I mentioned here the much discussed Pepsi Rebranding.

Fast Company revealed a leaked pdf that outlines the thinking behind the controversial new Pepsi logo.

If with this the designer team is trying to get excuses for their results and 5 months of working or the million dollar invoice, then they should listen to what everybody comment on this: it is a lame excuse.

Mixing gravitation in the Pepsi galaxy, energy fields, relativity of space and time, some mythical perfect proportions, some da Vinci Code and some smiley faces the document is trying, without a final conclusion, to make us stand up in ovation by the end of the reading.

Well, we will stand up…. And leave.

Download the document here.

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Trust means your future customers believe you’re likely to be honest and competent, and will deliver a good experience. Sometimes trust comes from friends telling friends they had a great experience. But most of your future customers wont have word-of-mouth to rely on. They have to decide on their own whom to trust. Thats the mission of your logo, website or brochure, to create your business dress and body language–your visual branding.

Here are a few basics to help your business look credible:

1. Go for simplicity and lack of clutter. (Think Apple, the master of simplicity in branding.)
2. Create or demand a clean, well-balanced graphic design.
3. Use one or two basic colors that go well together, not a hodgepodge.
4. Choose one font and stick with it. You can express almost anything by using variations within a single font family: size, weight (boldness), italics, etc. If you really must, choose a second font for major headlines. But first try it with one font.
5. Coordinate a single look – design, colors, etc. – across everything you do, including your logo, website, brochures, ads and signage.

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I’d start with the Apple Computers who dropped computer from its name. The move is rather normal considering that iPod or iTunes are two of the main products of Apple Inc. and was announced in the same time with the buzzy launching of iPhone. Now, getting to this, cannot help myself not to admire the Apple capacity to create a buzz in the media, no matter that we’re talking about the internet of the classic mass media. The phone they launched is, I admit, a work of art and has a lot of great features but I wouldn’t hurry to name it neither a Blackberry killer, a computer or a smart phone. It’s more like a beautifully designed, big brand sustained swiss knife of mobiles.

Anyway, the iPhone road is not clear yet, at least in terms of naming and branding as Cisco sued Apple over the name itself considering they are marketing a VOIP phone with the same name for quite a while now. I wonder on this what made Steve Jobs go on with the name at the Macworld conference: the trust in the Apple brand power to impose the iPhone on the market (along with its previous similar names products: iPod, iTunes or iMac) or the time pressure of the launch. There were even rumors (not confirmed after all) that they already changed the name to iTouch Mobile. Well not yet.

Speaking about Apple’s phone, is worth mentioning its (two years in advanced blindly signed) exclusivity distribution contract with Cingular. And coming to this is also worth mentioning that AT&T launched its largest-ever ad campaign yesterday geared toward absorbing Cingular Wireless into the AT&T brand. More than that. AT&T will also be launching a campaign to rebrand BellSouth as AT&T. AT&T acquired BellSouth for $80 billion in December – the largest telecommunications merger in U.S. history. Cingular was a joint property of AT&T and BellSouth. Now that’s a huge rebranding effort to follow.

Citigroup, the global banking giant, is shrinking its name. Executives are prepared to rebrand the company “Citi” and to fold up its familiar red umbrella and instead use a logo with a stylized arc above the name. The design is similar to the “citi” logo that now appears on much of its consumer advertising, office buildings and credit cards. A rollout could begin as early as next month.

Pepsi is introducing 35 different packaging designs as part of a global brand revamp aimed at bringing younger consumers closer to the brand. It is only the 11th time the brand has changed its look in its 109-year history. The graphics, created by US agencies, will use themes associated with teens and young adults. Looking to get a little extra pop out of its sponsorship of the Super Bowl XLI Halftime Show, Pepsi announced it is giving away a jewel-encrusted Pepsi can valued at $100,000 as well as Super Bowl tickets for life.

Now, getting to the soon to come Super Bowl and Time Magazine person of the year 2006, just found via Church of the Customer Blog an interesting initiative of some advertisers that have jumped on the citizen-created bandwagon by inviting everyday people to help create their ads. Lining up are Chevrolet, Doritos, and the NFL. The contests for Chevy and the NFL are to submit ideas for commercials, not actual videos. Winning ideas are made into ads by professional agencies.

And, in the end, since I got next to sports, even though I’m planning a separate blog post on this, it has to be mentioned as an important start-of-the-year-branding-event and a subject follow, the multi-million dollar Beckham brand relocation in USA.

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Here is a list of 9 things that should be taken in consideration when naming a new business or product:
1. The Name Achieves Differentiation From Competition – your name should be different from the competition, as should your messaging.
2. The Name Reinforces Positioning in Marketplace – a name should make an impact and should bring forth some sense of the company’s position as it enters the marketplace.

3. The Name Engages Customer or Prospect – it should be something that causes interest, causes inquiry and causes potential for action.

4. The Name Is unforgettable – it should embed itself in the collective consciousness, tie to mental signposts in the consumer’s brain and help the consumer remember the name when speaking to friends.

5. The Name Has a Life of It’s Own – A company name needs to carry a self-sustaining message, something that identifies what the company does or provides, without additional messaging or clarity being added.

6. The Name Evokes Deep Well For Graphical Images – it helps develop a logo, and design for websites, etc.

7. The Name Rises Above the Goods and Services You Provide – it should have a greater, more encompassing edge than the things you provide – because if it is tied to services or products, and they change, your name might well need to, also.

8. The Name Has What It Takes to Dominate the Category – this comes from the idea of timelessness, of speaking to the consumer in an unforgettable way, but it also goes above and beyond that.

9. Url has to be Available for Registration For Web Address- extremely important issue in today’s time and age of the internet.

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Getting a professionally designed custom logo and an easy to remember punch line are some of the very important elements of branding a business. A logo is not just a symbol or a piece of graphics; it is actually your corporate identity. A properly designed logo can leave long lasting impression on your clients and will never let your business slip out of their minds.

So, if you think you are tired of being a “small business” and its time to grow up, take the first step; establish your brand!

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The problem is that the logo is not understood by many in the first place–even some designers. It is not simply a commodity that you can purchased to make your business appear better than it really is. It also is not an adornment that everyone needs, in order to look legitimate. The logo is actually a promise, an investment, and a part of a branding strategy.

As a result your branding strategy, and marketing efforts need to reflect what your audience needs to know to be attracted to your services, and eventually become loyal customers. The logo is a part of that strategy. In some business cases the logo will be more critical than in other business cases. But the fact remains that the logo must reflect who you are, and it must communicate to your market at an emotional level.

via Evolution of Intelligent Design blog

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Employee branding is a process by which employees internalize the desired bran dimage and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents. The messages employees take in and process influence

• the extent to which they perceive their psychological contracts with the organization to be fulfilled
• the degree to which they understand and are motivated to deliver the desired level of customer service

In so doing, they drive the formation of the employee brand. The messages employees receive must be aligned with the employees’organizational experiences if the psychological contract is to be upheld. Therefore, the conscious development of organizational messages is the fundamental building block in this process.

The messages must then be delivered through appropriate message sources.The following guidelines provide a starting point in this process:

1. Organizational messages should be carefully thought out and planned in much the same way mission and vision statements are thought out and planned.
2. The organizational messages should reflect the organization’s mission and values.
3. Messages directed toward external constituencies must be in line with the messages sent to employees.
4. Messages directed toward external constituencies should be sent internally as well.
5. The design of recruitment and selection systems should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
6. The compensation system should incorporate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image. For instance, managers in organizations that value training must be held accountable when they fail to train and develop their employees.
7. Training and development systems should help managers and employees internalize their organization’s mission and values and help them understand how the mission and values pertain to their roles in their organization.This should enable them to more effectively articulate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
8. Advertising and public relations systems should communicate messages that consistently and frequently reflect the brand and organizational image.
9. Managers should be taught the importance of communicating messages that are consistent with their organization’s mission,vision, policies, and practices.
10. Performance management systems should address inconsistencies between practices and policies to minimize violations of employees’ psychological contracts.
11. Accurate and specific job previews should be given to new employees so that realistic expectations are incorporated into their psychological contracts.
12. Corporate culture (artifacts, patterns of behavior, management norms, values and beliefs, and assumptions) should reinforce the messages employees receive.
13. Individual output should be measured and analyzed to determine if there are message-related problems at the departmental, divisional, or organizational levels.
14. Individual messages should be continually examined for consistency with other messages.
15. Message channels should be examined to ensure consistency of message delivery.
16. In the event that messages need to be changed or psychological contracts altered, organizations must take careful steps in rewriting the messages.
17. Measures should be used to assess outcomes such as customer retention, service quality, turnover, and employee satisfaction and performance

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Results from TippingSprung’s first annual survey of brand names revealed the top brand names in a number of key categories. Major trends in brand naming were also uncovered. The survey focused on names and products that had been released within the prior 18 months.

Choosing a name is one of the most important decisions a company can make when launching a brand. While packaging, taglines, or even product formulation can change on a regular basis, the name is the one element of the brand that remains constant.

said Martyn Tipping, president, TippingSprung.

The following are a few of the trends noted in the survey:

Authenticity and simplicity rule.

The survey shows that companies are gravitating towards real-word names rather than coined or made-up names. This reflects the consumers’ desire to connect with brands that communicate authenticity and simplicity.

Marketers are stuck in the middle between consumers and lawyers.

Corporate trademark lawyer may like coined names like Verizon or Altria that can be registered and protected in multiple classes. Savvy marketers are trying to satisfy the needs of both audiences by developing coined names that have instantly recognizable roots and meaning. One approach is to “embed” a real word prominently in the new name, as in the examples of Achieva, Genworth, and Scenium. Another approach is to bring two words together to create a new name, as in the case of PureVision, SoundDock, or CallVantage.

As companies get more complicated, so do the names.

With a resurgence in corporate merger and acquisition activity, TippingSprung believes that consumers should brace themselves for a new onslaught of coined names.

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The basic concept of branding will definetly remain unchanged — to create an emotional attachment between the consumer and a product — but the near future (or should I say present?) will demand from branding to adapt to consumers high demand for specialized – peronalized – customized products.

The new technologies are changing the way consumers interact with companies, or with other consumers for that matter, exchanging views, complaints, opinions and comments about products and services, about brands, about companies, about YOUR company.

On the other side there are companies already engaging creative customers in new ways. These companies are clearly aware that tapping into the collective intellectual capital of their customers yields great creative and “real” content. However, let’s not make the mistake to think that in the end these conversations will all be about communications and branding: how about extending this cooperation with consumers to virtually everything a corporation does, by making the customer an integral part of ALL creative and creational processes? There are companies inviting theis customers to engage in CUSTOMER-MADE goods, services and experiences?

Get ready for CUSTOMER-MADE: the phenomenon of corporations creating goods, services and experiences in close cooperation with consumers, tapping into their intellectual capital, and in exchange giving them a direct say in what actually gets produced, manufactured, developed, designed, serviced, or processed. Consumerism will never be the same!

Read a detailed analysis on the customer made trend.

More than that, Martin Lindstrom, a recognized branding guru and author of Brand Sense is presenting five reasons for which branding is changing and companies have to adapt to the customization and personalization trend:

• Brand blogging
• Brand Phishing
• Brand alliances
• Situation placement
• Me Selling Proposition

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The process of exposing consumers to the various attributes associated with a particular brand, a successful brand experience creates an environment in which the consumer will be surrounded by the positive elements attached to the brand.

The successful brand experience can operate on multiple levels, including adding a new communications channel to reach the consumer, adding a service element to the product that extends a stronger offer, and extending the brand across seemingly unrelated products and services. The overall brand experience represents a way to bring the consumer to the brand and establish a close relationship.

And a brand means much more even than its product and service features. Brands are built from nothing less than the sum of a customer’s experiences with a product, service or company. Customers’ total brand experience will determine whether they will buy anything more from the company and, just as importantly, whether they’ll spread awesome or awful word-of-mouth to friends and family.

The balance between expectation and experience is why I like to think of a brand as a promise, and the customer experience as the fulfillment of that promise. No doubt a customer experience that veers wildly from it’s brand promise will erode the belief in that brand promise pretty quickly. Companies that promise one thing through their advertising and branding and badly let customers down through the customer experience are undermining a huge investment and one of their most valuable assets. The difference between a brand promise and the actual customer experience is the “experience gap”, and that will erode your brand equity faster than anything else, no one likes to be promised one thing and delivered another.

Any company that wants to establish a customer experience strategy must do it with a full and realistic evaluation of what their brand stands for and what their brand promise is. Any company that fails to align their customer experience strategy with their brand strategy will be in danger of creating an “experience gap” that will erode any brand equity they have built in the marketplace.

To create excellent customer experiences, it’s essential to gain deep insight into customer needs and wants. Just as imperative is developing a core set of customer metrics that:

(1) accurately measure where your brand stands in areas most important to customers
(2) best reflect the health of your business.

In other words, brands are multifaceted and complex—certainly much more than a name or image. If you aren’t aware of a brand, you’ll never consider it even though it may be just what you want or need. First impressions and appearance are very important, and so is the quality of the foundation and building blocks, especially over the long term. Brands, like houses, have unique personalities. Customers develop relationships with brands that change over time as their needs and expectations evolve.

As you think about how your customers’ experiences add up to create their overall brand experience, it’s helpful to focus on the three most essential marketing objectives and the metrics that reveal how well you’re meeting those objectives:

1. Customer acquisition, with a goal of acquiring the right customers in a cost-effective way. Three critical customer experiences in the acquisition process are awareness, learning and persuasion.

2. Marketers must focus on product “wow” in delivering a “wow” customer experience that exceeds expectations. Three critical customer experiences required for product “wow” are great first-time usage, usability and benefit delivery.

3. Marketers must focus on customer retention—retaining and nurturing loyal customers, and turning them into advocates. Three critical customer experience elements in the retention process are long-term usage and satisfaction, the purchase of more products and services, and positive word-of-mouth.

Evaluating these essential business-building drivers within the customer experience framework will help you focus on the most important levers for achieving marketing results.

What metrics do you need to use to know how well you’re doing and where you want to go? How will you ensure that your customers’ experiences increase their loyalty so they will not only buy more from you but will also spread great word of mouth?

Brands are so much more than a name, logo or image. They represent nothing less than a customer’s complete experience with your product, service or company.

As Kevin Keller said: The power of a brand lies in the minds of consumers and what they have experienced and learned about the brand over time.

Readings on this:
Designing Brand Experience: Creating Powerful Integrated Brand Solutions
Experiencing the Brand – Branding the Experience (440K, PDF, registration required)

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