You The Designer

The Rise and Fall of Famous Brands – Why Do They Fail?

Guest Blogger — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:00:31 +0000

We are living in a world where water is sold with a name, clothes are being marketed with signature signs and food items are being promoted with trademarks. The concept of branding has completely shaped the way people consume commodities. Customers in this day and age prefer status symbols over necessity. This shows the importance of branding and its influence on businesses.

It takes years to erect a successful brand identity, but only an instant to destroy it. All the famous brands and corporations have risen to their current status after a lot of painstaking effort. Failure is common for small businesses and start-ups, but have we ever wondered how famous brands falter? Today, I seek to uncover some of the most common reasons why renowned brands fall by illustrating the cases of some famous brands.

1. Confusing Brand with Product:

One of the most common reasons why some brands fail is that they confuse a brand with product. However, the reality is otherwise. Both the terms “brand” and “product” are dissimilar and each must exist separately in front of the consumers. For instance, Nike may not be able to send as many products and merchandise without its renowned swoosh and trademark. For Nike, the product is the merchandise they offer, but their brand constitutes the quality and reliability they guarantee.

2. Short-Term Approach:

For a successful brand, the short-term approach is always hazardous as it restricts the domain and vision of the company. While it is an inherent truth that all companies are there in the market to make money, one cannot keep such a short-term and narrow-minded mindset if it wants to win customers for a longer period of time. A recent case in point was British Petroleum that didn’t accurately forecast the repercussions of its business on the environment and ended up becoming the bad company in the eyes of the general public.

3. Fall Short of Customer Expectations:

For a brand identity system, brand promise is critical to gain customer loyalty. When people start believing in a particular brand, they have certain expectations and satisfaction levels attached to it as well. If the brand fails to meet these intrinsic expectations and fall short of what the customers believe of them, they are bound to fail. Coca Cola met a similar fate when they introduced “New Coke” that failed to live up to their customers’ expectations.

4. Too Slow to Change:

In this day and age, companies cannot afford to lag behind in technology and advancement. Those who were too slow to adapt to the changing environment lost the race in the long run. I remember a 64-Bit Commodore system lying in my attic that was once used by our grandparents for computing and entertainment purposes. The company was too slow to update their systems and lost the race to giants like IBM, Compaq and Apple.

5. Going Against The Image:

Honda, Toyota, Ford and Ferrari – all of these brands have built an image of being reputable car manufacturers. This brand image is attached to the company and affects their future operations as well. If one of these car manufacturers decide to enter a totally diverse field, let’s say, perfumes, would it be appropriate? Most certainly not! A similar case happened in 1999, when the famous women’s magazine, Cosmopolitan, introduced its own line of low-fat yogurt. The brand failed badly since the customers were reluctant to accept a yogurt linked to a female magazine.

To wrap up, brands must not be treated as mere products or items of physical value. They have an intrinsic value that completes the whole brand personality. Companies must align their branding efforts according to the expectations of their customers.

About the Author

Nora Reed runs Logoblog.org, where she writes about logo design trends, tips for logo designers, famous logos and inspiring logo design collections.

We’ve Started Using PunchTab!

Cadence Wu — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:00:47 +0000

Here’s another one of our attempts to reward you loyal readers for sticking with You The Designer all this time, and this one is a pretty big deal! PunchTab is a loyalty program that lets us reward you for engaging with the blog, whether you visit, browse, comment on, and vote up our posts and more – with points you can use to redeem a reward from us!

As some of you may have already seen by clicking on the Rewards ribbon tab hovering on the left side of our pages, we have a 30-day leaderboard tracking the most active readers on the blog.

Right now we’re still using PunchTab’s default catalog, but soon we’ll be adding more prizes of our own. And since it’s also a convenient platform for giveaways, we’re looking forward to hosting our next giveaways with PunchTab here on You The Designer too!

Ranjith Kumaran, PunchTab Founder and CEO, comments, “We’re excited to be powering the You The Designer loyalty program. We love their passion for rewarding their most loyal users and their drive to help spread the word about this site across all the major social channels. We look forward to watching their growth and continued success.”

Behance Launches Student Show, an Initiative to Support Emerging Designers

Cadence Wu — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:48 +0000

If you’re a student, here’s an exclusive design community where you can get your work exposure, get feedback from peers as well as world-renowned creative professionals, and even get hired!

Behance has launched a new student initiative called the Student Show Gallery, which aims to showcase the world’s next generation of creative talent. Membership is free! As a member, your work may be featured, “appreciated”, followed by fellow creatives, and noticed by recruiters. You’ll also receive updates on student competitions and exclusive discounts from some of the world’s top creative brands.

In fact, at the moment there’s a Student Showdown ongoing that you can participate in right now!

Entry to this competition is free, and the current submission round runs from January 11 to February 20, 2012. To participate, all entrants must be currently enrolled in school or graduated within the last 3 months. Check the competition details to see how the series works and what great prizes and perks you can get! New competitions are hosted periodically based on creative field or concept, so keep checking back with the Student Show Gallery for updates.

The Behance Network receives millions of visitors each month, and Student Show is the only program that’s exclusively for students. Why wait until graduation to get your work out there? Start now!

30 Examples of Impressive Concept Art

Gabrielle Mendez — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:00:08 +0000

For both video games and comic books, concept artists are necessary to create the aesthetically-pleasing visuals that enhance the storyline’s action and drama. From simple pencil sketches to 3D models, detailed character turnarounds to costumes, fantastic vehicles to intricate weapon design, the possibilities are endless.

These are some examples of impressive video game and comic book concept art.

BATMAN (DC/Rocksteady Studios)

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ASSASSIN’S CREED (Ubisoft)

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BIOSHOCK (2K/Irrational Games)

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DEAD SPACE (Visceral Games/EA)

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FINAL FANTASY Series (Square Enix)

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GEARS OF WAR (Epic Games/Microsoft)

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HALO (Ensemble Studios/Microsoft)

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MASS EFFECT (Bioware/EA)

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MONSTER HUNTER (Capcom)

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PROTOTYPE (Radical Entertainment/Activision)

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The Best Looking Beer Cans – a Beer Can Appreciation Day Special

Fernando Jose — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:54:44 +0000

January 24, 2012 marks the 77th anniversary of the day Gottfried Krueger Brewing Co. first brought canned beers into the market. Though it hasn’t been (and probably never will be) declared an official holiday, more and more people are celebrating Beer Can Appreciation Day to pay tribute to the creation that has changed the experience of buying, keeping and drinking beer, forever.

YTD takes part in the Beer Can Appreciation Day celebration with this collection of 35 tasteful beer can designs. Check them out and don’t forget to leave a comment after. Cheers!

Hurlimann Sternbrau

SAA Design
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Intuition Ale Works

DeRouen & Co
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Upslope Brewing Brown Ale

Anthem Branding
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Great Western

Saint Bernadine Mission Communications
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Heineken Rugby World Cup 2011

Raison Pure
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Bulldozer Beer

Firstbase
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Arctic Beer

Tank
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Howe Sound Lager

The Antidote Inc.
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Club Colombia Special Edition

JWT
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Tui Repackaged

DesignWorks
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Glow

Neumeister
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Smrprty

Tank Design
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Abro Organic Lager

Mattias Frodlund
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Austin Beerworks

Helms Workshop
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Pilsner

TAXI
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Vintage Packaging – Beer Cans

Hello Again
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Guinness Beer can re-design

Tamara Maksimovic
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Diesel 6%

Pavel Gubin
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Grolsch Beer Can FC Twente season 2011

Elroy Klee
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“1410″ Beer can design

Ignas Kozlovas
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beer can packaging

Sergey Prostov
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Carling beer brand design

Ingrida Liepyte
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Beer Can Label Design

Gradinar Razvan
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Brøckhouse 33cl Can

Morris Pinewood
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Saku On Ice 0,5L Can

Hannes Paesoo
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Asahi Breweries

Phil Munro
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John Davey’s Cornish Bitter

Pascal de Moratti
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Miller Cans

Tim Pokrichuk
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Three Towns Premium Lager (2009)

Mikael Hulkko
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Hockley Valley Brewing Co.

Andrew Oliver
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Latas tematicas Nova Schin

Fausto Uehara
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Heisenberg Beer

This is
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package design

Tim Murphy
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Negra Modelo

Mauricio Muñoz
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Beer Can Appreciation Day (we’d like to believe) wasn’t just created to give people an excuse to drink more beer. A bit of research about beer cans would tell you that they do deserve our appreciation.

First, beer cans are relatively cheaper than beer bottles. They require minimal energy to produce and most of the materials used in these cans can be reused to manufacture new ones. Second, beer cans do a better job in preserving the beer’s flavor. Aluminum cans prevent beer from getting “skunked” due to exposure from UV light. They are also very durable and contain lower oxygen levels than bottles which increases shelf life. Lastly, the variety of beer can designs makes them perfect collector’s items. And with beer cans that look as good as the ones above, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some people are more interested in the cans than the booze!

An Introduction to Concrete5 CMS — Part II

Sufyan bin Uzayr — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:00:32 +0000

In the previous article, we took an introductory look at Concrete5 as a CMS. In this follow-up part, we shall learn about the salient features of the CMS and learn to accomplish common tasks using its admin panel.

IMPLEMENTING Concrete5

The Dashboard

Just like WP, Concrete5 also has its own Dashboard. Once you login to the admin panel, you will see it. The Dashboard gives you access to site updates and traffic stats. There is also a widget that lets you search the official documentation for help. Finally, a basic but nifty note taker widget is also available.

Adding Users and User Groups

You will need to navigate to the Users and Groups tab in order to add new users and/or groups. The process is simple – you simply need to specify a username, an email address and optionally upload an avatar image. In order to create groups, you need to mention the group’s name and description. User privileges can be specified after a group is created. If you intend to create a temporary group, you can also set a date and time for automatic deletion of that group.

Managing Appearance and Layout

Concrete5 offers many themes in its repository, both paid and free. In the Theme Options page, you can see a list of all the installed themes and templates. With each theme, there are options such as ‘Inspect’, ‘Preview’, ‘Customize’, ‘Install/Uninstall’, and ‘Activate’. Inspect lets you verify the integrity of the theme files (compare it to MD5checksum) while Customize allows you to manually modify CSS and other style sheets.

The default page types (or templates) are Blog Entry, Full Width, Left Sidebar and Right Sidebar. Full Width offers a simple one column layout. Blog Entry page type is automatically activated for the blog section of the website. You can merge the Sidebar page types to create multiple columned pages. Special pages such as Sitemap.xml and Contact forms have their own separate types and templates (yes, Concrete5 offers native support for Sitemaps and Contact forms and you do not need to separately install plugins yourself).

Plus, Concrete5 makes it very easy to edit the meta data (such as HTML tag) without the use of any code. In the Attributes section, you can simply specify the text for pre-defined meta tags.

Addons and Plugins, Maintenance and Tweaks

Concrete5 comes with pre-installed addons such as support for embedded SWF files, RSS feedburner as well as native support for video playback (AVI, WMV, QuickTime/MPEG4, FLV, Youtube URL). However, you can easily install additional themes and addons from the Add Functionality tab. Themes and addons can either be installed by performing a search (which queries the default repository and any custom repositories that you specify), or by uploading a ZIP file from the admin interface or via FTP. (alternatively, you can also provide the URL to the theme or addon).

Concrete5 offers automated backups that you can schedule (the file is saved on the server itself). You can also encrypt the backups if you so desire, using the System and Maintenance Tab.

Overall Settings

In WordPress, how do you make your website load faster? By using a caching plugin, perhaps? In Concrete5, you technically do the same – but in this case, you don’t really use a plugin! Concrete5 comes with inbuilt caching support for faster page loading. You can setup caching in the Sitewide Settings section. By default, basic caching should suffice for a regular website. However, for the blog section and other dynamic content, you may consider activating Full Caching. You can also tweak the admin interface and add or remove the toolbars. Needless to say, such native functionality goes a long way in making the CMS nimble and light-weight.

Still not happy with the goodies? Concrete5 also comes with a basic email settings management section. You can either use the Default PHP Mail() Function, or the External SMTP server (in the latter case, you’ll need to provide additional settings). However, as far as my guess goes, you’d probably prefer reading your mails in your desktop mail client and/or GMail account and thus, Concrete5 need not be bothered with the same.

You may also block or whitelist users and visitors on the basis of IP addresses for the sake of security (mischief?).

Thus, on a concluding note, Concrete5 is an awesome CMS if you are looking for easy customization along with security for your website. If you wish to try it before downloading, you can visit the demo site here. And finally, you can explore additional features of Concrete5 in this video:

concrete5 – scrapbook and page type defaults from concrete5 on Vimeo.