Fish, Chips and Exceptional Curry

I took some well deserved rest last week and went out to Abersoch and Pwelli on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales. It was a beautiful sunny day and my wife my friends and I spent much of it on the beach soaking up the sun. In town (Pwelli) as is typical of most British seaside towns there were a plethora of fish and chip take-aways. The thing that struck me about all of these organisations was the fact that they all have really clear and compelling branding. All of these shops do what they say on the tin, customers know instantly and from far away what they do and once they get a whiff of them , they realise that they want it.

The entire fast food industry provide excellent examples of clear and efficient branding - Think McDonald's, Subway, Dominoes, Starbucks and even your corner Chinese. They all have the same components, clear charismatic visuals that work hand in hand with sensory stimulation.

For a small company, it is really important to create a compelling visual, that tells people (prospective clients) what your business is all about. This is something that can easily be overlooked. It is important that the branding is compelling to it's target market but also iconic. All of the best brands are iconic, even the local chippy has the fish symbol, for McDonald's its the golden arches and for KFC it's the Colonel. Can you create an icon?

What about the sensory/emotional response? With fast food, the most powerful form of ambush marketing is the smell, it permeates the high-street and reaches punters at a subconscious level. How can you reach your customers subconscious? That is the challenge for brand builders in the 21st century. In a saturated market full of competent competition, how can you protect your customers from the budget priced come latelys and the competitor who moves in next door?

We cannot all use smell or even one of the other 4 senses. We can all however use the 6th sense, the sense of satisfaction. I know how cheesy that sounds but if you think of yourself as a consumer, what is your single largest reason for not taking up a budget priced product or service?

Usually it is fear of product failure or inferiority. Other times a concern about hidden costs may also be a factor. Many premium brands get a lot of mileage from lifestyle advertising promoting the satisfaction they bring their clients. satisfaction can come from the quality of the product but it also comes from quality of service.

Incorporate satisfaction into your brand. Make your staff's smiley faces and impeccable manners a brand attribute. Train anyone who answers the telephone to do so professionally and in a friendly engaging manner. If you are able to do this, the sense of satisfaction will work for your brand the same way as the sense of smell does for the chippy.

I was inspired by an excellent dining experience at an Indian Restaurant in Matlock, the service was exceptional and the food was delightful. I spent much more than I planed to and that to me is an example of good marketing!

The First Rule of Logo Design & Branding, The Parable of the Fruit Picker.

This week I have been working with a new client, a marketing company with a pretty impressive portfolio. For the purposes of this discussion I will call them Company A.

Company A came to us with a very impressive design brief for a new product that they were launching. They needed a web agency to develop a website for them to use primarily as a sales tool to sell the concept to their clients. In their proposal they had I feel correctly identified their target market and designed a brand and corporate identity that played directly to the aspirations of that market, an example of very good targeted branding.

However, a committee came in and looked at the website we had developed for them and decided that the design was too target market specific and they wanted us to broaden the general appeal of the website. After spending thousands of pounds on a new website, the company seriously wanted us to look at their core design and make it "More commercial", This was a delicately designed very pretty website; full of lifestyle, aspirational imagery and perfect for its original target market. Making it more commercial in this case was like plastering sponsorship decals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Where did it all go wrong?

The first step in branding is to identify your target market. Do your research in phase one. If you have a product idea, establish who is most likely to buy it and focus your branding and marketing effort on them.

This is where mistake one is usually made.

The temptation is to try and design your brand with as broad appeal as possible. This is common sense the more people who like your brand and are attracted by it, the more potential customers you have.

But this is flawed thinking.

The best way to grow a customer base is to have a strong identity that really speaks to your desired audience. People however are all different, even the most popular and powerful mass market brands like Coca Cola and Google have detractors. To reach the mass market, a design or marketing message has to be so severely watered down that it looses the ability to compel it's primary market.

This situation is all too common and it can really slow the progress of a new brand. A good way to illustrate this scenario is to imagine that you in an orchard full of (insert favourite fruit here). If you look at one tree you will notice that it is full of fruit and if you have an hour you can pick it bare of 100 lovely juicy (your favourite fruit).

So you commence picking, within five minutes you will have picked all the fruit within arms reach, lets say 20 fruit.

At this point you will start to struggle reaching the fruit on the top half of the tree. They are tantalisingly close so you exert more and more effort in the struggle to reach each fruit.

Sure, morally this feels great. Each freshly picked fruit is a small victory and no doubt will be all the sweeter for it. In the end you may reach the last fruit on the tree. Feeling very content you climb down from the ladder pleased and fulfilled with your hard days work and your just rewards. It may have taken 3 times as long as you originally thought but you are probably most pleased with the few surprise fruit that you hadn't even seen. 120 fruit for 3 hours work, well done.

Compare that to the targeted picker. He knows that he has 1 hour to pick as many fruit as he can. Realising that each tree has about 20 low hanging fruit it will take 5 minutes to pick those low hanging fruit he can hit 12 trees in his hour delivering 240 fruit and plenty of time to enjoy them.

Our targeted picker did not work as hard but gut better results because he knew how to target his low hanging fruit.

A growing brand will benefit massively from the same approach. Identify your low hanging fruit, there should be enough of them out there to keep you busy.

Watch this space as the saga continues with the second reason a brand goes wrong.

For some examples of good branding visit our website here.

Micro Business and Web Cowboys

Yesterday I had an interesting experience, a distraught woman called me up and begged me to look at her website. I was a little taken aback as, although it is a fairly reasonable request seeing as I work for a web agency, this person's emotional intensity made me feel uncomfortable.

When I typed in her URL Google Chrome sent me a warning message indicating that this website my be harmful to my computer. The lady on the telephone assured me that this was indeed a legitimate commercial website and I needed to have a look at it. With some degree of trepidation, I twice informed Chrome that I was indeed bonkers and I would like to proceed to view this website.

I was relieved at first to discover that rather than contraband naughty-stuff and black market pharmaceuticals, the website was simply for a horse trader. The poor thing! She has owned the URL for 5 years and recently paid very little for a new website that while not doing anything for her brand or offering any SEO compatible architecture had managed to upset Google terribly. When the world's most popular search engine rejects you, that's not good for business.

I told her how it was, she needed a new website on a new domain and quoted her on our bare bones CMS system. She gulped, my very reasonable £1500 for a basic but well built and user friendly website was way above her budget. I felt sorry for her, I didn't want her going back to one of the budget website companies, this was after all her livelihood.

The long and the short of it is I was able to cut out some functionality and use an off the shelf CMS system to get the price down to £1000 and she was able to stretch to that. I was happy that I was going to get another small business a quality web presence that helps them to promote their brand and grow their business.

She came in with her partner this morning and we discussed some layout options and design concepts. Happily this job is moving forward and we should have another very satisfied customer in a few days.

This got me thinking, why are people happy to entrust a major business purchase to an amateur or alternatively why are owners of Micro business so unwilling to invest in a decent web presence? Many micro business spend massive percentages of turnover on print advertising but if there is any one thing that can uplift your brand and convince potential customers to choose you over the competition it is a good professional website.

Instead what I see is hundreds or even thousands of DIY websites or build by numbers template sites that do very little for the company or the brand.

The Company I work for, Reckless New Media is a full service web agency. We have helped dozens of companies most of the SMEs to make the most of their presence on the web. One of the most powerful things the internet can do for you is capture data of people and business that are interested in your products or services. We always encourage our clients to include some form of data capture on their websites, used with an email marketing program, this can be the basis of a very effective, very economical digital marketing campaign.

If you are interested in any assistance or guidance in getting your brand on-line why not have a look at our Wild Wild Web campaign, aimed at getting micro business on line.