Posts Tagged ‘brand experience’

photo courtesy of waffrie on flickr creative commons

I live in the Charleston, South Carolina area. A few years ago the old bridges spanning the Cooper River were torn down and a new breathtakingly beautiful bridge was built. The Arthur Ravenel Bridge is a suspension bridge that is a pleasure to drive over because of its architecture and ability to carry a large volume of traffic between Mt. Pleasant and Charleston.

Now as much as I like the bridge, it’s never occurred to me to use it as a component of my corporate identity, logo or in my advertising, but I think I’m in the minority. It seems that 8 out of 10 companies use the Arthur Ravenel Bridge, its towers or other features in their advertising. Now it makes sense for the Cooper River Bridge Run to use it in their advertising, but for a home oxygen supplier?  It makes more sense for the Yarborough Applegate law firm because the letters of their names form an impression of the bridge’s superstructure and it fits for The Bridge 105.5 radio station to use it in their advertising. But I’ve seen the bridge used in real estate ads, restaurant ads and business consultant’s ads. Just get over it!

If you do business in the Charleston area, I suppose you may want to use the bridge to give a sense of place in your logo or advertising, but wouldn’t you rather have imagery that depicts or speaks to how your customers use your products or services?

Your logo is a visual communication between your company and your customers. It should be distinctive. Individual. When customers see your logo, they should comprehend your brand qualities or understand the benefits of doing business with you. It’s lazy to use the most iconic image for your business sector or locale; the Ravenel Bridge in Charleston, the Eiffel Tower in Paris or a scale for a lawyer’s office or a chef’s toque for a restaurant.

When developing your logo and corporate identity, use a brand development process that clarifies your brand promise, qualities, benefits and features. Then your graphic designer can use this material to develop the best corporate identity materials for your company.

When your logo is developed, you’ll be glad yours is as individual as you and your company are.

Pepsi’s unveiled their new logo/look and is using social media to get the ball rolling. I invited my 22 year old son to weigh in on what and how Pepsi is doing this and here are his thoughts. Very insightful and on target.

If I were managing the roll out, I would not have blatantly announced I was “using social networking” to a bunch of Ad Bloggers. I would have used guerrilla marketing/micro advertising that treated the new logo as an obliteration of the old logo. In a year when “Change” is used as a slogan so much in politics, it is devastatingly clear how only one politician (Obama) has been able to actually appropriate it and manage it properly. He didn’t tell people they were going to start a social networking of barackobama.com, they just introduced and did it.

Furthermore, the Obama logo was perfect for destroying the stupid flag-and-name paradigm of political advertising. Shephard Farey’s propaganda posters (which I find very disturbing) also were daring enough to transform the campaign into a movement.

That’s what Pepsi should have done. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” except you are slowly infiltrating and upgrading your own brand. That’s what the Internet means today. It gives people the power to erode institutions through a multitude of voices– that’s how the Netroots beat the Clintons. In a wargame the US staged to prepare for a naval battle with Iran, a commander representing Iran chose to load all of Iran’s commercial, private, and military boats with dynamite and swarm the slow American dreadnaughts. He annihilated the US Navy in the simulation, so the Pentagon reset the war game and told him he couldn’t do that. That’s the power of small things versus large institutions.

Advertisers need to realize that social networking isn’t television. I don’t think they have. They still use it like a message-disseminating tool, not a message-shaping one. It’s not a megaphone. This generation distributes its own news, cuts up techno songs and puts rap lyrics over them, and designs its own t-shirts. User-generated content is the norm. I buy stuff, but I’m even more inclined to buy it if I think it was my idea.

And another thing kids hate: when big companies try to look cool by doing what the kids do, and making it obvious they are doing what the kids do. Like this campaign.

I do see that they are “inviting people to participate,” but coming from a corporation, that just sounds hollow. Especially because they already did a re-design and are stating this is “part of the new direction.”

So Pepsi should have made it appear like something new and better was taking over the brand instead of just saying, “This is what the new logo is now, look, it’s so effing cool because it’s not like those old logos it’s new and looks like an iPod and you guys like iPods, right? Because it looks like one and we’re using social networking to roll it out and you guys like that too, right?” See, Coke does redesigns, but I think it’s more comfortable with its status as “Classic.” This seems like the effort to get Generation After NeXt. Generation NeXt was a great campaign for the late 90s, by the way.

So what would the campaign look like? Probably the new logo everywhere, on subways, billboards, next to the old logo in stores, culminating with a You Tube of a solar eclipse. Then the blacked out sun becomes the new logo. Who knows if that would work. But I do think they missed the nuance of social networking and its importance to this generation.

When it comes to understanding a brand experience and making an emotional connection with brand evangelists many college alum offices stand out. But the one that stands out the most in my mind is Princeton, my son’s alma mater.

Princeton nourishes, nurtures and depends on this brand love to strengthen the feeling of the exclusiveness of the school. (While many of you reading this would say that the cost alone of attending this premier university establishes exclusivity, I would remind you of their financial largess to their students.)

Princeton searches for the best students; the ones who are Tigers in their blood. Once they tap you, they work intently on building the myth and making the fires burn bright.

They have rituals, new and old that may seem corny to outsiders, but once inside the gates, they have deep meaning. The days leading up to my son’s graduation were full of them. The beer jackets are one that I loved! You just gotta love a university that makes sure graduates have a jacket equipped to hold a six-pack of beers.

This year’s annual giving video is a great example of exactly what I mean.

There’s a lot to learn from the Princetons of the academic world when it comes to inspiring brand loyalty.

Create a myth or tell people about the myth that you have. Build a culture around that myth. Romance those who believe. Spread the love.