All posts filed under: General

Hey you, get onto my cloud

By Mark Di Somma

You could see iCloud as Apple’s long-awaited move into the cloud – a response at last to what Amazon and Google have been doing in this space. But to my mind, from a brand point of view, iCloud supersedes because it once again joins the dots, and in so doing it both ring-fences and reinforces the Apple ecosystem. One of the many things that Apple can teach others about branding is how consistently and persistently they link everything they do back to their purpose. While others continue to market features, Apple presents what it does as steps in the Apple journey. And with the proliferation of devices over the years, they have essentially created more on-ramps at more and more price points for people to join them on the road. Syncing via the cloud not only makes sense of that proliferation of devices, it deftly sets the stage to reduce the desktop to another one of those gadgets. There’s a clear agenda here, from a brand point of view, to flatten the hierarchy between the …

Every brand must dream

By Mark Di Somma

Positivity comes with benefits if this article on the optimism bias is anything to go by. While, collectively, our view of the future can swing in synch with the news, the budget or the crime stats, a 2007 study found that 76% of respondents were optimistic about the future for their own family. According to the author, “Even if that better future is often an illusion, optimism has clear benefits in the present. Hope keeps our minds at ease, lowers stress and improves physical health.” It gives rise to phenomenon like talk of ‘green shoots’ in the midst of terrible financial depression because, it seems, we are compelled to find them. The take-out for brands is obvious. Clearly, there is merit in espousing a clear and positive view of the way forward. It’s not enough to just inform. Brands need to inspire, because that optimistic prognosis of what lies ahead holds real opportunities in terms of engaging and involving people. It humanises brands. Optimism, I surmise, also aligns directly with our worldview. In other words, …

Waiting for the uplift

By Mark Di Somma

I once had a flatmate who was a pilot. He used to fly these ridiculously small planes in and out of crazy airstrips throughout Papua New Guinea. Every take-off, he used to tell me, was almost literally a leap of faith. You barrelled down a ramshackle runway in the middle of the mountains, literally fell off the end and waited for the winds to pick you up. He used to come home from an assignment, throw his bags on the couch, and announce, “So far, so good”. For some reason, I thought about Simon today as I read this article about the fall of Martha Stewart Omnimedia (MSO). What a long way down. In 2005, Martha Stewart’s publicly listed company was worth north of $1.8 billion. Since then, the stock has plummeted a whopping 88%. Now it looks like it may be up for sale – maybe even revert to private ownership – at a fraction of its peak worth. Sure, they’ve been some contributing factors to that – conviction for Stewart herself and of …

Be happy

By Mark Di Somma

Not the best of days yesterday. Put my back out, and retired to a lie-flat position. Brain racing, body stopped … Aaaargh. To pass the time, I mused on getting my understanding of the purposes of business and branding down to their most basic forms. It led me here: What if the purpose of business, particularly a service business, is as simple as this: to make people happy. Imagine if that was the metric for your product design, your standards, your customer service, your innovation programme, your culture, your brand, your competitiveness. And what if the purpose of branding is to let people know how you intend to make them happy. Here come the objections: most of them variations of ‘we do that already’. No you probably don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have effective competitors, you wouldn’t struggle to maintain market share, you wouldn’t find yourself locked in a pricing war. Perhaps you think they’re happy or hope they’re happy, or you word your customer satisfaction surveys so that you can tell yourself they’re …

Well, well, well

By Mark Di Somma

When place branding specialist Simon Anholt explains in a podcast why nations need a carefully thought through brand strategy to which all players in the economy subscribe, he quotes the legendary David Ogilvy who once said, “If all you want to do is attract attention, then you put a gorilla in a jockstrap”. As Ogilvy himself explained it, if you want to get recall, you then put the brand on the jockstrap itself. You will certainly get buzz, and people will remember the stunt. But will anything meaningful, in commercial terms, happen beyond that? Doubtful. And the reason is that having got people’s attention, you need to do something with that energy. You need to direct it somewhere. You must provide a meaningful story and experience that links what people have seen with what they do. It’s not enough just to give them something to look at. It’s as meaningless in branding terms as a carrot, a jumping trout or just another pretty logo. Badges aren’t brands. Of course Wellington’s already done a lot more …

Plenty of ideas coming out of AG Ideas 2011

By Mark Di Somma

I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the AG Ideas 2011 plenary yesterday morning via the simulcast into Wellington’s Te Papa museum. My highlights: Definitely the video of the kids workshop, with two stand-out examples of great design ideas by young minds that, as Ken Cato pointed out, do their creating with no preconceptions. The first design suggestion: a hot dog with legs, so that, in the words of its young inventor, overweight people, who love hot dogs, would have to chase them and thus burn calories. And then, the second suggestion, via this exchange: Ken Cato: What have you designed? Child: It’s a surfboard with flames. Ken Cato: How would that work? The flames in the water … Child (slightly impatiently): It’s a new design. Of course, the brief notes that follow cannot do justice to the presentations of the four featured speakers, but I thought I’d pick up on some of the thinking that particularly struck me, because it intersected with, and informed, the things that fascinate me – and, at …

What they see is what they brand.

By Mark Di Somma

Oh the irony. For years, many of us tried to get the people we worked with to broaden their understanding of what a brand was. It’s not just a logo, a product, a TV commercial – that conversation. We were fighting to make the definition of brand bigger. Now I’m wondering whether we have to start going back the other way. Suddenly, there are no people, countries, groups anymore. Instead, everywhere I look, everything’s a brand. Donald Trump is a brand, Charlie Sheen is a brand, so are Kate and Will, the President’s a brand, Greenpeace and just about any professional sports team or association you care to name. America’s a brand, so are the Tea Party, Survivor, Wikileaks, the Beckhams and Lady Gaga. That suggests to me that the media is in the process of redefining a “brand” as anything that gets or has our attention. In the new parlance, brand now is much more about profile. So I think Paula Lynn is right when she comments on this story in MediaPost that, “The …

What would you Like?

By Mark Di Somma

In this discussion on whether Liking a brand on Facebook makes you more inclined to be positive about that brand, writer Gregory Ferenstein says that rationalisation theory suggests “our actions secretly influence our opinions”. I’m sure that’s right. We do something and we justify that action to ourselves. When we “like” a brand, we tell ourselves it’s a better brand than we might have thought it was otherwise. We make a public endorsement and we stand behind it. When we pay for something that makes us feel good, we feel better about that brand. And when we buy something alongside many others, we feel more secure because we are not alone. The dealmaker or breaker though is that we do get what we thought we were getting – and this is where brands need to be so careful in framing expectations. If I take an action, and the action turns out to be better than I expected, I will be pleasantly surprised and I will naturally carry that through to my view of the brand. …

Going, going, Groupon …

By Mark Di Somma

You know what you think you’re worth. But what are you really worth? Some great points about company du jour Groupon in this article originally posted on Forbes. Most interesting perhaps because the article helps explain why and how value can so rapidly commoditise. Here’s what I got out of it: Success quickly generates a wolf pack – 425 competitors and counting have simply copied Groupon’s model. They did so because they could. There doesn’t seem to be any specific IP here that prevents duplication. After the rain comes the flood. Lots and lots of competing sites in turn could well create “deal fatigue” – once customers have too much of a good thing, they quickly start to feel glutted, effectiveness drops and with it market share. Why get married? Big businesses can probably replicate this process themselves rather than go via Groupon – or as close as makes no difference to the consumer. Time for the big fish. Bigger opportunities attract bigger players. As you succeed, your competition also scales. In this case, Facebook …