For men who find shopping for shirts an exercise they can do without, Peprismine offers multiple design options and
neat fit clothing, all virtually. In conversation with co-founder Anuj Ramachandra.
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This week's updates include Android's market share increase, new apps – Path, StockTwits, Hulu and update on Skype; shutting down of Microsoft Hohm, partnership with Baidu, patent protection, Skype update; Facebook improvements to chat, new data centres, Circlehack;
Twitter stats and valuation, FTC investigation, BackType acquisition, Joe Biden joining; Google+ rebranding of Picasa and Blogger, NFC tag reading, Chrome market share, offline status of WonderWheel and Realtime search, loss of Nortel patents.
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One of the interview questions that brand managers get asked early in their careers is 'What is a brand?' Some of my favourite answers have been 'a promise to the consumer' and 'a thought in the consumer's mind'. But changing landscapes in technology and consumption mean that the definition remains an evolving one. I found a few interesting perspectives last week in this context.
The first is this seemingly simple, but excellent post at HBR titled 'A Logo is Not a Brand' which (to really summarise) explains how the brand is its strategy, the stories that its products tell, its calls to action, its customer service, its tone, attitude, its people, communication tools and its logo and visuals are all part of the brand. And he asks a very pertinent question in the end
Whether you know it or not, whether you have a swanky logo or not, you do have a brand. The question is whether or not it's the brand you really want.
With social platforms and user voices that become more effective than the brand's own, the likelihood of different perceptions is indeed high, but the good news is these very same tools also offer brands the opportunity to bridge the chasm.
The second post titled 'Brand Building: Is Function the new Emotion' builds on the view (that I also subscribe to) that the best advertisement for a brand is its product. But the twist in the end is that “the functional integration into a consumer's life creates an emotional bond” and sustaining it requires “superior performance and meaningful, empathetic innovation”. Completely agree, because it does tie into the idea of social business and identifying a workforce and processes that will help build and sustain it.
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A brand's purpose is something I have written about many times earlier on this blog. I found a very elegant brand framework – part of Leo Burnett's Human Brands concept – in one of the Cannes 2011 decks. According to Mark Tutssel, Chief Creative Officer, “Brands which have a purpose, but don't act dreamy, while brands which act without a purpose are noisy. And, for brands which lack both, they are lazy.” (via) The top right quadrant belongs to 'HumanKind', and that's where successful brands are.
So what prevents other brands from occupying it? One interesting answer I read was 'Fear'. As the post says, to build a leading brand, “organizational thinking must be on the creative plane (possibility and potential) not the competitive plane (hard bargains and discount pricing)”, and marketers are frightened of what this entails. The post even outlines a six step transformational cycle. Metrics are mentioned as a strong deterrent.
I have always felt that most advertising have not been measurable from an actual sales perspective. Parameters like TOM, salience in brand advertising are a no-brainer, but even in 'performance' advertising, there are so many factors that remain unaccounted for and unmeasured. But most brands go through the loops. We come back to the first reference about brands being a collection of various parts, a sentiment that is echoed in the last reference too, as the author defines leadership as “the quality of one’s presence in every aspect of life”. When organisations learn to do that, brand utopia will be nearer.
until next time, contrabrand
I remember writing this post about 4 years back, with an insight on why I didn’t particularly like to travel. Things have changed since then, and I do travel as much as possible these days. The odd discomfort of viewing masses of humanity still persists, but the reasons are more nuanced.
What reminded of that post was this article that beautifully expressed the discomfort with the title “The Sad, Beautiful Fact that We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything“. The article uses this in the context of books, films, music, television and art. But I relate it more to places and people. I still remember that the saddest part of leaving Leh was that it was perhaps my only visit to the place and I had not seen everything that had to be seen. In the case of people, the rise of the statusphere (Facebook and Twitter) has only added to the feeling that one is constantly missing something significant.
It is probably going to get worse, unless of course, we manage to do the Matrix-USB type thing of instant information absorption. Even then, it would probably go the way things are headed to these days anyway- consuming without experiencing. The real time challenge of being updated about people would still exist. And perhaps it will end up the way the line goes, “we will increasingly be defined by what we say no to”. But, as the author of the article I linked to, above, notes,
It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good………That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.
If I had to adapt that to places and people, I could say that the creator might feel insignificant if we could discover all of it in a lifetime. However, the collective advance of humanity is not a complete solace when it comes to the individual’s existential angst. As one of my fave Calvin strips go
until next time, insignificant choices too?
This week's updates include iPhone's 4 years of existence, Skype's announcement of an iPad app, Fring's video chat on iPad, Apple suing Samsung; Twitter's Promoted Tweets in the stream, Twitter for Newsrooms, the Obvious Corporation; Facebook's growth, Winklevoss d
isputes, new designs and ad formats, LivingSocial's acquisitions, market share and IPO, Yelp's new features, Facebook Deals rollout; Google's Transparency Report, wdyl, Swiffy, Google+, Google Health and PowerMeter shutdown, and the roll out of +1.
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