Tag Archives: Branding
Sugarpova VS. Hallmark
As we descend into a holiday weekend here in the US, we thought we’d keep this week’s New Brand Post on the light side. A great time for our second Punny Brand Name Showdown. This time we chose two brands named after their founders, with an added pun.
An added pun with a dash of sugar in this case. Sugarpova is tennis star Maria Sharapova‘s step from endorsements into entrepreneurship with a line of gourmet candy. The 25-year old is targeting a market “that doesn’t have a premium segment” (Bloomberg Businessweek) and she has translated her own brand name into a sugary pun. (How they got away with using ‘Lips like sugar’ as a product name remains an open question. Did Echo & The Bunnymen receive tons of free sugar power to keep them awake at their age on stage when performing their biggest hit by the same name?)
What you might not know is that the established greeting card company Hallmark was actually named for its founder, Joyce Hall. Hallmark also means a mark indicating quality or excellence (Wiki). Voila, an excellent punny brand name has been born.
But there are winners and there are losers and you can’t be both, or can you? In our second Punny Brand Name Showdown we have two winners and two losers. Sugarpova is a great pun, leveraging the person behind the brand in a memorable and fun way. Yet, it does feel a bit bittersweet by elevating sugar to become the new star of the fun, but not quite healthy brand. Hallmark is a great pun with a personal touch, but if it was a brand launch in 2013 we would stray away from it based on online search and IP ownership difficulties.
CATEGORIES: Blog Your Brand Launch: Naming
3 Crucial Brand Identity Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make
You call it logo. We call it brand identity. Just sounds so much more important. Why? Because it is darn important. It is the visual platform to all of your new brand’s communications. It is the visual foundation of the house you are about to build; the eye candy and sex appeal; the quick read ‘know it all’ brand identifier. Getting it right is an art. If I can give you only 3 pieces of advice before you dive head first into crafting this – did I say important? – piece of design with your agency or freelance design partner, these are the ones to keep up front and center on your dashboard throughout your journey:
1. You Want It To Be Everything
You (will) have many ideas for how your new brand’s logo should look and what it should convey. I am here to tell you, sorry, you can’t fit them all into an identity design. You can try, but you will fail and you will suddenly find yourself not communicating anything at all. Your logo will look more like a painting of sorts and it will confuse rather than educate. Great identities convey one or two messages and they work because they do just that: They have a focus. They focus on the most important message through concept and visual target audience appeal through colors and typography. Ask yourself ‘What is the big idea and who should it cater to?’ A brand identity is a simple mark not a canvas. At times you are able to convey multiple concepts by refining areas of the logotype or mark, but it’s a lengthy and diligent process. When we re-branded Creative Talent Agency Match a few years back, we were able to communicate the symbiotic relationship between client and talent agency as well as talent and talent agency through typography that is co-dependent. We further use the letter A as a stand alone mark that signifies a computer cursor, which describes the online nature of the agency in a subliminal manner. Yet the identity does not look busy or complex. It’s a simple concept that is hiding subliminal messages within.
2. You Get Stuck In The Present
Don’t think of today. Think of tomorrow. Create an identity that not only will convey who you (company/product/service) will be in a couple years down the line, but also will keep connecting with your audience three to five years down the road. Don’t make it hip. Create something that has the ingredients to be timeless. We created the below identity for Don Joaquin’s line of Guacamole eight years ago and it works just as well in today’s overly crowded marketplace as it did back then because we focused stylistically on tradition while forming timeless emotional connections with the consumer. There was nothing hip about it then and there’s nothing hip about it now, and that is why it works.
3. You Want To Fit In
Your identity should surprise the segment you are about to disrupt. Show your competitors and consumers alike that there is a new player in the field. That alone is often the key ingredient for the initial purchase, or call – out of intrigue. Just like that funky tasting soft drink you tried out the other day because it looked so different and enticing, you just had to give it a shot. If your product or service is not like all the others, your logo needs to stand tall behind that claim and represent it visually as the key creative element that will be on all your outreach materials. When we crafted the identity for an online music service that promised to shake things up amongst traditional record labels, we decided to return the power of music to the hands of the individual, may that be the artist or the listener. It made a statement and conveyed disruption. Soon after launch the CEO told me that a complete stranger stopped him while wearing a company T-Shirt and said ‘The power of music, that’s a great shirt man.’ Little did he know it was a brand mark.
CATEGORIES: Your Brand Launch: Identity
The top 5 must-do’s for your tech startup brand launch
Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, Engadget, TechCrunch 50, LAUNCH, This Week in Startups as well as his new venture, Inside.com, asked me ‘What are the most important things you’ve learned about launching?‘ Here is what I wrote him:
1. PICK A PROCESS
There are many processes to launching your tech startup. Choose one that works for your personality, budget and within the culture you are about to create.
2. TEST AND FAIL
Test and fail and test and fail. You should invest in creating your brand only once you really understand your target audience’s behavior and true needs.
3. LAUNCH AS A BRAND
Launch as a brand, not a startup that may develop into a brand. Launch by design. Design relates to the process you have to adhere to, but furthermore it truly is design that holds the key to early brand success. Graphic design, brand identity design, and web design will set your offering apart at the time of launch.
4. TAKE NAMING SERIOUSLY
Naming is crucial. You can’t change the name of your kid once they are in puberty. The name you choose at launch will remain with the brand forever, so don’t settle for a placeholder name that just happened to make it into beta because the domain was available. It’s an art, science, and legal matter, so make sure it doesn’t get overlooked.
5. LISTEN SELECTIVELY
‘Opinions are like @**holes, everybody has one‘ – choose wisely whom you listen to, which opinions you implement, whom you exclude from certain conversations and why. Have a ‘stakeholder opinion plan‘ in place from the start to make it easy for you to adhere to and eliminate the unease of hurting people’s feelings or having to re-do certain phases of your project because you did not listen to the right people at the right time.
The Name-Letter Branding Phenomenon
Did you know that your name can have an impact on everything from your day-to-day decisions like which candy bar you prefer to some of your most important life decisions like the career you choose?
“If a brand name shares our initials, we tend to like it more,” says Miguel Brendl, Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, who has taken an interest in studying the complex relationship people have with their names and brands they purchase.
It is no coincidence that there are an unusual number of Dentists named Dennis. Women named Louise are likely to move to Louisiana, and Craigs like Coke while Peters prefer Pepsi. Is it any coincidence then that I am running FINIEN and my name is Fabian?
Read more about this interesting phenomenon here.
CATEGORIES: Your Brand Launch: Naming
Your new brand’s logo cannot be hip
I was asked the question, ‘What current trends in logo design do you truly hate?’ at a panel discussion at NYU back in December. I felt it was time to manifest my strong feelings towards trends in logo design. It’s an oxymoron. A logo shall never be trendy. Trends come and go, your brand identity is created to stick around for a mighty long time, hence ruling out even the remote possibility of making it trendy.
Your logo can still be modern, exciting and speak to a young audience – it just can not look like a trend. How would you know? Your idea might have been derived from something you saw, maybe you liked it because it looked hip – maybe you’ve seen similar logos before and you felt yours should follow the lead. Don’t. Lead rather than follow. First with your logo, then with the rest of your brand.
Hip logos? X that idea out.[Click to Tweet]
I hope the very painful overly retro compilation below will make the point even more convincing. If it’s a trend, others will follow and you will end up blending in, and there’s nothing hip about blending in. It’s tough because you thought you finally had the chance to jump on the hip bandwagon. Your logo is not the right channel for that, but you can always use a one-off campaign to do something trendy with your brand instead.
Hipster Logos
KISS 3 times during your next marketing effort
Creating a brand is only half the battle. Now you have to continuously keep building it. Over time, your brand requires carefully and well orchestrated crafting of one consumer message and marketing piece at a time. The truth is, this is where brands usually lose focus very early on. It’s time to KISS and make up. Our version of KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) is: Keep its soul, stupid!
As I have declared the death of the style guide in an earlier post, now that the brand is on its own two feet, there needs to be a constant reminder of why your brand came into existence in the first place. It’s about your brand’s soul and with all the talk about metrics, ROI and the latest shiny marketing gadgets being rolled out in front of your eyes, one tends to forget the why and instead focuses on the what. The what can feel like the sexier, easier and, often times, safer choice.
In a recent client meeting discussing creative round 1 of a website launch, the Marketing Team proudly shared our work for the first time with the CEO. She was delighted with the strategy and visuals, but having users go through a pop-over opt-in form prior to entering the site made her pause. ‘Whose decision was it to make the user go through this step prior to seeing our landing page?’, she asked, ‘Who was involved in that decision outside of our Marketing Team?’ The room fell into complete silence. For the duration of the project, the Marketing Team had been pushing for the form to take over the site prior to entering the site’s full content, in the hopes of receiving immediate ROI on the project upon launch. After a long pause, the CEO said ‘The only people who will like this idea is Marketing.’ It was an awkward, yet powerful moment as everyone in the room realized their error. If your project’s success is primarily measured by conversion rates, it may seem like a logical conclusion to push for the opt-in screen. However, this is the moment you lose sight of your brand’s soul. You no longer have your customer in mind first and foremost, instead your focus drifts towards your own success. That’s the time to take a step back and look at the brand’s broader success metrics, instead of the project brief.
In your next creative marketing project, we suggest you schedule 3 milestones labeled as “KISS” (Keep its soul, stupid) for the purpose of ensuring that your project stays in line with the brand’s soul. It is important to consider how a short-term campaign fulfills the brands’ values while also serving its long-term goals. Labeling them as “KISS” milestones will serve as a reminder of the true goal of the task. When it comes to brands, let’s keep its soul, stupid.
Your New Brand Shall Live without a Style Guide
I proclaim the death of the style guide. For decades new brands have been equipped by their branding agencies with expensive and thorough style guides explaining how design elements, such as the logo, typography and brand colors shall and shall not be used. Most are obvious and none will be followed, so why continue with the tradition?
Style guides are an important part of keeping your newly formed visual identity in check, one may argue, but does anyone care about using, or more importantly, reinforcing them? Over the past 11 years of running my branding agency I learned that it is more of a pricey exercise of ‘feel good’ and ‘make believe’ than an actionable tool. It will be presented to your employees in a big setting and over a period of 6 months it will be completely neglected. There is employee turnover mixed with new media adaptations and suddenly the lengthy and hard to navigate PDF is lost in some complex folder infrastructure and only gets found – and referenced – in order to point fingers, not to creatively implement.
Looking at a very traditional brand manual from 1970 for the New York Transit Authority (of the great design legend Massimo Vignelli), one can appreciate the ideology and craftsmanship, and one might even buy into the need for it. It seems logical, after all you just spent a good chunk of your marketing budget on establishing the brand, or re-establishing an organization, but this is not 1970, this is 2013 and your employees are spreading your brand through tens, often hundreds of channels. Channels change daily and new company cultures have changed from top down to hands-on employee empowered brands.
We stopped creating style guides at Finien, instead we create Brand Atmosphere© books for our clients. We highlight the language of the brand and focus on the flexibility of the just established identity rather than restricting it from the get-go. Different chapters provide actionable insights to jump-start the thinking process for usage in specific media types, the ones that are important to your specific brand based on your positioning and target audience. We show examples, in lose sketch form, that provide your staff an idea of what makes the brand strong within certain applications, but allows them to think and implement the brand’s voice in their own ways. I believe that leading by inspiring examples and providing the right tools and empowerment over the new brand will result in a better culture and a better, consistently evolving brand for your new company. You need simple, actionable tools that not only ensure a consistent brand, but more so, tools that ensure the brand can grow and adapt to new media channels.
It’s time to kill the style guide and provide new brands with actionable tools.[Click to Tweet]
Will your logo have the correct amount of white space around it and not get stretched beyond belief without the style guide? Yes, I think it will. Times have changed and style guide books get thicker and pricier without addressing your needs.
Spend your budget wisely – if your agency places a style guide as a budget line item, ask them why you will need it, how you will implement it during employee turnover and media outlet changes, and more importantly how they ensure the guide will fit your company’s specific needs and culture? Let me know what they say.
CATEGORIES: Your Brand Launch: Brand Atmosphere
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Fabian Geyrhalter is the Principal of FINIEN, creating clarity for brand transformations.
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