Branding Archives - Page 6 of 8

💎 On communications being as simple as possible (but no simpler)

…I likes this exchange between John Major and Boris Yeltsin:

“JM: Well, Boris, in a word, how is Russia?

BY: Good.

JM: And in more than one word?

BY: Not good.”

Excerpt from: Lynn Barber’s review of A Life in Questions by Jeremy Paxman.

💎 On the power of traditional brand identities (the Spirit of Ecstasy)

The Spirit of Ecstasy wasn’t an original Rolls Royce feature. The fashion was to have your own emblem made to personalise your vehicle. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, John Walter Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, asked his friend Sykes, recently graduated from London’s Royal College of Art to design his mascot, and it’s believed to have been modelled on his secretary, mistress and love of his life, Eleanor Velasco Thornton.

Charles Sykes described it as “a graceful little goddess, the Spirit of Ecstasy, who has selected road travel as her supreme and alighted on the prow of a Rolls-Royce motor car to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies.“

When Rolls Royce noticed that some personal mascots did not reflect their vision of their beautiful vehicles, they commissioned Sykes to manufacture the Spirit of Ecstasy for them.

Now it’s 100 years old and a huge part of their brand identity. At times designers must have been tempted to modernise it, but apart from a smaller version for sports cars and the US “Flying Lady” it stays the same.

Excerpt from: 100 Great Branding Ideas (100 Great Ideas) by Sarah McCartney

💎 On knowing your place (Do you know who I am?)

It’s an American agency called Wundermann.

Apparently, one day the owner flew in to visit his agency.

He was a big, brash New Yorker.

He drove straight into the car park below the building.

The gruff cockney parking attendant stopped him.

He said, ‘Where you going, guv?’

The American was indignant.

He said, ‘I’m parking, of course.’

The parking attendant said, ‘You gotta permit?’

The American said, ‘No.’

The parking attendant said, ‘Then you ain’t parking here.’

The American was outraged.

He said, ‘Do you know who I am?’

The parking attendant shook his head and said, ‘No.’

The American got out of the car, raised himself up to his full height, tapped his chest and said, ‘I’m Wundermann.’

The parking attendant said, ‘I don’t care if you’re fucking Superman. You ain’t parking here’

Excerpt from: Predatory Thinking: A Masterclass in Out-Thinking the Competition by Dave Trott

💎 On avoiding potentially negative celebrity association (of Jersey Shore)

And that is what Abercrombie & Fitch was worried about when it saw “The Situation” wearing their clothes on Jersey Shore. Their press release stated:

We are deeply concerned that Mr. Sorrentino’s association with our brand could cause significant damage to our image. We understand that the show is for entertainment purposes, but believe this association is contrary to the aspirational nature of our brand, and may be distressing to many of our fans. We have therefore offered a substantial payment to Michael “The Situation” Sorrentino and the producers of MTVs The Jersey Shore to have the character wear an alternate brand. We have also extended this offer to other members of the cast, and are urgently awaiting a response.

Companies are usually overjoyed when celebrities wear their clothes. But Abercrombie was worried about what would happen if the wrong celebrities started wearing the brand.

Excerpt from: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

💎 On adding unneeded complexity and jargon ruining a piece of writing (consideration of contemporary phenomena)

From Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell’s version goes:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Excerpt from: On Writing Well by William Zinsser

💎 On advertisers’ biggest decision being how much to spend (rather than how it’s spent)

Everybody who’s written anything half-way useful about adverting has agreed that the most important decision a client company makes about advertising is the decision to advertise in the first place. The difference to a company’s long-term prosperity between advertising and not advertising is infinitely greater than any decision it might make between two alternative creative approaches or two competing advertising agencies.

But that, of course, is a very generic point of view. And agencies like all competitive brands, have little to gain from generic truths.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore

💎 On advertising and the attitude problem (product over brand)

“We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product.” Bob Hoffman.

Excerpt from: How To Make Better Advertising And Advertising Better by Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer

💎 On how advertising jargon is used to hide flimsy thinking (synergy, media-neutral, content-led…)

Advertising and marketing people need to lose the jargon. A culture of business bullshit has slowly polluted the commercial world. Engagement, low-hanging fruit, synergy, media-neutral, content-led, always-on, ideation, adcepts, holistic approach, storytelling, user-generated content, leverage, realtime 24/7, cultural currency, the list goes on (and on). This language is symptomatic of a move towards the unnecessary complication of the world of advertising and marketing.

These terms allow people to hide behind them, and mask flimsy thinking. They confuse and conceal…

Excerpt from: How To Make Better Advertising And Advertising Better by Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer

💎 On how we overestimate ourselves (even when it comes to our image)

Whitchurch and Epley took photos of people and blended their facial image, in 10% increments with either an attractive or unattractive face. So the face became more or less attractive. We then showed people all 11 versions of their faces – their actual face, the 5 blended with the highly attractive face, and the five blended with the highly unattractive face—in a randomly ordered lineup and asked them to identify which face was their own. We found that people tended to select attractively enhanced images of themselves, thinking they were more attractive than they actually were.

Excerpt from: Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want by Nicholas Epley

💎 On how little we remember (even about items we see so regularly)

However, if I asked you to describe a £10 note to someone who had never seen one so that they could create it from scratch, I’m guessing that you wouldn’t get very close to reality. Are the “£” and “10” in the same color? Does the word “ten” appear on the note anywhere? If so, how many times? How many digits does the serial number have? Is it printed vertically or horizontally? What pictures are there? How big is the note exactly? Your unconscious mind has the answers, but your conscious mind is evidently preoccupied with other things!

Excerpt from: Consumerology: The Truth about Consumers and the Psychology of Shopping by Philip Graves

💎 On communicating risks to others to change behaviour (are anti-drugs ads too formulaic?)

Public-education films in the rich world have historically focused on the risks to health caused by taking drugs. Several decades later, those campaigns don’t seem to have made much of an impact—and that is not surprising, given that the chances of dying of an overdose are fairly slim. The truth is that buying and taking illegal drugs probably won’t kill you. But it may very well kill someone else. Cocaine, for instance, is manufactured and exported exclusively by cartels that use murder and torture as part of their business model.

Excerpt from: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel by Tom Wainwright

💎 On needing multiple techniques to understand a consumer (think about the big picture)

This is illustrated by the parable of five blind men walking into an elephant.

Each tries to describe what they’ve bumped into.

One blind man feels the side of the elephant.

He says, ‘An elephant is like a wall.’

Another blind man feels the elephant’s trunk.

He says, ‘No, an elephant is like a snake.’

The third blind man feels the leg.

He says, ‘You’re both wrong, an elephant is like a tree.’

The fourth blind man feels the tusk.

He says, ‘Sorry, but an elephant is like a spear.’

The fifth blind man feels the tail.

He says ‘You’re all wrong, an elephant is like a piece of rope.’

All of the blind men mistake their little bit of truth for the whole truth.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott

💎 On the need for ads to turn viewers into accomplices (or they will be our challengers)

In his dense but thoughtful book, The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says this: ‘Language itself is never completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but at the same time they are merely stepping stones for thought. The artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.’

That seems to be as good a definition as I know of the role of creative people in advertising. We have to try to turn our audience into accomplices; because if they aren’t our accomplices, they will be our challengers.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore

💎 On the dangers of looking for formulas in advertising (you can’t be that mathematical and that precise)

In 1964, as reported by Denis Higgins in The Art of Writing Advertising, he was confronted by an interviewer trying to analyse just how and why he was such an original advertising thinker. Asked if there were any striking characteristics unique to talented writers and art directors, he said, ‘One of the problems here [in this interview] is that we’re looking for a formula. What makes a good writer? It’s a danger. … I remember those old Times interviews where the interviewer would talk to the novelist or the short story writer and say, “What time do you get up in the morning? What do you have for breakfast? What time do you start work? When do you stop work…?” And the whole implication is that if you eat cornflakes at 6:30 and then take a walk and then take a nap and then start working and then stop at noon, you too can be a great writer. You can’t be that mathematical and that precise. This business of trying to measure everything in precise terms is one of the problems with advertising today. This leads to a worship of research. We’re all concerned about the facts we get and not about how provocative we can make those facts to the consumer.’

Excerpt from: The Real Mad Men: The Remarkable True Story of Madison Avenue’s Golden Age by Andrew Cracknell

💎 On medical conditions (invented by advertisers)

In addition to the dread of auto-intoxication, the American consumer faced a positive assault course of other newly minted or rediscovered maladies – pyorrhea, halitosis (popularized by Listerine beginning in 1921), athlete’s foot (a term invented by the makers of Absorbiner in 1928), dead cuticles, scabby toes, iron-poor blood, vitamin deficiency (vitamins had been coined in 1912, but the word didn’t enter the general American vocabulary until the 1920s when advertisers realized it sounded worryingly scientific), fallen stomach, tobacco breath, dandruff, and psoriasis, though Americans would have to wait until the next decade for the scientific identification of the gravest of personal disorders – body odour, a term invented in 1933 by the makers of Lifebuoy soap and so terrifying in its social consequences that it was soon abbreviated to a whispered BO.

Excerpt from: Made In America: An Informal History of American English by Bill Bryson

💎 On writing copy for a specific person not a demographic (it should be a conversation between two human beings)

All the while I have fixed in my mind a mental picture of who will read what I’m writing.

I don’t mean “AB males aged 35-44 with a promiscuous attitude to white spirits.” I mean I think of an actual person, be it a friend, neighbour or relation, who is in the target audience.

When I see that person in my mind, I know what will appeal to them.

That way I can write copy the way I believe all copy should be written: as a conversation between two human beings rather than an announcement from manufacturer to consumer.

Excerpt from: D&Ad Copy Book by D&AD

💎 On the mistake of thinking advertising has become harder (because it hasn’t)

It’s a puzzling form of self-deception, this. Comparisons across time are meaningless. Winning things gets neither harder nor easier. The increased sophistication of your consumers, real or imagined, will affect your competitors no less than yourself. There has never been a time when advertising was expected to do anything other than work hard.

To the envious practitioners of 2040, marketing in the 1990s will presumably seem to have been a doddle. How easy, they will think, how very, very easy.

The reason it doesn’t seem so now is because it isn’t.

Excerpt from: Behind the Scenes in Advertising, Mark III: More Bull More by Jeremy Bullmore

💎 On advertisers not eating their own dog food (most people do not want to ‘join the conversation’)

Ask most marketing or advertising people if they themselves, outside of their professional life, have ever shared brand content, or used a brand hashtag, or got involved in making or editing or uploading their own experiences of a brand, or any of the other things that they often expect customers to do, the answer would be rarely, if at all. Yet they regularly expect other people to do them.

Contrary to what appears to be popular belief inside agencies and marketing departments, most people do not want to ‘join the conversation’ or take part in any interactive, two-way dialogue with brands, even in relatively high-interest categories.

Excerpt from: How To Make Better Advertising And Advertising Better by Vic Polinghorne and Andy Palmer

💎 On the only vegetable that doubles as a piece of advertising (the carrot, a propaganda vegetable)

Note. I’ve read that the carrot is to return to its roots and go purple. Generations have grown up believing that carrots are orange, but in Egyptian, and later in Roman times, carrots were purple or white. In the middle ages they were also black, red and green. They have only been orange since the 16th century when patriotic Dutch growers favoured the House of Orange.

A propaganda vegetable.

Excerpt from: The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher

💎 On the fluidity of our buying behaviour (depending on mood and occasion)

Our ‘beliefs’ about brands are nowhere near as stable and consistent as we think. As Ehrenberg-Bass’s work with re-contact surveys has shown, individual opinions about brands are much more volatile than top-line tracking data suggests.

The overall percentage of people who agree ‘Pepsi tastes better than Coke’ might stay the same from survey to survey. But that doesn’t mean that individual respondents are answering the same way each time. Look at the data more closely, and you’ll see that people answer research questions in a ’probabilistic’ way. They may lean slightly in favour of one brand or another, but they don’t have fixed beliefs.

Behaviour patterns are similarly fluid and messy. We like to think that people divide into distinct buying groups. But look at long runs of data, and you’ll find that real-life buying behaviour is much more ’agnostic’. Buyers of premium brands also buy Own Label; low-fat buyers also buy full fat; Coke buyers buy Pepsi.

Our opinions about brands fluctuate depending on mood and occasion. And so do our brand choices. In the morning, we feel healthy and go for low fat. In the afternoon, we want chocolate.

Excerpt from: How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up by Les Binet and Sarah Carter

💎 On the parallels between commerce and sex (heavy users are promiscuous)

Back in high school there were people who were “heavy users” of sex. Remember them?

They often had one characteristic in common — they were promiscuous.

They didn’t just have lots of sex with one person. As we used to say, they “got around.”

The world of commerce is like that, too. Heavy users in a category tend to be promiscuous. They tend to try lots of different brands in a category. They get around.

In his book How Brands Grow, Prof. Byron Sharp gives a good example of this. Someone who is a heavy user in the fast food category might go to McDonald’s 4 out of 10 times; Subway 2.5 in 10; Wendy’s 1.5 in 10; Taco Bell 1 in 10…etc.

Excerpt from: Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey by Bob Hoffman

💎 On the misconception that slogans have to be short to be catchy (when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight)

It is a widespread misconception that a slogan has to be short to be catchy: in fact, a few extra words are often required to create a striking rhyme or rhythm – for example, it would have been quicker for FedEx to adopt the one-word tagline ‘Overnight’, but opting for the longer ‘When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight’ gave the tag its memorable turn of phrase. The line also captured the emotional state of the package-sender – a desire for certainty.

Excerpt from: 100 Ideas That Changed Advertising by Simon Veksner

💎 On the ineffectiveness of facts as a tool for changing beliefs (explains politics)

There is a long tradition of attempting to test whether the truth changes people’s perceptions, both in academic and campaigning work, but the results remain mixed and inconclusive. Some studies show no impact at all on perceptions when we are told the correct figures, while others show some impact on certain beliefs, but not others. And some show more marked changes. In one more hopeful, recent example from a study in thirteen countries, the researchers split the group of respondents in two. They told one half some facts about actual immigration levels, and said nothing to the other half. Those armed with the correct information were less likely to say there were too many immigrants. However, on the other hand, they did not change their policy preferences: they were not more likely to support facilitating legal immigration. When the researchers went back to the same group four weeks later, the information had stuck for most – although so had the policy preferences. This fits with long-identified theories that facts struggle to cut through our partisan beliefs or our ‘perceptual screen’ as Angus Campbell and colleagues outlined in their classic book, The American Voter, back in 1960.

Excerpt from: The Perils of Perception Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything by Bobby Duffy

💎 On power of the placebo effect not being uniform (e.g. colour of pill)

As the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman has documented, one of the important determinants of a drug’s efficacy is the colour of the pill it comes in. When people suffering the symptoms of depression are given the same drug in different colours, they are most likely to get better when the pill is yellow. Sleeping pills, by contrast, tend to be more effective when they’re blue.

Excerpt from: Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit by Ian Leslie

💎 On the power of names (why female storms kill more than male ones)

Such names matter more than one might expect. In 2014 a study by researchers at Arizona State University and the University of Illinois found that hurricanes with feminine names killed more people than those with masculine ones. This has little to do with their ferocity, which was randomly distributed, but rather with people’s reactions to them. It seems that tropical storms with women’s names are taken less seriously than those with male names.

Excerpt from: Go Figure: Things you didn’t know you didn’t know: The Economist Explains by Tom Standage

💎 On the power of a price tag (they are used as an incorrect indicator of quality)

Wine without a price tag doesn’t have this effect. In 2008, American food and wine critics teamed up with a statistician from Yale and a couple of Swedish economists to study the results of thousands of blind tastings of wines ranging from $1.65 to $150 a bottle. They found that when they can’t see the price tag, people prefer cheaper wine to pricier bottles. Experts’ tastes did move in the proper direction. they favored finer, more expensive wines. But the bias was almost imperceptible. A wine that cost ten times more than another was ranked by experts only seven points higher on a scale of one to one hundred.

Excerpt from: The Price of Everything: The True Cost of Living by Eduardo Porter

💎 On the power of a name (Paradise Island)

There is an island in the West Indies that was once called Hog Island. Hog Island was a very beautiful island, but it was difficult to attract tourists to it. Then, one day, a clever person had the bright idea of changing the name of the island and, suddenly, it was inundated by tourists. What was the island’s new name? Paradise Island!

So, don’t use words carelessly. See the power in the meaning of words and use this power to develop your idea.

Excerpt from: The Idea Book by Fredrik Härén

💎 On the lottery of pitches (I hate it / I love it)

Three main clients attended, the editor, publisher, and some bloke from distribution who kept talking about lorries and timetables! Well, he would, wouldn’t he.

We diligently went over the strategy with heads nodding enthusiastically, even the man from distribution. And then I revealed the line that captured their positioning. The Mail on Sunday: ‘Depth without drowning’.

There was stunned silence. Finally, the publisher said, ‘I hate it’. Every time I read the word ‘depth’, I see ‘death!’ This is not going well, I say to myself! No, no, no says the editor, that’s absurd. That’s what we do, provide news in depth. I foolishly think we’re back on track. Someone with a brain is thinking about this. And then he says, but I hate the word drowning. I have a fear of swimming. Jesus, I say to myself, I really am dealing with tabloid brains here. There are only three words in this line, what else can go wrong. So I turn to the distribution genius and say how do you feel about the word ‘without?’

Excerpt from: Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty

💎 On how the language we use to describe an event shapes our memories (every word is important)

Elizabeth Loftus showed subjects a videotape of a car accident. Some subjects were then asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’, others were asked, ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit one another?’ The average speed given by the first group was 41 miles per hour and by the second 34 miles per hour. A week later subjects were asked whether they had noticed any broken glass resulting from the accident. The presence of broken glass was incorrectly reported by twice as many of the first group as of the second: the suggestion that the cars had been travelling fast had made subjects confabulate the occurrence of broken glass.

Excerpt from: Irrationality: The enemy within by Stuart Sutherland