Albinoriotman says Twitter your brand!

We recently had the pleasure of catching up with a mate of ours from the UK via Memphis, TN - the award winning copywriter and professional Tweeter - Jon Burkhart aka Albinoriotman . While in NZ we had an incredibly stimulating get together with the guys at iJump which resulted in this interview. Jon discusses Twitters ability to add depth to brands, create connection with consumers and entertain in the process.

Client Work: Hello Dolly

Branding, Product Design, Advertising and Promotional material

We created the branding and product designs for this new gift brand. The brand has been a sell-out success story. The design appeals to women of all ages and needed to be flexible enough to use on anything from hammers to aprons, posters or printed material. The simplicity of the colours and the packaging design create a strong, memorable retail presence enabling the products to sell themselves. The products and trade fair stand have won numerous awards. Click image for more detail.

Client Work: Tax Management New Zealand

Branding, Advertising and Promotional material

Starting with a brand workshop we’ve worked with Tax Management New Zealand to rebrand their business and raise product awareness across a range of media including advertising, direct mail and online. The work has been highly successful resulting in record product acquisition numbers. Click image for more detail.

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The limitations of marketing

Here's a great little story by a friend of mine. He talks about how he finds an amazingly packaged beer with a great story, that unfortunately can't live up to its own hype.

Great packaging, great advertising, gorgeous design, clever marketing ... these things can only get you so far. They get people to talk about you, they make potential customers become aware you exist, and they can even generate trial. But for a successful BRAND, there must be more than trial. Repetition of purchase is fundamental to business success, and repetition will not happen without a quality product.

In cases like Eric tells in his story, when the quality is largely determined by the nebulous benchmark called "taste" there are numerous examples of brands that defy my thesis. Stella Artois, I am told, consistently wins the award for the worst tasting beer in Europe, and closer to home I am continually astounded by peoples love for a particular market leading brand of espresso (who shall not be named). In these cases "tasting good" is often a euphemism for "what I am used too."

However if we examine an industry such as hotels, you can tell everybody how wonderful you are, but if your front of house service is sub-par, customers won't come back. If a brand of footwear falls to bits, they won't be purchased again. If you are a seeking a repair for a laptop bag, and the retailer makes it hard to get that repair, you'll definitely think twice next time you consider purchasing from the store.

It's because of this that companies need to have a more holistic view of the idea of BRAND. Despite what the design comapnies might tell you "branding" is not your colours, your logo or even your tagline - brand is the totality of a persons experience with you. It's the way you deal with complaints, its the way your answer the phone, it's the music playing in your store, it's the handwritten thank you card that come when they resubscribe to your magazine. These are the types of things that determine repeat customers

The end of the master brand

An interesting white paperby Geordie McClelland from Brandchannel. He writes:

"Master brands and brand architecture are two of the many inward-focused notions that have come to define the world of branding. While these concepts heralded an important milestone, continued adherence to their principles may lead to branding’s downfall. Inflexible models and exclusive language inherent to these concepts are alienating branding’s most critical potential proponents, giving the impression that as branding practitioners, we have built artificial processes to justify higher fees for what otherwise would be considered “expensive marketing.” In this article, we will make the case that traditional brand jargon, brand architecture and its numerous flavors - such as Branded Houses, Houses of Brands, Endorsed Brands and Sub-brands under a Master Brand, and any other “branding” term that puts unnecessary conceptual distance between a business and its brand(s)—is ultimately detrimental to the discipline of branding. We will then provide an alternate view of brand system management that we feel is more relevant to the needs of businesses and the many stakeholders they serve."

Download the full white paper here