Curiously, I was talking with a friend of mine about Motorola’s plans this past weekend and we had gotten on to a discussion about the equity in the Droid brand. Our conversation revolved mostly on how Motorola’s then plan to introduce another operating system and the destruction of the Droid brand it would bring. Obviously, things changed on Monday.
Google’s purchase could mean a number of things for the Droid brand. The interesting aspect is that this will essentially be Google’s first real consumer brand that lives outside of the Internet. Brands that extend to the tangible world – and especially the product world – are different beasts than purely digital ones. The care and feeding of a brand like this is much more than what Google has experienced in the past.
The Nexus line was probably their best foray into actual products and it could hardly be called a success. Otherwise, you have the current push for the Chrome laptops, which I am sure that many who are reading this probably haven’t even heard of. Even the Android operating system, which is poised to be ‘the’ mobile device platform in the coming years has anemic advertising behind it, smacking of Business-to-Business bland-our.
Should Google notice, they may have lucked into a solution that could make their own branded phone a success. With Droid, they have essentially a turn-key branding solution for their mobile products, as well as the channels necessary to make it easy to get things in front of clients. More importantly, they have the cache to convince shoppers to buy.
Motorola put a lot effort into creating the brand, which is possibly the strongest Android brand on the market, even though it seems that Motorola has backed away from the push, cutting down on the more pervasive, high-value advertising campaigns. With a little effort, Google could breathe some life back into the Droid brand and perhaps own the market once again, just as Motorola had done initially.
The question is will Google understand what needs to be done to maintain and grow the brand? There has been a lot of talk about Google’s purchase being merely for the mountain of patents that Motorola had relating to mobile devices and not so much about the actual product lines. Perhaps Google just doesn’t know what they have. It is not without precedent that large companies lack the understanding of everything they receive when they buy other companies. It happens all the time.
The other issue that’s brought up in this Businessweek article is that Google may just have to scuttle the brand to head off an exodus from the Android OS and scatter us to a number of proprietary mobile OSs. Should that exodus happen, WebOS and Windows phones may become the heirs to Androids other-than-iOS crown.
What would be the best way to operate this purchase? I would think that allowing Motorola Mobility to operate as a somewhat independent subsidiary would yield the best results. Google would get its patent protection for Android. Google would also get a premium supplier of handsets to make sure their Android vision is properly executed. In order to do this right, Mr. Page would have to keep Google’s branding off of Motorola – a hard thing to do with mergers. When people buy things, they can’t help changing those things.
For the Droid brand, it would be massive mistake to push forward a co-branding scenario that’s all too common in these situations, like ‘Droid by Google’ or ‘Google Droid’ Ruining strong brands is easy when you dilute them with the misplaced necessity of staking claim.
Personally, I am a big fan of Motorola and their mobile products. The Droid campaign was genius and perfectly executed against everything iPhone. I am also a fan of Google and the products they put forth, although I am unsure that this plan will work out on in the most fruitful manner.
When you look at a smart phone you see a sort of 21st century Swiss Army knife. It has a lot of functionality but every one of its functions are compromised (at least slightly) to cobble them all together. Perhaps it’s time to break them apart. If you did that with the knife, you could have a proper-sized set of scissors and just deep-six that bloody cork screw.
Looking at where phones are at right now, I think most can see that the mobile device world is having some growing pains. You can see it most when you consider the dimensions of the products available. People would really like to have a larger screen to run apps and do a bit of mobile browsing. This obviously bumps into the portability of the device and using it for calls. If it’s too big you can’t comfortably carry it in a pocket without anyone thinking your sumuggling paperbacks and it’s even harder to jam one in a small purse -not to mention holding the brick to your head for calls. Do you then have two phones? One that you can carry easily and the other the mini tablet?
Coming from the other side of things are tablets. Personally, I think the ideal size for a tablet is at least 10 inches. Most companies are aiming at 7 inches. This awkward size makes it just a little too small to do a lot of serious work, but also makes it even less portable than a large smart phone. Then they have a connectivity issue. Do you buy one with 3G? Play the hot-spot-hopping game with WiFi only? Buy both?
Finally, there’s the questions of etiquette. We all know that taking a call while talking to someone in person is pretty rude ( or at least we should ). Perhaps we also know that checking our phones every few minutes or every time we get the buzz of an update is pretty irritating as well. These actions also have an effect on our productivity. Our interconnectivity is not going to diminish in the future. The goal now is to take all these things and think about how we can change them for the better.
How would this look for a mobile device? I think the best way to think about it would be to make our persons a portable network. We would perhaps carry a ‘Personal Server’ that would really be the link to outside networks like 3G or WiFi and the connector to a number of peripherals, like a handset or a Status Monitor, perhaps even a tablet or some devices we haven’t even thought of yet. If we separated all of these components we could choose which items we would like to bring with and which to keep at home or in the car.
There would be even more advantages to a selective constellation rather than a single device. By pushing updates to some sort of Status Monitor, like a wristwatch or a fob, we could diminish the need to always unpack the phone to check what all the buzzing is about, we’d also diminish the chances of toliet-bowling our phones.
Having a tablet to interface with your personal network would have a few advantages as well. The tablet would operate through your network’s connection, eliminating duplicity as well as perhaps pulling processing from the network server itself, making the tablet a much more affordable item. Perhaps then, you could have two – a completely unusable 7inch tablet you can barely use and a larger one for more pointed operations.
While it sounds great, what makes it better is that the accessories for the network wouldn’t have to updated when you’re finally at that point with your data plan. You could get that peripheral when you need it or maybe even want it really, really bad. Think about it: if we broke with the brick we could finally drive fashion into our electronic accessories and maybe the world would be a slightly less irritating and connected world.
Did Borders Miss its Pivot?
We all know the sad demise of Borders. Some of us know the the rest of the story as well: crushing debt and poor timing on taking on competitors, amongst other things. Could the real problem be that Borders did not make its ‘pivot’ when it should have?
Borders was a bookstore chain, but Borders was more than that and perhaps in this ‘more’ was their solution. What else was Borders? We have to look at what people used it for to really answer the question. Within that answer was the direction Borders should have changed its business plan to.
Certainly, people went to buy books – or at least look at books. People also went because it had a coffee shop where people could look at the books in depth and decide to purchase. People also used the bookstore as place to meet with others, as you could easily do in the aforementioned coffee shop.
The manner at which Borders coffee shops were set up was different than other coffee shop competitors. The area was far larger and could be used (most times) by a working patron. It had lots of tables instead of plush chairs. You had a better chance of finding an open table there than at any Starbucks. The larger space committed to the coffee shop portion made it re-configurable for larger groups, so you’d normally see students studying or people talking with each other.
The three kinds of shopper who frequented the coffee shop were shoppers, workers and socializers. If these were the people who most came in to the store, shouldn’t it be obvious that the store be redesigned to attract more of these sorts?
This would be the little bell for Borders to pivot.
Perhaps Borders could become a coffee shop? After all, a coffee shop attracts people in much the same manner and the great part about it is that Starbucks’ stores are really not set up to handle the sorts of activities at the scale Borders could. With a ‘coffee shop’ the square footage of a Borders, a company could afford to have more people drink coffee for longer without worrying as much at turn over. Perhaps instead of removing chairs and tables from the showroom floor, they should have put more in.
What if Borders traveled down that path further? If Borders had thought not as a bookstore with a coffee shop but more as a socializing place for people, things would have been different. They would have to make a business of bringing people together inside the store, or better yet, make a situation where the shopper would be inclined to stay longer? What if Borders was to become a social neighborhood hotspot? Perhaps even they could have sold more books.
People come together for a united cause. Friends are friends because they share something similar, whether it be the same love of cars, live in the same neighborhood or play the same sports. People also spend to be united in cause. Finally, most people are desperate to socialize (We are social animals after all.) Bring enough people together and socializing happens and for Borders, the longer people are in stores, the better the chances those people will buy.
This could have happened easily enough for Borders. It could have been a grass-roots sort of affair. It could have started as innocuously as with author talks, then with book clubs (driving book sales). Borders could then hire cool hunters to sort out the new thing and bring that in for demonstration, thus driving socialization and in the process, sales. If one is not constrained by thinking of purely authors, there are a world’s possibilities available for attracting shoppers.
Borders could have seriously embraced technology as it had early in its life and worked to bring both the cloud-world and the bricks & mortar world together. When people leave a Borders they stop thinking of going to Borders until they drive past or feel a specific need. With the social capabilities of technology that they could have leveraged, they could have made a persistent presence in shoppers’ lives. They could do this with all of the store engagements they execute. What good is having them if no one knows about them.
Of course there are other gems that could have polished. Perhaps then with a digital reader app that allows one to preview books only at the local borders, thus driving people to physically go to the store. It could have been pushed further; coupons would be sent to be redeemed when they checked into the store. They could have further pushed tech by creating in-store apps that connected people in interesting way, and broke down the awkward barriers people have to talking to new people. It could have even had a (gasp) ‘singles night’ like my local grocery store has ( yeah, that’s for real!).
All of these suggestions could have helped to at least slow down the decline. They take money, yes, but so does making money. The only way Borders could have pulled out would have been if Borders would have understood that there was no more money in being a bookstore and it had to do something else: Pivot.
Like peacocks, or any animal really, we use our attributes to attract mates or at least like-minded prospective friends: “We like the same sort of sports team, I bet he’s a good fella.,” or ”She reads Gogol, she’s the one for me!” We differ from the animal kingdom in that we have a great number of attributes at our disposal that we can simply purchase or make and change them at will.
It’s really interesting to chart our evolution. We started off like any animal, we displayed our bodily traits and we stayed with types we liked. Then we gained capability and our clothing or tools told our story and perhaps enhanced our form. Recently, we let our love of certain brands define us. Now it seems we are on a trajectory to change again. This time we will base all of this on what our mobile devices divine for us.
This article on Gawker about how the Kindle ruins your dating game does a good job of bringing the point home. The shift to operating more in the technology world than the tangible world has begun.
The Kindle is helping in a small way, sure it gives us the capability to carry any book we ever wanted, but it also takes away from the tangible world a visual definition of ourselves and an invitation to interaction. It wasn’t the first item though, we saw this happen with music players. We used to have CD and tape players with physical media that people could see and make a connection from. This was swallowed by MP3 players. If I had an MP3 player 15 years ago, a State Trooper in Virginia wouldn’t have let me go after searching my car – just because he liked my music. And remember when we would get to know people through looking at their CD collection? It’s creepy to think of looking through someone’s media player.
Soon, we will search for people of like mind solely through our media devices with cleaver apps like OKCupid’s that alerts you when matches are nearby. We will gaze at our phones like people holding metal detectors waiting for the pulse that says someone special is nearby.
Perhaps the physical tolerances of GPS location awareness will keep some of the serendipity alive. Imagine someone seeing on their phone that a good match is nearby and due to the fuzziness of location, they meet someone totally different and it works out. That will be the next generation’s ‘How I met your mother’ story.
In the near future there will be stories of ships passing in the night. Sad, lonely stories about great romances or friendships that never were: they were standing right next to each other, but alas, they were on different networks…
Conversely, the next generation of ‘Players’ will have an entirely different skill set than the ones now. Not having to rely so much on finely tuned interpersonal interactions, since that will be supplanted by our trust in our app’s matching skills, they’ll have learned to game the system by honing profiles in just the right way.
But for now, we will suffer through the uncomfortable near future of trying to puzzle out how to initiate interaction when we can’t just cleverly read the name of someone’s book or place faith in our phone’s love-seeking capabilities.
So we all know how Sears/Kmart is just not making it happen. It seems to be a beast that’s trying to get it’s groove back while coasting on its massive inertia. It also doesn’t help that the owner looks at the business as giant real estate investment.
The lastest plan Sears has is to create profitability by selling its amazingly successful private label brands in other stores – instead of using them to create a basis for driving sales into their own stores. In some ways I imagine that this could work out, but there are a lot of reason why this would be folly, at best.
One of the first things to think about is that this will be the first time Craftsman (or Kenmore or Diehard) will have to compete against other brands.
You could say that they’ve always have, but if you take it store by store, Craftsman has never had to compete at the shelf level. There has never been another brand that’s hung right next to a Craftsman product where a customer would hold both and decide between them. You came to Sears to buy a Craftsman tool. The world is different when people go to a brand neutral store like Ace where Stanley and even Ace have their brands.
Hmmm, I don't see any Craftsman packaging there, do you?
Why does this matter? While Craftsman has a strong brand (and that may be enough for a while), they will now have to compete on features and perception in direct comparison with other brands. If they fail at this, then all they’ll have left is to compete on price – a dangerous place for any company to be.
Sears will now have to work to make their packaging and marketing amazingly more effective. If you’ve ever compared Craftsman’s packaging to say, Stanley, you can see that the design work has gotten soft due to the lack of in-store competiton. This re-treatment will be costly. Hopefully, they’ll decide against creating two lines of packaging for Sears and then for others.
I think the real question is what does Sears get out of this? It’s one thing to plow Craftsman into Kmart, a wholly owned subsidiary. It’s quite another to spread your private brand equity around to any other store that wants to carry it. Sears stands to gain a lot more product sales, sure, but at what cost?
Allowing other stores to carry your flagship products destroys any reason for consumers to visit Sears stores. If I can get Craftsman tools at Ace, why should I drive to Sears to buy them, right? What’s the problem? Sears still gets a sale, right? They do certainly, but what they lose is shoppers in their store…shopping for other things and impulse buying, No longer do you have someone coasting through clothing to get to tools. There’s a reason why you can get into the mall through Sears and Sears seems to have forgotten it.
My thinking is Sears essentially looses its anchor brand draw to its stores, losing Sears store traffic and now has the added burden of converting a non-competing store brand into a national name brand. What happens to Sears, now?
Throwback Packaging and Logos as Brands
There seems to be a lot of throw-back packaging making the rounds out there, from Pepsi to Tide, a lot of companies are getting into it. While it’s pretty fun to see and brings back some childhood nostalgia, this little fad illustrates a nice point: Your logo is really not your brand.
See, your brand is much bigger than an icon or a set of colors on a box. It encompasses far more than that. Your brand is the collections of feelings and perceptions you’d like people to see in your company or product. It is also the feelings and perceptions people actually feel about your brand. That’s a lot of stuff, but what it isn’t is a trade dress or an icon or anything else. This is why Doritos can dress their products in throwbacks, tossing aside mastheads and current brand marks while getting more interest without loosing anything, while crappy companies keep ‘re-branding’ themselves with new identity, hoping for more customers to no effect, as people notice that they haven’t changed their business practices.
To be a bit more specific, people know that Doritos makes really tasty chips and always have. They know that it doesn’t matter what the bag looks like as long as it says Doritos and they can make out that the triangular chips. The quality, taste and consistency of the product is Doritos’s brand. The logo doesn’t make it good, the company behind it and their actions does. The logo and trade dress are only a reminder and a method to drive interest, as well as to serve the distinction between Doritos and competitors.
Don’t get me wrong, trade dress and logos are important, but their only important when your company is consistently upholding it’s brand promise in all aspects. Otherwise, your brand mark is a lighthouse that signals, “stay away, rocky shores ahead!”
I’ve made a lot of ‘bonus’ packs and certainly a lot of ‘combo’ packaging. Most of the themes of these packs have been to convince shoppers to buy the main product. Clients will throw in an extra item to sweeten the proposition in relation to the competition. Who doesn’t want to get the drill bits for free when they buy a drill?
I saw something quite interesting the other day that puts a different spin on the combo pack concept. This bread mix by Carnation is after something else, or at least what I perceive as something else. They seem to be using their bread packaging to introduce and advertise another product in their line, Carnation condensed milk.
I have it on good sources that condensed milk, once championed by home bakers in previous generations, has waned a bit in popularity. Most recipes have been re-designed to work with other materials, so the little cans have been forced down to the lowest tier on the gondolas, and we all know what that means.
Carnation, though, not wanting to let a product die out is working hard to push condensed milk back in the spotlight. This combo pack is really a kit that reduces the need to hunt all over the store for all the components needed to make the bread, creating a one-stop impulse buy, perfect for endcaps, but more importantly, it slyly re-introduces condensed milk into baking.
Their packaging reflects the push to advertise the condensed milk by not only talking about it, but featuring the milk in its most common packaging. This creates product recognition for the next time the consumer is in the store. Condensed milk is basically fat and sugar, so the bread, when made, will taste extra sweet and tasty, so the gambit here is that consumers will consider the milk as necessary for a great loaf. They will remember the look of the can and the great taste it made, spurring them to purchasing more.
To make sure they hammer it home, they’ve even used the imagery of the can on the back panel when discussing directions, and on the front panel in the ingredients section, further re-enforcing the connection and brand imagery.
Sadly, I found this package in the discount area, so I guess this won’t be a line extension for Carnation this time around. If my assumptions are correct, this was a pretty dramatic push to re-invigorate a brand. It’s really amazing considering Nestle doesn’t seem to have a wing that normally creates cake and bread mixes, nor does Carnation seem to make anything like bread.
I talk a lot about packaging design on here, so today I’ll dive into the bits of branding that goes into packaging as well as other things. With that in mind, it’s important to talk about logo quiet space and specifically how that works with your brand mark.
When you put together style guides or standards manuals, one of the first things you have to talk about is how to handle your brand mark ( logo). This is pretty important information. Your logo is basically the connector to everything you do and what you stand for as a company. It’s important to treat it right.
The easiest thing to do is to give your logo the breathing room needed to make sure it makes a statement of its own. This is done by prescribing a zone around your logo where nothing can compete – the quiet area. Why is this important? Firstly, you want to make sure that you leave enough space between your logo and other things. Not enough space diminishes the power of the logo and lessens’ your brand presence. People have a hard time making the connection that your company is the driver of whatever you’re looking at. If there’s truly not enough space, they may loose you entirely. Don’t make your logo compete with your message.
The other important reason for the space is that if you’re in a group of other logos, say you’re a sanctioning body or contributor, not enough space between you and the next logo might suggest some sort of partnership. Sure, that might be good if you make video games and you’re next to Playstation but what if you’re The American Lung Association right next door to Phillip Morris? Not so good. Keep a distance.
So, how much space do you need? That’s something that varies from logo to logo. I am sure that large agencies probably have some sort of scientific methods to ascertain the right dimensions, but you can find a nice distance by making a series of mock-up layouts from close to far and find what’s too far and not far enough, like the simple example above. Another method is to look at the materials you already have and locate an example that seems to feel ‘right’ and use that as gospel.
Once you have your distance, you have to tie it to the logo itself. Think scalability. Your logo is going to be many sizes and it’s crucial that the quiet area become a percentage of the logo rather than a concrete number. When the logo gets big, the quiet area will get big too, and the same thing for moving smaller. I like to find something in the logo mark itself to determine the dimension. In the example above, the width of the serpentine sets the quiet area. This guarantees that as long as the logo scales correctly, you can always ascertain an appropriate and proportional quiet area.
Logo usage rules, and quiet space rules specifically, can get far more complex than this and with fairly large corporations, they often do. Some of the variances I’ve seen and produced is two (or more) stage quiet areas – think of a soccer field with the penalty box and a goal box inside. Complexity increases with the treatment of tag lines as well as using the logo with a brand name or a sub-brand. It can get pretty labyrinthine quite quickly. On the other side of things, it’s important not to get too far into the granularity of the matter. Knock out the important rules first and determine the minutia as the situations demand.
The most important thing is to protect your brand mark and to make sure you get that information in the hands of the people operating on your logo. If you get that far, don’t let your brand down. Double check the work to make sure it follows your rules. To manage your brand well, your brand has to look good and look good all the time, making it important to have a plan for all these things.
So this is kind of a new sonic area for the blog to be sure. This release, Pichis Brew by Trío Antimanierista is more of an avant guard jazz release. Don’t be afraid, it’s good stuff! There is a lot of new jazz out there that can be a bit harder to get your head around. I am well aware of this as I spend a time here and there trolling through it. This release is not like that at all, no choking and dying saxes or percussion that sounds like a drunk in a cookware store. It’s pretty easy-going and kind of minimal, but just enough there to get the thought across. As I have said before, to do minimal right takes a lot of talent.
The release does dissolve to a bit of noise here and there, but there is an underlying sort of plan that one can discern, perhaps a second listen might be necessary. It has a bit of a story telling quality that feels kind of at home in what you’d figure is a late 60s movie score. Nothing you can’t handle, especially if you’re coming from the Drum & Bass or Hardcore world – in that case, this is relaxing!
Do download a copy, it’s certainly worth it. Listen to it. Feel like you’re all cultured and stuff without damaging your ears or sanity! I have a copy and will be subjecting my brother to it this weekend!
There’s a lot of attention always being lavished on the front panels of packaging and with good reason, but the back panels are usually an after-thought. Especially, this happens with carded items.
The back of a card really should get much more attention than it does. After all, it’s essentially a bit of free space to help sell your product – and usually it’s larger space than you have on the front – but there are even better reasons than this.
Above, we have the pretty darn excellent Betty Crocker cooking implements packaging that you can easily find in Dollar Tree. Yes, that Dollar Tree, home of “everything is a dollar”(which should hammer home the point that you should be always in it to win it, no matter what the price point is). So what’s so great about this trade dress? The answer is on the back.
Sure, there’s all the usual stuff you’d see on the back of a package: the closure, the legalese, and of course, the UPC. But what else does it have? It has a call to action, asking people to go to the Betty Crocker website for more whatever, but it also gives something a bit more to the consumer. It gives a little recipe. How nice is that? Perhaps the product has no features to talk about on the back but instead of just letting that space go, Betty added a little extra gift for the buyer. It cost them nearly nothing but it gives something even more than the logo. It gives the ‘feeling’ that the company is invested in your cooking or baking journey and wants to help you get there – not just sell you a cheap plastic thing for a dollar. The added detail is like if Betty Crocker herself gave you a little wink and a go-for-it thumbs up.
Even more, it gives Betty Crocker a chance to cross-sell it’s baking and cooking food products, while perhaps not in the same store, it will stick in buyer’s head for when they come across it. Mmmm, creamy chocolate or vanilla frosting! A sneaky bit of advertising concealed in a cleaver value-add.
Comparing this work to a not so similar product that’s in an arguably similar store situation, you can see the real difference in the perception of how each company really seems to care about the buyer. The product on the right is a package of epoxy from Harbor Freight (and the stuff works really well!). The glue is sadly an example of how many companies treat this extra space that could be so valuable to them. There’s all the basic stuff that you need and that’s it. Otherwise, it’s bone dry – not even any branding on the back, and certainly not at the level of completeness that the Betty Crocker has.
Harbor Freight has invested in printing on the back and even in two (possibly four?) colors, why not go all the way and really make the product experience as complete as possible for your customer?
When you’re making a lot products it’s easy to blow through the backs of innumerable cards, but it’s important to think that the back of the card is really your salesman that gets to go home with the consumer and makes sure that your product’s experience is as complete as possible. I’d like to think that how you treat the front of the package in these small instances as how much you care about your product and the back of the card is how much you care about the customer. If you had these opportunities, shouldn’t you capitalize on them?
