Passive-aggressive branding

This post from Futurelab about the situation BP finds itself in is an excellent read about what a brand can and can’t do when it gets itself into a world of trouble, just as they have in the Gulf.  It turns out that many of the standard, by-the-book solutions for limiting damage to the corporate image, executed however perfectly, aren’t adequate to a situation of this magnitude.

Part of it is because of the sheer magnitude and uniqueness of the disaster; part of it, inextricably linked with that, is the fact it occurred in a mediascape where the prevailing meme is now far, far outside of BP’s ability to control the dialogue.  Doing things by the corporate P.R. bible is now seen as spin, as manipulation and image cleanup that’s not only out of proportion to the problem but somehow dishonest and inauthentic.

The best solution BP could possibly pursue is to become at least as invested in resolving the problem, fixing the wrongs and restoring the damage, as the groups and communities that are decrying them right now.  As the article points out, they need to be leading the news cycle, not following it.  That’s the kind of initiative that can save a brand, and a company…and not let it drown in the slick of its own failure to act.

Branding: the entrepreneur’s advantage.

Okay, so nobody’s ever heard of your company, your product, your service – yet.  You may have barely gotten the shingle hung.  If you even own a shingle.  But no matter where you are as a startup, understand that you’ve some serious advantages over your bigger and more-established competitors when it comes to launching a branding initiative.

Like what, you ask?

No inertia.  Ever heard of ‘organizational inertia’?  It makes modifying or fine-tuning a brand image almost impossible sometimes – believe me.  I recently spent six months working on a brand re-launch project for a major CPG firm.  Support and commitments came from across the organization, right up to the C-level.  But when time came to pull the trigger…there were suddenly a hundred tiny, nattering voices who didn’t want the status quo disturbed, even if the outcome was potentially game-changing.  “Good enough” ruled the day.  You’ve got no such bureaucracy or entrenched habits to battle.

The spirit that moves you. Small businesspeople, entrepreneurs, innovators, all have a precious set of commodities that can be expressed in their brand promise: enthusiasm and vision.  Where big companies drift into maintenance and codification of what they’re all about, you’re still close to the beating heart of your business – the aspirations that got you going.  That’s the kind of energy that makes a brand authentic and real to your customers or consumers…and it’s exactly what they’re looking for.

Holistic grasp. If you’re small, you can have a hand in every aspect of the business, and of the branding.  That means it’s far, far easier to control it, adjust it, fine-tune it and have fun with it, in every expression.   It makes you nimble (see: inertia) and it makes it easier to react if you need to turn on a dime to confront a new opportunity.

Owning it…and up to it. It’s your company and your brand – and it’s your responsibility and challenge, too.  Brands are meant to be coaxed, nurtured and grown, not simply set loose.  By not managing your image and branding, you’re inevitably putting them at the mercy of the marketplace — and your competitors.  A passive-aggressive brand will someday run up against a problem where it doesn’t have the gumption or wherewithal to measure up to the challenge – see BP in the Gulf – because it’s lost the reflexes that allow it to seize the moment.  If you’re serious about your brand, you’ve got to own up to that responsibility every day.  Ask an Apple, a NIKE or a BMW about what being strict, smart and proactive about their brand image has done for them.

Branding meets Force: our new site for EDL Consulting.

After an intensive but, all things considered, not too long of a gestation period, we’ve just launched a very large, very extensive new Web site for EDL  Consulting, a client based in Northbrook, Illinois.  How it came together speak volumes about the potential of Cloud-based platforms for expediting online marketing and CRM, as well as practically every other facet of business.

As an IT consultant to many Fortune 500 firms, EDL Consulting makes organizations more efficient, nimble and successful by delivering solutions to the complex systems integration issues behind state-of-the-art technology. Their solutions generate real revenue, trim costs, and differentiate their clients from the pack…and one of the tools they’re expert at deploying is Force.com, the Cloud-based platform that Biersma Creative used to develop and host their new Web site.

Their new site, as extensive as it is — EDL can touch many areas of a client’s business, and needed a Web site that spoke to many different capabilities — was developed and launched comparatively quickly versus  a non-Cloud implementation.  Using Force.com’s tools and templates vastly streamlined the process, and allows extraordinary scalability and responsiveness and attendant cost savings, which  are just some of the reasons why we’ve become specialists in its implementation

Site design and architecture was the result of a focused pre-development process that included an extensive Digital Audit of EDL’s own previous site, as well as a deep-dive into various competitor’s sites to assess what did and didn’t work.  The theme of the site is “cutting through complexity,” and it was critical to design it to do the very same thing — allowing users to find the answers they seek with a minimum of clicks.   So the site architecture we designed provides alternate paths to enterprise solutions, all of them presented simply and directly, and in ways that speak plainly to the user’s need.

Last but not least, as Mike Biersma, points out, is that from a branding standpoint, EDL Consulting now has a site that measures up well against some of the biggest competitors in IT consulting — think IBM and Accenture, among others — and delivers in indelible user experience of simplicity and linearity that’s reflective of their brand promise.  “And that kind of alignment with your brand is absolutely what a marketer should expect from their site,” he says.

To learn more, consult our case study on this project.

Collecting butterflies…and sales, via Augmented Reality!

This Augmented Reality campaign in Japan is an indication of just what the potential is for AR as a marketing tool that delivers fun, eclectic, resonant engagement.  By “collecting” the virtual butterflies using a downloadable mobile app, users can add to their “collection” — and turn that collection into coupons and vouchers.

Even better, the “butterflies” are swappable with friends, just like items in a real collection would be.  That turns it into a social activity that’s a completely natural viral extension.  But it also injects a layer of wide-open gameplay into the activity that takes it beyond marketing, giving it authenticity that’s a rare commodity for any marketer to create.

The costs of a program like this aren’t particularly extreme, and the potential for buzz and involvement is enormous.  Even in the B2B universe, ideas such as this can be leveraged for impactful and lead-building results.

Location-based social media — can it help in B2B?

This list of marketing programs that use Foursquare suggests how using location-based social media can work on behalf of B2B marketers, too.  Especially since any marketing category is inherently competitive, and the most innovative and aggressive marketers will jump on a tool like location-based media…especially as it becomes commonplace and comfortably familiar for the general population.  Better to jump into the lead than lag when it comes to applying leveragable marketing tools that can differentiate you from the pack.

Since a tool like Foursquare is cross-platform, there’s no hardware barrier to its use — whether iPhone or Blackberry, any customer or employee should be able to easily access and participate in a program you mount.  A few possibilities:

• Ideas like the Gowalla and Chevy partnership at SXSW, delivering free airport shuttle service to Foursquare users, suggest an obvious way to use this media as part of a trade show or conference check-in program.
• While attendees are out on the floor, use Foursquare to drive them to your booth or display with promotional spiffs for checking in at your location; geo-markers, A/R and other digital overlays can also be deployed to enliven your presence.
• After-hours activities like dinners, entertainment tours, or other around-town junketing can be made more efficient and entertaining via location-based media.  Imagine a scavenger hunt or sightseeing tour with a series of plotted check-in points that delivers information, value-addeds, spiffs or other rewards.
• Build virtual presence at a trade show or conference, even if you don’t have an actual booth.  Inbound marketing software firm HubSpot did it, by creating a check-in spot at SXSW that was virtual, and by allowing attendees to download and use their Foursquare Grader and Speaker Grader tools.

Social media best practices — a policy primer

When your enterprise wades into the exciting, sometimes hectic and daunting world of social media, it’ll be good to have a set of policies in place that help guide your adaptation of social media.  So here’s a list of best practices for your organization that can help guide its understanding and implementation:

1. DEFINE social media, how it relates to the organization and its objective, so leadership and employees all share a common understanding of how, when and where social media channels are engaged.
2. DIFFERENTIATE between business and personal social media usages; leave as little grey area as possible in terms of expectations of how employees use these channels.  Whether you’re going to be liberal or restrictive in those expectations, make sure you determine what’s acceptable to the company.
3. AUTHORIZE who’s in charge of social media — marketing?  PR?  Does it require C-level attention?  Who sets up these accounts?  Who posts — and who doesn’t?  Who manages any negative escalations or other issues that may occur?
4. ASSIGN ACCOUNTABILITY: if social media is a tool, make sure it’s getting the attention this initiative absolutely requires by making sure it’s part of your accountability structure.  It shouldn’t be something that’s done in “spare time,” or when other “more important” tasks are off employee’s desks.    To do social media right, it needs consistency, imagination and hard work…and needs to be viewed as being just as important as other facets of your business.
5. PLAN AND REVIEW — set mileposts, goals, calendars, analytics and review processes in place, just as you would for any other business process.  Social media, in the context of business, is a business instrument, and needs to be managed accordingly.  And with the right approach and diligence, it’s totally quantifiable.

Augmenting your Trade Show

Putting Augmented Reality to work in the trade show environment is getting nearer and nearer; here’s one testimonial from a vendor who utilized A/R platform Junaio to deliver navigation, 3D visualization and other assets for some of its trade show clients.

The fact is, the sky’s the limit in terms of application of Augmented Reality in this channel.  The new adage in digital marketing is that “if you can imagine it, you can build it.”  That’s nowhere demonstrated better than in bringing A/R to bear on making your next trade show presence more exciting, leads-driving and buzz-building than you can imagine.  Soon, it wont just be a matter of being on the bleeding edge: exhibitors will need to embrace A/R simply to keep current.

Quirks of sports team branding

The Utah Jazz are revising their logo, going back to a more retro look.  But first, I’d suggest they stop calling themselves the Utah Jazz.  Sorry — that’s just the persnickety branding geek in me, complaining about a brand that makes no sense in its current context.

Time was, teams had names that made sense because they were part of a sense of place.  They represented solidarity with the communities where they were formed.  They had as much local flavor as, well, the beer in the stands that was often brewed at a Schlitz or a Strohs plant up the block from the ballgame.

That day is kaput.  But it leaves us with some interesting branding oddities to consider — and use as conversation fodder for the pre-game visit to the local sports bar:

• The Utah Jazz hail from New Orleans, so “Jazz” makes sense — in New Orleans.  Last time I looked, Utah didn’t exactly have a thriving jazz scene.  Maybe the “jazz” is what’s happening on the floor?  Plays more like elevator music, IMHO.
• Los Angeles has a habit of importing teams whose names make no sense whatsover in the new locale; in fact, they’re so particular to their place of origin, it’s almost laughable:
  • There’s no lake in L.A., so why the “Lakers?” Because they originated in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that’s why.
  • The Dodgers? Well, their nickname is one of the most rooted-in-place names in sports, a part of a locality’s inimitable cultural heritage: New Yorkers taking the trolley across Brooklyn to their Manhattan jobs would refer to the natives there, somewhat disparagingly, as “trolley dodgers.”  So when they started a baseball team, Brooklynites proudly adopted “Dodgers” as its moniker.
• The Devil Rays was too off-putting for the Tampa Bay MLB franchise, so they shortened it to Rays, and included a little splash of sunshine on the logo.  “Rays,” get it?  Though the fish is still there, too.  As far as they’re concerned, you can have it both ways…though it makes a branding expert’s head hurt to contemplate the two-headed dissonance…
• Ever think about how the three major sports franchises in Pittsburgh all share the same color palette? Black, white and gold are the three major colors for the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins.
• The Detroit Pistons would seem to have an name firmly rooted in Motown, but they were originally the Fort Wayne (IN) Pistons, before owner Fred Zollner — whose company manufactured pistons, among other auto parts — schlepped the team to Detroit.

Arriving at authenticity…authentically.

The overall impression a prospect, customer or consumer has of your brand is determined not through a single transformational encounter, in almost all cases, but via a series of incremental experiences: the Web banner or magazine/e-zine profile, the trade show or touring event incidence, the actual tangible, do-or-die encounter with your product.

More than ever, general consumers are turning to what B2B buyers and specifiers have looked for all along from what they’re looking to buy — authenticity.  What  exactly constitutes “authentic” can change, product-to-product, user-to-user, but the definition in the dictionary works pretty well:

1. not false or copied; genuine; real; an authentic antique.

2. having the origin supported by unquestionable evidence; authenticated; verified: an authentic document of the Middle Ages; an authentic work of the old master.

3. entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience; reliable; trustworthy: an authentic report on poverty in Africa.

Augmented (Event) Reality

Now that companies like Layar are making big inroads into mobile, with apps that are simply installed on nearly any cellphone, it’s time for every B2B marketer to take a look at Augmented Reality as a way of enhancing engagement with customers and prospects.

Truth be told, deploying A/R in service of your business isn’t as daunting — or expensive — as you might think.  Solutions like Layar, and the digital creative and production platforms to build A/R models, are now off-the-shelf tech that any decent digital design agency or in-house department can work with.  The only limitation is imagination and commitment used in incorporating it.

That said, it’s important to use common sense and B2B marketing savvy in executing an A/R tactic.  A marketer who uses it only for shock value, for buzz-building, will quickly seem a one-trick pony if there’s no real value or authenticity behind it.  But deployed properly it can both dazzle and inform, and give your company a patina of bleeding-edge leadership.

Some implementations?

• In event marketing, your company can “install” a geolocated virtual object like a 3D product model, movie or demo that’s integrated into your trade show presence — and can be as scalable as you want!
• Put an A/R object right in a conference attendee’s hotel lobby, or conference room, or wherever you choose — viewable either through their smartphone or through another device you can provide, like a camera-enabled tablet carried by a brand ambassador.
• As part of a promotion, virtual objects can be used any number of ways — as part of a virtual scavenger hunt, for example, that can enliven a convention or facilities visit.
• In a presentation, it’s a unique way to present information, product demos or other content.
• Advertising can benefit enormously — whether it’s a trade ad that’s online or in print that contains A/R features, or virtual billboards and signage.