Who owns your brand?

I've done a lot of 'brand' work over the last 15 years and what I love about it is it's about identity. I find organisations fascinating and often thought if I ever did formal study again I'd want to look at organisations - identity, culture, and how they are more than the sum of their parts.  Organisations include businesses, ngos, nations, families and any place where people join together as an entity. 

Many people are fascinated with personal identity - which explains the popularity of horoscopes, blogs, personality quizzes and so on.  In organisations a lot of these quizzes about personal working styles (Jane is a harmonising finisher and Peter is a competitve explorer etc...) seem to be about working out who's the hands or fingers, who's the spleen, who's the brain and who's part of the digestive tract. In my experience in large organisations the digestive tracts are particularly large.

What is interesting is while I have spent a lot of time concerned with managing perceptions of  brands it has become clear to me that no organisation I have worked for has ever owned their brand.  Likewise with personal brands, you can choose how you want to be perceived and work toward it but really you never do own it.

I've not done any searches on this and I know it's not going to be a brand new (ho ho) observation, but it seems to me that the brand is owned by the audiences.  I realised that because that's where I go to measure brand equity. In other words, in case this isn't clear, if I'm measuring perceptions of people who are customers, or staff to measure the brand the brand actually held by those customers or staff. 

Same with personal brand I might think I'm a nice guy but if everyone says I'm an arse, what am I?

So brand managers are really stylists and the audiences are the judges.You can say something about your organisation over and over, but if the customer doesn't believe it it's not true.

 

Posted via web from SamNZed's posterous

Basket case economy

Had a chat with a good friend the other day, when I say chat it was a series of tweets, but the issue was one thing that holds us both back from blogging is not knowing enough sometimes to be authoritative. That is commenting on stuff we really don't know enough about.  So with that in mind and noting I do realise I am not an expert on very much here is my postulations about the NZ economy.

I love New Zealand.  I love Christchurch where I live. What I have noted, during my lifetime, is the gradual but consistent lowering of the standard of living of New Zealanders.  New Zealand has not had a real balance of payments surplus since 1973 - here are some tables on our economy http://www.reservebank.govt.nz/statistics/econind/ 

I'm not going to argue this - while there have been some years where exports have exceeded imports any surplus has been wiped out by repatriation of profit to foreign owned businesses.

So what I have seen is the removal of businesses and production overseas, increases in foreign ownership, a decline in both the standard of living, wage rates, jobs and NZ slipping in the OECD rankings.  Our regions are getting less prosperous and the number of corporates and head offices shrinks in all our regions (except maybe Auckland but they are moving overseas). Also we're producing more theatre, communications and media graduates than we are biotechnology graduates.

Meanwhile no NZ Govt has really had the analysis, the guts or the will to develop an economic and regional development strategy since 1973. 

I freely admit I am overstating this -but not by too much.

So more another time, but it does bother me.

Posted via email from SamNZed's posterous

Man on the moon

Love the REM song Man on the Moon. The song was a highlight in the movie of the same name on Andy Kaufman, particularly effective on the big screen with large sound system.

The movie wasn't so good. Having looked at the book I was keen to see the movie, Andy Kaufman suffered the same problem Peter Sellars did and that is he really didn't know who he was. The movie failed to nail this, they had him making many frank admissions and talking to people when it was clear in the book he wasn't capable of it.  (The movie trailer)

 (Springsteen joins REM)

But that's not what I was thinking about when I heard the song today.

What I thought about was 'do you believe they put a man on the moon?'. 

I do.

I also don't believe the US or UK Governments faked 9/11 or 9/9.

Or that the UN is a giant conspiracy to overthrow the US Constitution and has an army of black helicopters.

I think we're in the 'New Dark Ages'; science is openly ridiculed, superstition in the form of weird consipiracies are all the go and religious fundamentalism in the major religions is thriving. 

Worth a screenplay or play I think.

Posted via email from SamNZed's posterous

testing

Just seeing if I can email posts

Posted via email from SamNZed's posterous

Dumb dumb dumb = iSnack2.0

So the story is the new Vegemite product is to be called iSnack2.0.  Assuming the name survives any legal challenges from Apple it's dumb.
http://bit.ly/U5HBy or more usefully - 'It's vegemite but it's different' http://www.vegemite.com.au/vegemite/page?siteid=vegemite-prd&locale=auen1&PagecRef=758
Yes '27-year-old father-of-two from Western Australia Web designer Dean Robbins has coined the name for the new Vegemite, with his winning entry chosen from a field of almost 35,074 submissions'.  The other 35,073 submissions must have barked and howled badly (although there were only 16,071 unique names).  And why not entrust branding and naming of products to anyone?  It's easy isn't it.  I mean writing is easy - we can all use a keyboard. Logos are easy - we can all draw pictures.  And after all - we're all experts in politics and business as we can listen to Radio Live or TV news. Even though we're all experts and qualified to design brands and names I suspect Dean saw lots of fun in the design and thats how he came up with it.
There are three clusters of reasons I think it's dumb. In reverse order of significance

1) Brand identity and Brands dependent on other brands

Apart from using 'i' being brand theft, let's assume Apple let it go on the grounds they're not in the revolting spreads market. You can't have your product dependent on the whim and fortunes of another brand. While it is unlikely Apple may do something dumb, pollute all of a province of China, be bankrupted in an IP case, whatever.

And here's the thing - what are they saying? That this is a snack with Wifi?  That this is a snack for people who own an iPhone? Does this spread come off your Mp3 player easily?  We've mixed silicon chips through it?   Probably that this is the spread for cool young people.  Have they got a budget to place it in that market?  Is it part of a brand strategy or just a folly?  And so are they now gonna rebrand the wrapper to look 'cool and sweet for yuff'?

2) Spoken brand

How do you say it?   Eye snack two point one will never work. So it will be i snack OR worse vegemitesnack or ivege (or 'cream vegemite')  2.0 is just not gonna survive Don, Doreen, Jayden and Allysa's breakfast time. (Just give me coffee and pass the cream vegemite stuff!)

People will never write it correctly - not so important in an age where people don't write anymore but I can imagine dairy owners misspelling it badly as it has a '.', a capital in a strange place, and snack is as easily misspelt as potato. [hint: there is no e in potato or tomato UNLESS  pluralised].

3) Longevity

Ten years ago when I led changing the physical branding for the Christchurch City Council we were presented with one option which was a graphic presentation of  www.ccc.govt.nz rather than saying Christchurch City Council.  The designers said that this would show we were modern and up-to-the-minute. (They also had a well-meaning promotion campaign in their pocket that was effectively 'Hey we have a website!'). While almost all companies had websites then the other main reason we rejected it was because it sounded and looked very nice and futuristic at the time, and that meant it would date quickly.

iSnack2.0 looks like a temporary product. That may be the strategy but if it did for some weird reason take-off (perhaps lots of people getting depressed and seeing it as a low-level self harming masochistic thing) the name will need to be rebranded very quickly - probably to VSnack or, if Apple don't make it hard, iSnack.

I really don't like competitions in the brand, design and naming area. Yes they build popular support, but no they don't hit the mark for the strategies you should be following.  Also, in the case of - 'draw us a logo' you end up with things you can't use any of, creating a disappointment or rejection of customer participation.
Why do I care?  I take brand strategy far too seriously. Understanding what products, services and organisations do of value to their communities, customers and stakeholders is one of the things I do. Really though I hate seeing a job in this area done badly. If we leave it to amateurs we all look like amateurs.

Posted via web from samnzed's posterous

Ch ch ch ch changes

I went to a conference once where 'Changes' was the theme and all through the event Bowie's Changes was played.  Essentially the conference was good but not that many changes in PR were clearly sketched at the time (late 90s).  When I reviewed the notes maybe 5 years ago when I was throwing stuff out it occured to me again that you don't always see the changes for what they are.  We talked about email and mentioned the web but the full extent of the revolution wasn't clear.

Anyway on a personal note I've been grappling with a few issues of career, family, passion and although what is changing is not obvious yet I have discovered my attitude towards writing is again altering. 

Quantum randomness

'Anyone who has not shocked by Quantum theory has not understood it' Niels Bohr 1885-1962

The world was apparently turned inside-out with quantum physics and I love the idea that particles more than light years apart are somehow in sync or communicating and that the certainty of the physical world may not be as certain as we think.

BUT

The physical world is pretty dependable.  If I leave something on the clothes line it is there or i can usually find it or there is a very clear physical explanation of where it has gone. Of course car keys are not always where I leave them but that may be random failures in my brain.

So yes I am shocked but at the same time I don't understand how Quantum theory affects the physical world I live in.

Living in the past

Every now and again I realise I am reacting or acting based on the past. Bugger.

Obsession du jour - Social Media and internal communications

I have been reasonably sure for a while that corporate PR has to change. This is due to the fundamental changes in media and communication wrought by the web (often called social media). In my earlier career it was easier to have a staff policy that only spokespeople can talk to media. It would usually work.
There were problems sometimes with people at public meetings or being interviewed or reported for an outside work issue. And of course at a barbecue staff could say anything. 

But then sometime a few years ago it all started to change. First there were bulletin boards and news groups.  these were followed by Blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn Youtube, and now Twitter. Now people are more visible and having meangingful policies on controlling their views and activities is impossible. There are employment policies of course but really.....  You can get staff blogging via work controlled blogs, but really they can still blog in their own time.

Also social media has created potential to harm brands and companies - consider
Burger King staff member having a bath in the BK sink http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1iyN7Y-jJQ
McDonald's staff wrestling http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSdBKG6pYGc

And of course there are videos of misbehaving staff and blogs and Facebook posts running down companies.  You can have a complicated system to monitor blogs, bulletin boards, as well as Talkback and other media but that doesn't address the problem.

The real answer is that we can't control people. When jobs were for life there was a chance.

The solution I think is we need to start to place internal communication where it should be in the communication tool kit: right next to customer and shareholder PR - at the top. Not an add-on or something run by HR.  Meaningful, planned, sustained communication with and from staff, and the building of a sustainable and constructive internal culture need to be a priority.

Happy, loyal and positive staff are the best defence against the ravages of FB, Twitter and YouTube, they are also the best opportunity to succeed in the new environment.  These staff will also provide defence against customer backlash and other 'crisis' issues.

Why Tim Barcode?

Years ago when I was writing plays as soon as actors knew I had written them they started to change them make adjustments and generally argue a lot. When I wrote plays as Tim Barcode, aside from the odd word, actors just did it. There was also a backstory that Tim Barcode was from Melbourne, so there was almost a reverance about the scripts.

It was when Playmarket told me they couldn't help me unless I went under my real name that I reverted to that for playwriting. Oddly I've been less successful since I took their advice.

will try again

Got side tracked by a range of projects but will be back

Bill keep making those pots

I saw a TV doco recently where a talented potter had dramatically cut down his output as he was a committed green and didn't think the smoke from his kiln was acceptable. It was a clean burning kiln and in the interview he talked about having to get as close to a zero impact on the planet.

While lauding his sentiment it occurred to me that his foot print would be less if he just sat at home and ate as little as possible, so as to conserve energy.

The I realised it would be less if he was dead. In fact in his world view perhaps the true green thing to do would be to dig a hole, plant native seeds in it, and then kill himself on top of them.

Bill - thanks for thinking of the planet, but I think your pottery was worth it mate. Of course you won't see this as you don't believe computers can be justified either.