monkey business. our only business.
Utterly, utterly bizarre, though I wonder if anyone has ever ordered a whole box of 100? Patrick Bateman perhaps,?
Custom Gold business card by Mitsubishi
What better way to impress am important guest or potential partner than to hand him your business card…coated in a gram of pure gold?
[From Lifestyle - Custom Gold business card by Mitsubishi - Japan Trend Shop]
So I’m keen to talk to people in the Tech Startup space about Branding. Questions like: How important is your Brand? How did you come up with it? How much do you spend on it? Do you see it evolving over time? Is it just a logo and colour palette to you? How much does your brand steer and influence your products and services?
Anyone who’d be happy to meet up / talk over the phone please ping me at nathan@simiant.com. Any help much appreciated!
This looks interesting, a new agency set up by old colleagues Robin (from back in the day, ‘when niggaz had waves, Gazelle shades, and corn braids’ i.e Clarity and Nathan from MRM). I <heart> the name ‘we are social’, makes me feel all warm inside.
Hello, we are social. We are a conversation agency. We help brands to listen, understand and engage in conversations in social media.
Hurray. We are (retained) on the BBC’s Design Roster for Brand Strategy & Design Identity. w00t.
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
So watching the video it IS called ‘blist’ not B list. Anyway, guess they didn’t test that.
Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.
Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…
I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.
LBI Is now publishing a ‘magazine’ and on first glance it looks quite interesting: LBIQ. “We’re not experiencing a ‘digital revolution’ and this isn’t a ‘digital age’ any more than the 50s were the ‘atomic age’ or the 60s the ‘space age’. We simply live, as we always have done, in fast-changing times. LBiQ is a response to this frantic pace of change, and it’s one that responds from an attitude and point of view that we’ve shamelessly stolen from Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Oh Snap! LOLCats? LOLBots? Hey, here’ssss……. LOLBrandz. LOL!
OK so I’m plugging an ex-client from a previous agency here, but anyway…
1. They have Chewbacca on their web site
2. They want you to eat Fugu
3. They have grannies in cars on their web site.
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