers directly.

New press coverage: Laptop Magazine has a new interview with CEO Peter Chou which is not quite as detailed as the one he did with Engadget in December, but does have some new info. Particularly interesting is HTC's focus on interface innovations and (selective) commitment to its original ODM business as with the highly-anticipated Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA line.

Product branding: This week, HTC (or, more accurately, "someone close to the situation") announced that the Android "Google phone" that HTC is working on will be called "Dream". Interesting to see that the company is putting much more effort into its product naming strategy, at least for high profile products. Traditionally HTC's product naming has been more about non-committal non sequiturs which its channel partners were left to rename (Kaiser becomes Tilt, Excalibur becomes Dash, etc). Seems like HTC stepping to the challenge of getting its product marketing in order.  

Intel Outside

Intel is the kind of client that branding consultants dream of. In addition to being the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductors, Intel has also run one of the most successful ingredient branding campaigns in history. Beginning in 1991, Intel successfully stemmed the tides of commoditization with a simple sticker that assured consumers that the computer they were buying was powered by the latest and greatest technology. Over the years, the campaign has changed to reflect Intel's enormously complex product portfolio, but the basic parameters of the campaign (backed up with some serious co-op marketing dollars) have kept would-be competitors like AMD at bay.

Today's announcement that Intel would be introducing Atom, a new brand for its line of low-power processors is the next evolution in this ingredient brand strategy.

This new generation of extremely small, energy efficient processors are the core of Intel's bid to power smaller devices such as mobile phones, ultra mobile PCs and low cost laptops (Intel calls them Mobile Internet Devices). Intel has struggled to find its place in the market for mobile phones, the hope now is that Atom will allow them to do so.

As a name Atom is so good that it's a miracle it made it through Intel's trademark attorneys. It elegantly conveys the key benefits of the product line in a simple and appealing word (and only 4 letters!).

And yet while the technology is revolutionary, the marketing strategy looks like more of the same. Great brands are defined by the flexibility with which they evolve to meet the challenges of new market realities. Intel on the other hand seems stymied by the success of a strategy that it has employed for 17 years.

The market for mobile phones and ultra portables is much different than the market for PCs in which Intel's brand strategy worked so well. Is there room for another ingredient brand in this muddled, fast-changing and poorly understood marketplace? Is there room for an ingredient brand on the slim and forever slimming form-factors of cellular phones? Will the Intel brand hold the same degree of influence with consumers in emerging markets; for whom mobile devices will be their first and primary computing experience? Finally how should the Intel brand--and its ingredient brands--adapt to the realities of a world where computing power is less relevant than connectivity?

No one can know the answers to all of these questions, but slapping another "inside" brand on this new generation of devices will almost certainly fall short of the mark.

A New Definition of Services

In thinking about services marketing, I often return to this 2004 paper by Lovelock and Gummesson. It argues that we need a new definition of what a service is.

The old definition, found in most marketing texts, is that a service is an intangible good. It is consumed at the same time it is delivered. It is fleeting--remembered as an experience. It is different every time it is delivered. It is different from a physical product.

The new definition, the authors suggest, is that a service entitles the purchaser to access a particular physical resource for a period of time. So, Hertz hires out a car, Deloitte a partner, Verizon a piece of its network.

Today, manufacturers increasingly use services to differentiate their goods. Services companies launch products. It is often a challenge for a company culture built around building physical things to market intangible things (and vice versa). For this reason alone, perceiving service as "rental" can help to clarify relationships between what previously have been characterized as two ends of a spectrum: from tangible to intangible.

Later this week, I'll take a look at the implications of this way of thinking about services for services marketing and branding

A Room Worth a Bundle

Always on the look out for clear examples of bundling of offerings, we came upon the Kithaus from Design Within Reach.

It's a prefab house sold as a base structure and packaged with accessories such as canopies and louvers; installation included. Customers can also buy a package of furnishings to put inside it --marketed as an “office in a box” that can even include “the box”".

This is bundling that's clear and compelling. A simple example of how to nest packages of offerings within larger ones and link to a larger context.

Brands: A Shrinking Advantage or Shifting Advantage?

Umair Haque writes today about the Shrinking Advantage of Brands. Cheap interaction, he says, is "driving the strategy of branding into decay".

Huzzah! Haque echoes a number of the things that form the basis of our mission to remake the way marketers think about marketing. In doing so, however, he seems to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the mechanisms for building a brand are changing, does the value and advantage of a strong brand necessarily implode as well? If consumers have more of a role in determining the relevance and meaning of the brands that they love (or hate), does the fundamental importance of these brands as repositories of perceived value go away?

With cheap interaction now available to all, isn't the need for a brand stronger than ever? With all of the market noise that accompanies cheap interaction, how else can a provider of goods and services identify the specific ways that they differentiate their value? How else can customers, partners, employees and other stakeholders identify and respond to the firms that they interact with? Brands today are more relevant than ever because they are more volatile. For the Googles out there that have built multi-billion dollar brands in breathtakingly short time periods, there are many others that have lost value due to a failure to live up to the promises made to their markets (think Kodak, GM, AOL, Motorola, Sears). This is less a failure of the brands than it is a failure to deliver on those brands.

Haque makes a fundamental error that most people (including many seasoned marketers) make; he conflates "branding" with "advertising". Yes, in the industrial era interaction was expensive, communications channels were limited and awareness of a product or company was the critical challenge facing marketers. However, in today's world of cheap interaction, mass media advertising is still the primary mode of brand-building. This has a lot to do with market inertia, the influence of major advertising conglomerates and fears about messing with the orthodoxy of the 30 second spot. No CMO wants to have to justify a reallocation of massive advertising budgets, even thought far more cost-effective brand-building channels now exist.

Marketers need to redefine their roles and the process of how they build brands. This will require moving away from the advertising-dominated paradigm that proven so difficult to shake. It will also mean breaking down the wall that currently exists between marketers and  product developers, so that together they can hear the marketplace and respond to its calls for new kinds of value. The most innovative leaders out their will be able to pull it off, the others can look forward to clever advertising campaigns which do nothing to bolster their weakening brands.

Another LodgeNet Reivew

UnderConsideration's brand blog Brand New interviewed our creative partner on the LodgeNet project Jerry Kuyper. A good discussion of the strategic issues behind the effort and how Jerry made them manifest in a new visual identity.

Let's Get Social

BusinessWeek recently ran an interesting article by authors Spender E. Ante and Catherine Holahan called "Generation MySpace is Getting Fed Up," which deals with the tenuous relationship between social networks and advertising. It focuses primarily on the uncertain nature of advertising in this environment and how advertising might affect (read: annoy) users. It's useful reading generally, but one thing in particular caught my attention. "The Myspace Generation," it reads, "may be getting annoyed with the ads and bored with profile pages."

This brings together two things I think are important to understand regarding social media. 1) Serving traditional online ads won't ever be very effective, and 2) the social network that brings utility to the social media sphere will win out.

Let's start with point 2 just to be contrarian. There's no question that social networks like MySpace and Facebook are initially a kick and kind of addicting. But the novelty wears thin quickly. How many vampire attacks can you send before you begin to question the nature of the vampire attack? The poking and gifting fast becomes a nuisance and masks the real value a social network can provide.

A social network like Facebook can serve as the ideal hub for communications and content - more fun than a Yahoo! homepage and more personally relevant than a Google search. The combination of having, in one place, all of your preferred content and quick access to what you're friends are reading and watching, where their eating and what products they're into, is a truly killer app. 

But for the benefit to be realized, the network needs to actually offer the capability to draw the necessary content and applications to create this personal hub. Currently, the social networks have little utilitarian content of this kind and what little there is tends to be incredibly hard to find. There need to be more applications like the ones created by NetFlix and GoodReads and the incredible new city guide UpNext (currently in beta). Have a friend whose tastes you share in movies, take a look at their queue. A friend who is particularly well-read, have a look at reviews of the books they've read. How about your friend who is really in the know. Check out what they think about a recent visit they had at one of Manhattan's hot spots. One can imagine a social network ultimately being a true content hub where friends can share immediately a television program they saw that might appeal to a friend of theirs, a news item directly related to their line of work, or their wedding gift registry. These are the kinds of useful tools that need to become more prevalent on social networks to combat the boredom that eventually comes from one to many "superpokes." And right now they're precious few.

Which brings us to point 1. Companies have to stop focusing on figuring out how to deliver ads to consumers on social networks and begin to actually use the medium to their advantage. An ad will always be passive and, as BusinessWeek notes, sometimes intrusive. Instead "advertisers" should be developing actual applications, as well, ones that are useful to consumers and can take advantage of the inherent viral nature of social networks.

Companies can learn from the likes of NetFlix. The app is, in effect, an ad as well as an extension of their service. But a straight promotion can be transformed in the social sphere, as well.

Why wouldn't a credit card company like MasterCard investigate creating promotional applications in Facebook? Something that extends their SoundStage promotion into the social media habitat, for example. Or take it a step further and allow social networkers to create and share their own "Priceless" campaigns.

Dominos is asking customers to create their own pizza recipes. Why not make this an OpenSocial application that can be used on any of a number of social networks? And why not let them order it right from their profile page?

These are just a couple of examples. Are these ads? Yes, in a sense. But they are neither passive or intrusive. They're instead interactive and self-selective. The promotion is essentially endorsed by whomever passes it along. A music lover might be drawn to the SoundStage promotion app and compelled to share it with a fellow music lover. You can imagine millions of people sharing the Dominos app and concocting the most preposterous (delicious?) recipes. But every person that downloads the app at the encouragement of a friend is a person exposed to the brand.

These sorts of promotions are everywhere but in the past getting them in front of people took major capital investment in advertising or hope that people would stumble upon them. Now the mechanism is there and companies are remiss if they don't take advantage of it.

New realities of branding

We attended Columbia University's BRITE Conference on branding, innovation and technology last week. Much of the discussion centered on the tech-inspired convergence of product development, brand and customer experience.

Speakers and attendees alike noted how the practice of branding is changing. It's moving from an approach focused on communications channels to one built around things customers are trying to accomplish. One example: getting more out of running with Nike Plus, the convergence of Nike shoes with Apple iPod that allows runners to share favorite jogging routes, measure their performance, and trash talk with their friends.

One of the open questions: How do you define a brand in a way that gets product developers, marketers and those in the field responsible for delivering on the brand promise to create an experience with which customers want to involve themselves?

We were struck by the extent to which the cases covered were examples of adding value through the addition of services to products and vice versa. This is one of the greatest opportunities for differentiation for both manufacturers and services companies. You can see some of our thinking on the topic here, here and here.