Tag Archives: branding
Chicken Sexing and Your Brand
It’s possible that determining the sex of a baby chick is more difficult than branding your company. Oddly enough, they both work in similar ways.
At one day old, the male and female chicks look exactly alike. While scientists can explain the minutiae of wing color, and where to find the BB-sized ovaries of the female chick, these observations don’t fly down on the farm.
The Zen Nippon School of Chicken Sexing in Nippon, Japan is known for training the most successful chicken sexers. The curriculum is simple. The student stares at the rear end of the chick and announces whether it’s male or female. The master standing nearby says “yes” or “no” and the chick is tossed in the appropriate bin.
Over a period of weeks the student gradually becomes an expert. This isn’t garden-variety deductive logic at work. It’s our unconscious mind learning through pattern recognition, colors, shapes, textures and associations. Sound familiar? It’s the same way we’re reminded by a glimpse of a shape, color or font. While you may remember the plot or the headline of an ad, great branding communicates a powerful message that the unconscious brain deciphers. There you go, chicken sexing and branding, now we all have a backup plan.
Use the News to Create Buzzy Campaigns
A quick public relations reaction to news that relates to your brand can spur exceptional results. After all, your customers are already tuned into the news. All you need to do is weave in a relevant story about your brand. Procter and Gamble, for example, immediately responds to oil spills by donating Dawn dishwashing detergent. The community relations effort drives millions in free publicity while embedding a key brand message about Dawn’s cleaning power.
You don’t need a billion dollar advertising budget to harness the same concept. After Sony announced that it would cease floppy disk production, Ideopia pounced on this news to unseat one of its client’s competitors, whose medical device is dependant on floppies. Yippee!
The Advantage of News Tie-ins
- Built-in and sensitized audience
- Credibility of third party endorsement, e.g. “Silicon Valley News says the floppy is dead.”
- Relevancy. It’s happening now, not six weeks from now when your next ad campaign launches.
Unearth News Tie-ins for Your Brand
- Monitor keywords and trending topics in social media
- Track online publications using Google Alerts
- Keep micro audiences in mind. It may not be news for June and Ward, but it could blow the top off your industry.
Develop a Quick Response Mentality
- Create an infrastructure that can think and act quickly.
- Social Media and Web: 1-2 hours
- Print: 24 hours
- TV and Radio: 12 hours
How to murder an established brand in 10 easy steps.
- Protect your brand from change like a religious zealot. Your marketing mojo has worked for 100 years, and by golly it’ll work for another 100. Convince yourself that all good change is evolutionary; that anything progressing faster than a teradactyl is downright dangerous.
- Democracy rules. Vote on everything, especially creative work. And vote often. Phil in accounting. Lisa in customer service. Your mom. And, of course, legal. Your marketing will be stripped of anything that could possibly make it work, but an ass covered is an ass saved.
- Believe your sacred brand lives in a vacuum where it is immune to cultural, technological and demographic changes. Like Women’s Suffrage and the internet, they’re all fads anyway.
- Worry about losing your job. That fear will protect from taking any action that could positively move your business forward, while you may get lucky and ride the flat growth line into retirement.
- Wear Teflon by Armani. Let the little guys take the fall. Make your subordinates more afraid of losing their job than you are of losing yours. Afterall, it’s your job to cultivate talent internally.
- Talk a good game. Drop buzzwords. Maybe Tweet once or twice. Reference articles about social media and forward them to higher ups. Everyone will know you’re on top of this new fangled stuff, but don’t do anything about it.
- Congratulate yourself for being at the top of your industry without wondering if your industry will be there in 5 years.
- Ignore criticism or even the hint of negative karma. Consumers are idiots or difficult cases. Research lies. And your agency’s job is to suck up and take orders.
- Never benchmark or evaluate your program against other industries much less competitors. Those guys are clueless and their ideas have no relevance to an aged and revered brand like yours.
- Consumers are idiots (see No. 8). Listening to what they think or feel about your brand, or how it could better meet their needs is just stupid. What could possibly come from it? New product ideas. More share. Why bother? Your brand had this nailed 100 years ago.
Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature
Janine Benyus shows off biomicry (design from nature) in this top-rated youTube video.
Sasquatch Wine Brand Myth Hits Sour Note
Would you buy a bottle of wine from this hairy humanoid?
I admit it. I am a Neanderthal when it comes to wine. I like my vino cheap, and I make my decisions based on cool graphics and interesting names more than woodsy aftertaste. This is how I came in possession of a 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon ($4.99) from Sasquatch Cellars. Afterall, who better to be an expert vintner than a large, hairy humanoid.
Brand myths, like Sasquatch, can differentiate products in a commodity market. Add a clever back story, which Sasquatch Wine Cellars takes a shot at, can capture a loyal and profitable cult following. Presumably the tin foil hat crowd in Sasquatch’s case. Here’s the upshot: when you uncork your Cabernet for a romantic evening, it cannot smell and taste like benzene. It doesn’t matter how sturdy and robust the marketing is if the product stinks.