In honor of what’s at the core of TED events – the spreading of ideas – we’ve captured the top 10 tweets shared from those at the event below.

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A brand needs effective design and strategy in order to be complete. Great design helps a brand function as best it could; so even if there is a purposeful lack of design, this simplicity could make the brand.

A brand needs to be cohesive across all outlets, yet maintain a differentiated image!

On digital and social media outlets, effective design is pertinent because of the increased audience and competition. What makes consumers ”gotta-have” your brand? What differentiates it from others? The marriage of strategy and effective design create your “special sauce”.

Check out our blog post on gnomeflash, our design blog, to see what our designers have to say about this topic. They even provide a few case studies.

Join us on Gnomeflash…

Charles Duhigg is an award winning investigative reporter and NY Times Best Seller. You have probably heard of Charles Duhigg’s investigative report on Target… well, targeting pregnant consumers by mailing them coupons. Target was able to do this by tapping into their buying habits.

Habits, Duhigg explains in his book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business, focus on routine. In an interview with Welt Branding, Duhigg described the three components that guide habit understanding and change: cue→routine→reward. He explains that in the past decade we have learned it is most effective to focus on the routine component. For example, we experience a trigger (cue), and we then act out a behavior (routine), which facilitates a future craving for the benefit that we receive (reward). The behavior is the usual focus because this is the component a person controls when guiding habit change.

From a marketing and business standpoint, there is no particular need for comprehensive data in order to identify habits. Data doesn’t pin point cues and rewards — robust data finds correlations. For a company to be successful in identifying and leveraging on consumer habits, the company needs to watch consumer behavior.

Duhigg explained that marketers have to understand their own consumer in order to encourage habits. There are multiple opportunities to trigger behavior. Targeting consumers during a major life event is not necessarily the best opportunity for encouraging buying habit changes. For example, consumers make thoughtless purchases and these purchases change buying habits on their own. However, when consumers do experience changes in their life, these habits become particularly valuable because they are vulnerable to change as well.

To stay up to date with Charles Duhigg and The Power of Habit:

Visit http://charlesduhigg.com/
Buy the book
Tweet him @cduhigg

For more of Welt Branding in the digital space, engage with us here:

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Companies use branding to enhance customer perceptions – perceptions that will ultimately embrace or destroy a brand image, and heavily impact the bottom line.

But, what happens when consumers experience a loss of trust in you or your product?

Trust is extremely difficult to define. In some cases it directly correlates to customer satisfaction while in other cases it relates to ethical alignment. Netflix consumers lost trust in 2011 when the DVD company hiked prices up by 60 percent.  Ozzie Guillen, MLB Miami Marlin’s Manager, stated, “I love Fidel Castro,” in a Time Magazine interview and upset thousands of fans.

Brand damage can also occur when company strategy doesn’t evolve with consumer trends or, rather, dismiss their core customer for the mass market. Borders bookstores ignored the importance of establishing an online and digital presence. The company never invested in creating an e-book reader, such as rival Barnes & Noble, and is now bankrupt. American Express’ exclusive image was threatened when they allowed more people to open accounts as Blue and Optima cardholders. (Amex eventually started to give some of these cardholders a $300 gift card to pay off their balances and close their American Express accounts.)

Case in point, there are many ways companies can inflict brand damage upon themselves. So, what should a company do once the damage is done? Any company should recognize that there isn’t a magic switch they can use to just turn off the negative attention. Reconstructing a positive brand image takes times, takes effort across multiple channels, and takes strategy.

Admit → Apologize → Observe → Listen → Strategize → Rebuild

It is essential for brands to have a general crisis plan in place that will facilitate the creation of a more specific strategy once brand damage has occurred.  Regardless of your industry, preparing for adversity may just save your brand image.

Do you need help constructing a crisis management plan? Has your brand already been damaged? We can help.

Hit us back at social@weltbranding.com or leave us a comment!
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In fact, we’d go so far as to say that if Facebook were looking at the situation through cold calculations, they would have seen Instagram itself as a potential juggernaut. Instagram (as we mentioned earlier) does one thing well, and that is share photos. It could be argued that this “one thing” is raison d’etre of social media on the whole.  Facebook now owns the “one touch” of the industry.

Don’t believe us?

How difficult would it be to beat a Facebook as a social media platform if it didn’t allow pictures? No tagging your friends doing embarrassing things, no sharing eight million photos of your newborn sleeping, no girls making “duck lips” at a camera held at arms length, and above their heads, no shots of food you are eating, etc.?

Essentially, it would be a really robust platform for instant messaging…

Why do you think Facebook dropped a bundle on Instagram?

Do you think Instagram is a good investment for the money?

Let us know your take. Smack us back at …
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Insulted and very angry (rightly so), Cincinnati residents took to Twitter. Tidy Cats issued apologies to complaints and by Thursday night, the ad was covered up with a billboard promoting Purina pet adoption.

Tidy Cats, good effort at being quick to try and correct this, but for many the damage is already done. We love OTR and this campaign was #notfunny.

Hit us back…

Note: these images are photographed by Ilonia  Szwarc and is represented by Redux Pictures — the company that does American Girls editorials.

1. Not a positive look for American Girls;
2. Do not represent the company well;
3. Are exploiting younger girls;
4. Are extremely inappropriate;
5. …What were they thinking?!

Social Media expert and Welt alumn, Jay Kulpa, comments on Google yawning fact - did it make you yawn too?

Controversial: employers have been asking potential employees to give up their Facebook password. Twitter is where Welt heard it first!

#Perezism = Perez Hilton giving (not so bad) advice or inspiration.

We missed the #cincySM event, but we were able to follow it on Twitter (thanks to the avid tweeters.)

Makes a good point... It's easy to forget, but sometimes the simple stuff goes a long way!

Fun fact

Visual aids - such as inforgraphics - really help to put something into perspective.

We like OTR and Arts, so we couldn't help but add this to the list.

While the brawl that got this coverage in the NYTimes isn't ideal, it does reflect one thing we think that makes Cincinnati great: the basketball teams, who both seemingly have rebounded since their fight.

One brand that might not be too excited about Shawne Merriman's comical response to the NFL's bounty scandal: P&G's Bounty Towels.

Bonus tweet:

Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning fund Airtime, which is a live social video company.

Which tweets were your favorite? Did we miss any? Hit us back!

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So it comes as no surprise that a project called “Homeless Hotspots” beta-test coincided with this year’s festival. The project turns Austin’s homeless into 4G hotspots for SXSW attendees to use. No joke. This is part marketing, part charity, part innovative, part very cool, part exploitive, and mostly very controversial.

Image taken from Discovery News article "Homeless People Are Wi-Fi Hot Spots at SXSW" by Nic Halverson

How do you know the person is a hotspot and what’s the cost?

They are uniformed in a T-shirt that reads, “I’m (name here), a 4G hotspot, SMS HH (name here) to 25827 for access.” A minimum donation of $2 for 15 minutes of Wi-Fi usage, though users can donate as much as they want. (One hundred percent of these donations go directly to the homeless participant you are using as a 4G hotspot. Participants are also paid $20/day.)

Seneel Radia, BBH NY’s director of innovation, explains that homeless individuals who hand out newspapers inspired the project; it helps to shift their newspaper sales into the digital age. Homeless participants are thankful for the monetary opportunity, but are most excited about the value of possibly changing stereotypical perceptions towards the homeless.

One homeless participant, Mark West, who became homeless after moving to Austin and pursued several unsuccessful job leads. He explained that “Homeless Hotspots” is “a great thing. [People] can see it from a different side, my side, instead of just stereotyping the homeless.”

Image taken from CNN Money article "Turning the homeless into 4G hotspots" by Stacy Cowley

Not everyone sees this project as a good cause.

Our thoughts: we agree with BHH and the homeless participants that this provides great opportunity for interaction and changed perception – though we wonder what will happen once SXSW is over. Therefore, we also believe that the execution of this project has not only exploited the homeless, but doesn’t really solve a problem. We’re not convinced that this campaign does anything to forward the cause.

Ultimately we want to know how it best benefits the cause, not how it best gets attention. How can BHH monetize this so it has a prolonged usefulness to the homeless? In other words, we’d like to see this turn from a project into an organization that provides training and stability to the homeless.

What do you think?

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So, why the sudden shift to $3 million TV commercial placements?

When live TV commercials were first introduced in the 1940s, the commercials ran at 60 second spots and eventually decreased to the more modern 15 second time spots. Today, these 15 second spots enable most TV advertisements to be creatively short. They usually highlight value and benefits and are ultimately all versions of one another, at least within each industry. Many are lacking in differentiation and consumer appeal.

Recently, however, there have been a number of retailers, including Chipotle and Gap Inc., that have caught sight of this redundancy. They shifted strategy and instead opted to create multi-minute long TV commercials. Not only are these advertisements enormously longer than competitors, but as a consequence they tend to “roadblock” competitors from airing during the same sitcom.

The most recent contender, Cartier, debuted its new commercial on Sunday night. The debut appropriately aired during “The Good Wife”, “Celebrity Apprentice”, and “Desperate Housewives” sitcoms, all with demographics akin to that of Cartier’s target audience. Their commercial placement is of heightened importance because Cartier needed to not only grasp and hold consumer attention span for minutes longer, but also ensure that the many more dollars invested in capturing the extra time have a valuable return.

So, how does Cartier do this?

Well, forget a sales pitch! Every consumer knows that diamonds are shiny – that they represent wealth and success. What about the brand? What about the jaguar?

Cartier’s, “L’Odyssée de Cartier”, captured the essence of a story. The commercial brought a journey to life. It differentiated Cartier from other luxury jewelers by introducing the jaguar as a character, giving it a narrative. Luxury, mystery, fantasy, and seduction were all elements in the story line – but the real drawing was that the commercial carried the consumer from beginning to end. Consumers wanted to see what happened next.

A similar example, the popular Chipotle commercial “Back To The Start.” The 2 minute 20 second advertisement evoked emotion. The restaurant chain elicited a real yearning for integrity and good; the company touched on consumer nostalgia. There was a story, with characters, that guided you through Chipotle’s company history. There was an element of transparency in which Chipotle acknowledged where they lost themselves, went wrong, and decided to change.

Consumers watched the entire commercials. One advertising executive, Tom Julian, from Tom Julian Group, was quoted saying he actually rewound Cartier’s commercial to watch it again. Cartier stopped people from fast forwarding through the commercial break.

AdAge writer, Brian Steinberg, concludes that these elongated commercials will change the TV advertising landscape in both price and time variables. Welt wonders, though, whether longer ads may become just as redundant as the existing 15 second spots. We agree that the landscape may shift to longer and documentary-focused advertisements, and that there will most certainly be an effect on Network pricing once this happens; however, will this change be permanent? The examples we cited above were extremely well executed – and we beg the question, how many brands can actually pull this off?

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