I wholeheartedly disagree. Consumers generally have a much better to make an apples to apples comparison; all of the tomato sauces in the grocery are laid out in a row for me, and their nutritional information, ingredients and price are clear. With business to business sales, the value and price is much more convoluted and this opens up the door for personal scrutiny that can be swayed to emotional. “Well company X has a shorter timeline an requires less cash down, but company Y has a track record of delivering on budget.” I would argue that brand plays even more of role in B2B than B2C.

To build your B2B brand, you have to create great customer experiences. And that starts with how you treat your clients when they come visit you. You need to think about their experience in a way a hotel or a restaurant thinks about your visit with them.

When I stayed at the the Swan and Dolphin resort at Disney World in Orlando for a conference, I was amazed at how much thought was given to making sure I had a positive brand impression of them. A shuttle picked me up and took me right up to the door. The entry way was beautiful and the path to the check in desk was clear. I was greeted with a smile and great service, and clearly shown where my room was. In my room, the TV was on with a video looping through pictures and video of the hotels services, set to serene music. I actually took notes on it, because it was so powerful at positioning the hotel as relaxing and inviting.

You get the impression that no stone has been left unturned to create a great experience with really great places in the hospitality industry. Experiences like Disney World and the Mandarin restaurant actually seem synthetic because of their how fine tuned every part is. But I’ll err on the side of a great controlled positive experience rather than a casual experience.

Take a walk in your clients shoes. Is there easy access to parking? Are they greeted at the door promptly and curtiously? Is the office well decorated and clean? Is the office laid out in a simple way? Is the meeting room easily accessible? Is the meeting room open, well lit and have windows, or does it feel claustrophobic? Are the clients offered a coffee, tea or water? If they require a tour, do the salespeople know how to give it professionally and stick to points the client would car about? Is your branding places prominently around the office?

You may think that you don’t need to think about that fluff, and you can concentrate on your product and operations to compete. Admirable, but spending a little time thinking about the experience can have a high return on investment (ROI). Spending a few thousand dollars and some man hours tuning up the client experience can all be paid by getting one contract you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Your clients are coming to see your location because they want to judge how professional it is; if they didn’t want to know that then they would stay in their office and let you come to them. Manage their experiences.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

Now, marketers and companies know if they give something away, their business can grow in unpredictable ways. It’s the karmic model of marketing. The freemium is a part of this; there is rarely a piece of software or a website that does not offer a free version or a trial of their service. I call this the drug dealer model: the fist taste is free. This was always the model for most art forms. For music you could listen to a song on the radio for free (essentially) in the hopes that you would be enticed to buy the album or go to the concert. With art you could always few a painting in a gallery or the artist studio with the artist hoping you would purchase it for free.

Now the marketing world is taking it one step further because of the tendency of the web and our connected society to make things viral. We see this all the time in the marketing community with free eBooks. I’ll freely tell you that is the strategy I am counting on when I provide the insights here in this blog. I provide this content with no expectation. Now I would be happy if you enjoyed it and told other people who would enjoy about it, but I have no expectation of that. I don’t force you to email 3 people about the blog before I show you the latest post. There is no transaction. I do this for myself, and the hope that you will enjoy it.

Now the karmic marketing model and the reciprocity based society don’t mix. They create dissonance with people. Our society tells us that every thing is a tic for tat transaction, but people are trying to give us stuff for free. As a result people have an ingrained mistrust. They are looking for the hook. “Why are you doing this? Do you want my money? Email address? My time? Personal information? My contacts? A reference? Etc. Etc”

This basic mistrust of anything being given away is a fundamental resistance that you need to disarm if you are going to give something of value away.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

I do not mean the freemium model, or what I call the drug dealer model: the first taste is free but you have to pay later. This is where the brand gives you a free trial that is limited by either locked functionality or a time limited offering. We are used to seeing this in the App market and video games. But that tactic is using the same product to promote itself, and that is not what I am talking about here.

In this age you can release a related product to build buzz and excitement or introduce a new concept before you launch the big product. The intention of this is to build excitement in the core fans of the brand to build general buzz to build a good climate for the big launch to proceed in. Here are a few examples:

I was watching the Blu Ray releases of Star Trek 3-5 last night, and the only trailer on all 3 discs was for the modern Star Trex movie by JJ Abrams. This was a 3 disc collector box set in never before seen quality. While I was watching these movies a year after the modern Star Trek was released, the core fans of the original Star Trek television series and movies would have picked this set up months before the release of the modern movie. They would then talk to their friends, colleagues, and neighbours about the original Star Trek and hopefully how excited they are about the movie.

Another movie example is the release of the Thor and Captain America movies to build to the Avengers movie. Thor is scheduled to be released May 6, 2011 and Captain America is coming out July 22, 2011. These movies will be phenomenons in themselves, but they are building to one of the biggest movie launches in history: The Avengers in May 2012. The Avengers is a superhero team up movie that pairs Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and a few others. Given the talent that have played these characters in the single movies, you can imagine the ensemble cast of the Avengers: Robert Downey Jr, Samuel Jackson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo and the list goes on.

If you are seeing a pattern here, and that these seem to be part of the geek culture, you would be correct. But that is because they have an engergizable base of fans of those brands. But a broader market example of this was the iPhone softening the market for the iPod touch. You might think that the iPod touch is a small footnote compared to juggernaut launch of the iPhone. But there are almost as many iPod Touches sold as there are iPhones, and the iPod touch was released 6 months later. The iPhone broke the touch device concept into western culture, and built amazing excitement around it. This was excitement that some people couldn’t take advantage of because they could not afford the monthly fee of the iPhone. Along comes the iPod touch. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they had released the iPod touch ahead of the iPhone. Apple wanted the huge paradigm shift to make their brand seem more innovative, especially since the computer and iPod innovation had stifled. If they had just introduced an iPod touch that could make calls, it would not have exploded in the way it did.

Is these a product or service you can launch to build buzz for a future, innovative product or service? This might be a tactic that has some appeal specially if your company is product driven and not great at promotion.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

It is true. An idea is just firing neurons and words if it is not executed. If you are truly committed to your idea, then you have a responsibility to bring that idea into the world. You need to take the action steps necessary to get from an idea to a change in the world. Branding is about what your customers can experience, and they can experience something if it is just an idea in your head.

Seth Godin in his book Linchpin talks about trashing early in a project. By thrashing, he means identifying and working through problems; the behavior that our nature is to do at the end of the implementation process. We want to  identify problems at the end of the process because we don’t want to hit the execute button. Pressing the execute button opens us up to risk. But risk mitigation isn’t our job when we are in the implementation stage of a project. That should have happened long ago.

There are a lot of industries where you can be falsely lead to believe that you are planner. The design industry and the marketing / branding industry is definitely one of those. Even if you are in a strategic role, you may believe that your job is to plan. Your job is to deliver a plan. If you think about planning as an activity rather than a means to an end, you tend to talk and talk and brainstorm to know end. Think about the deliverable.

I call it the execute button because it is really a button for many people. For most people it is the “Send” button on an email with that proposal you have been working for a month on. It may be the export button for the final draft of the new campaign presentation. It could be the button that put a radical new build of your software product. It could be the “Publish” button on your blog, as it is for me right now. The things that have that execute button are the things that grow your brand.

There are forces inside you that keep you from pressing that button. They are inside all of us. But you have to perservere and move forward. Hit the execute button.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

In industrial design we talked alot about the democratization of design in the last decade. Good product design was a luxury of the rich. In the past, you only had an easy to use, beautiful CD player if you could pay for a Bang and Olufsen. Now you can go to Best Buy and get a Sony Plasystation 3 that can be the jewel of your living room, and be the best CD player you could ever want and do hundreds of other tasks. You can go to Target (if you are in the USA, soon to be in Canada) and get a Michael Graves tea pot that used to be a working sculpture only people in a higher tax bracket could afford. Target has been a great leader in the democratization of design, as well as IKEA. Unfortunately the quality has not followed the beauty and ease of use in these consumer products.

A similar movement is happening with marketing. There are avenues in which small companies can get their brand’s message out that have never been there before. Facebook gives any business the ability to do hyper targeted advertising based on demographics, psychographics and declared interest. That level of targeting was only available to very wealthy companies in verticals with high customer lifetime value. Google has made billions through giving people the ability to target their ads to people with declared interest at the moment of interest.

But even those services can eventually be crowed out by brands with the biggest pockets. What can’t be crowded out is social media’s natural effect of amplifying word of mouth. Yelp and other social review sites are the greatest example of this. I personally have found small business restaurants with great food and service using Yelp. A particular barbecue restaurant in Etobicoke comes to mind. This was one that was a 4 star recommendation on Yelp about 10 kms from where we were. The food was delicious and they over serviced us. We talked to the couple that owned and ran the place and they said that most of the traffic that they were getting was from Yelp and other restaurant review sites. Here is a mom and pop shop competing with deep pocketed chain restaurants and getting mind share and customers. Kelsey’s could throw 10s of millions of dollars into an advertising campaign that wont change that their food and service is spotty. And a mom and pop BBQ shop can take way business by concentrating on product and service.

This is what marketing was all about: connecting great products with people in need. We got sidetracked with mass media giving the rich a large megaphone. But now we have given millions a voice, and together they have a voice loud enough to drown out that mass media megaphone. But this means that if your product is sub par, your not going to get any traction.

The cream will rise to the top, just as well intended all along.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

I was wrong. It was a country western themed bar and restaurant. Nothing wrong with that, but I was excited about and expecting something else. The surprise factor tarnished my first experience, and the first experience is the most critical time in the relationship between a customer and a brand.

People (generally) don’t like surprises. There are good surprises, but people are generally used to dealing with negative surprises particularly from companies. When they are surprised, they assume it is negative and need to be convinced otherwise. McDonalds has built an empire on people being able to buy the same okay tasting hamburger anywhere in the world. United Airlines boarding, flight and deplaning is a scripted, predictable, choreographed play. Denny’s you can expect to get the same greasy breakfast 24 hours a day. People don’t get their cars serviced purely based on the fear of surprised.

People are also weary of bait and switch tactics. No matter what the bank offers at first, you wonder how long it will last. Sure the cable company is giving you 3 months of free service, but how bad is the service? The phone company wants to give you that shiny new phone, but how long of a contract do they lock you in for? When someone is surprised, they look for the hook.

Make sure your branding isn’t going to imply something that your product or service is set to deliver.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.

How do you get a customer to come and use your product and service again and again? You get to know them. You talk to them, you look at them, you ask them questions. You try to get to the bottom of what makes them who they are what they need you to do for them. Once you know their needs, you need to be selfless. You need to put your needs above your own. You need to over service them and then ad a cherry on top of that. Seth Godin in Linchpin “Art [or service] is a personal gift that changes the recipient.” You need to not only give them the product or service they require, but you need to make them feel better themselves. You take a load off their shoulders, make them laugh or make them think in a new way.

All of this seems like love to me.

This is how you build your brand, one loving interaction after another. You might be thinking that this a long, hard and tiring road and there is no way you or your employees could keep that up. But the interesting thing is that once you get to this point, it becomes a self sustaining cycle. The energy you or your brand mates will get when you see a customer completely fulfilled will give your energy to service the next client. And the energy from that client will feed the service of the next. And the next. And the next.

This isn’t the first time we have used a dating metaphor for user experience. Here is an article on how packaging is the first date of user experience.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.

Well this one is cross industry. The logo for Heys luggage has the same old coat of arms design as Porsche.

Porsche has the broader brand awareness, so Heys is the one that benefits by all the brand associations that come with having a logo similar to Porsche. Heys has pre existing associations like performance, high engineering, luxury and quality even before they run their first add. This is an amazing advantage, because Porsche had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to earn those brand associations, and back it up with 60 years of quality products.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you are building a brand, you need to capitalize on these associations so that you are getting a head start at building your brand to have those qualities with your customer. You don’t want to directly copy a logo, but to model your logo, graphics or architecture on that of…

To read the rest of this article, click here to find it on it’s new home: Finkle.ca

The closer you get to the front, the more power you have over the brand.

Krulak refers to General Charles Krulak, a general who theorized that with the new era of cell phone cameras and online social networks, the field soldiers would have more impact on how the military is perceived than anyone. This is an important insight in a war where part of the mission is winning over hearts and minds. One soldier who act biligerantly towards a local can permenantly damage a brand.

The same is true with your business. Someone who woke up on the wrong side of the bed can have far reaching impacts in your brand. That could be a You Tube video highlighting your poor cleanliness. Someone could upload a photo to Facebook of one of your servers yelling at another customer. Someone could tweet about how one of your customer service representatives giggled when they described their problem. We h

But this problem is also an opportunity. With great front line people servicing customers, you brand can be enjoyed by customers and can grow and spread. Someone can share on Facebook a great experience with a phone centre agent that tirelessly worked to solve their problem. Someone can send a picture of the beautiful meal they were just served. Someone can write a 5 star review on Yelp based on the friendly staff of your bakery.

How to get there is to hire the right people and get them excited about your brand and about doing their very best they can for their customers. We are going to be doing a set of posts on Internal Branding, but if you are looking for guidance on this Zappos is the model.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.

… there is no recipe for a viral video!

The most powerful medium of this time in marketing is also the most elusive. It’s the viral video. If we knew the recipe, than advertisers would be leveraging them so much that they would loose power and ability to spread. Much like mass media advertising, there is only a certain amount of space for viral videos. In stead of air time, it is mind share. The public has a very set appetite for viral videos, and when blasted with too many, they tend not to pass it along.

One company that gets it is Old Spice. Old Spice has hit the holy grail in that they have had so many successful virl videos that hundreds of thousands of young men looking at their You Tube channel to see what they come up with next. They are the fifth most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. Their videos have an unfair advantage towards going viral because of the 300,000 or so views a video gets just being on the Old Spice channel.

Another thing they have been able to do that eludes most viral videos is stay on message and on target. Their ads speak directly to the product and in a way their target market of young men respond too. Most company sponsored viral videos have nothing to do with the company or even the brand, except a 5 second logo flash at the end of the video. All of Old Spice’s videos talk about the product, and they don’t even comically over exaggerate the features of the product. They just associate it with fictional gods of manliness. They don’t say that if you use Old Spice, that you will instantly become a pillar of manliness. In fact they say that you will just smell like one? That association plays to the product attributes and the aspirations of their target market.

That leads to the most important part of a viral video: speaking to something visceral at the core of a segment of people. If it doesn’t hit someone in the gut in 30 seconds, than they wont pass it along. A common misconception is that a viral video has to speak to everyone; quite the opposite. It needs to speak to some people deeply. With Old Spice, that deep sentiment is the need for young men to feel manly and desirable. With Nike’s “Write the Future” video, it was the cultural diversity and cultural pride of the World Cup. With the Tom Tom’s Darth Vader recording studio video, it was about seeing someone who is known to be serious in a comedic way. Wit Hi Tecs “Walk on Water” video, it was making something you knew was impossible seem possible.

A more simple thing to learn from Old Spice is that you need to take alot of swings of the bat to hit a home run. They produce alot of videos. For every video that Old Spice has that goes to 3 – 6 million views, there are 2 that are at about 1 million views or less. When you strike gold, you aren’t going to know exactly how and why or if that is even repeatable. But the why doesn’t matter, the video going viral does. You just need to experiment.

Another repeatable thing Old Spice uses is brevity. Thirty seconds or one minute and that’s it. The principle reason Old Spice does this is to fit into the time slots of video services intro / outro slots. Most viral videos are around 2 minutes 30 seconds, but being brief gives you a higher percentage of being passed along. If people feel like they are committing their friends to watching a long video, it had better be captivating. A short video is just a snack.

Something also it keep in mind is directing your cinematography so that the video can be understood when viewed small. We are getting the opportunity to have HD video now, but that doesn’t mean people are watching it in HD. They are watching it from their Facebook news feeds, or huddled around a 19″ monitor in a cubical. Make things large, graphically simple and only have one area of focus on screen at a time.

Consider using an audio logo like Old Spice, but we already have a post on that.

While creating a viral video may seem like a black art, it is doable. If you don’t think that you can make something that can get to 5,000,000 views than just remember that if it reaches a few thousand people who are your direct target market, than it was valuable. Happy experimenting.

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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.

Interact with the Firebrand community – Please Comment or Email.

The views expressed on this weblog are mine alone and do not necessairly reflect the views of my employer, FX Displays.