billboard brands

Designing an effective billboard is always a challenge. This probably explains why so many are terribly executed. Billboards require concise copy — sometimes only a few words — that people are supposed to read, digest, and process in just a few seconds. If the copy is too long, or the billboard is too busy, consumers will take a quick glance and move on.
 
Branding should be approached in the same way.
 
You don’t want a billboard so junked up with extraneous items that consumers are unable to understand it. Brands, like billboards, should be simple and direct. The battle for a position in the mind of a consumer is much like battling for their attention in the few seconds they drive by an out-of-home advertisement. If it isn’t something they are already familiar with, you have but just a few precious seconds to grab their attention. The sharper, more narrowly focused your brand is, the likelier it is you’ll land a strike.
 
Brands that are complex, or vague, have a hard time fighting through the noise to reach the consumers. However, brands that are simple, narrowly focused, and clear as to their purpose, or value, resonate better.
 
If you have just a few seconds to reach consumers about your brand, what would you say? Think of what you would put on a billboard to describe your brand. Ideally, it would be just one key word. It would be the one word that your brand has come to dominate, and one that defines it. For example, here is what some of the top brand billboards might look like: “Apple: Innovation in Technology;” “Google: Online Search;” “Burberry: Fashion’s Luxury;” “Marlboro: #1 in Cigarettes;” “Toyota: Automotive Reliability.”
 
Just two or three words, paired with a logo, would be all these brands needed to not only advertise the brand visually, but also tell consumers everything they need to know about it. Apple is where to go for the latest technology. Google is where to go for online search. Burberry is what you buy to look posh. Marlboro is what you smoke (because if they are number one, they must be the best). Toyota is what you buy if you want a reliable car.
 
Taking a look at your brand, could you explain it to consumers in just a few seconds, with just a few words? Could you turn your brand into a billboard? If not, maybe it is time to revaluate the brand, and trim off some of the excess. The best brands are ones that are narrow in focus, simple, and consistent. If you have a busy brand — trying to be everything to everybody — it will never hold a spot in the minds of consumers, just as a busy billboard will never register with consumers.

marketing may fade, but the brand is forever

Apple’s marketing budget is $5.5 billion. Microsoft’s is $17 billion. Yet, according to BrandZ’s Top 100 global brands chart, Microsoft holds the number five spot, behind brands such as McDonald’s, IBM, Google, and…Apple. Why? According to conventional wisdom, the companies that spend the most on marketing should have the best brand, right?

Not so, according to a recent article at Fast Company's Co. Design, which suggests that the days of marketing are fading. “In an increasingly transparent, digitally empowered economy, where everyone potentially can know everything, companies can no longer use the other three P's (Price, Promotion, and Place) to gain a long-term competitive advantage,” writes Jens Martin Skibsted, founder of design agency Skibsted Ideation, and Rasmus Bech Hansen, London-based strategy director at Venturethree. “These P's, in other words, are becoming strategically less significant; they are still valuable, just less so than they used to be, and they don’t provide any long-term edge.”

Is this true? That’s the ongoing debate, and one that has monumental implications for brands large and small.

Skibsted and Hansen write further:

We, however, still believe that where a company sells and distributes its offerings is becoming less important relative to what it sells. The rise of e-commerce makes it much easier for consumers to buy the best product irrespective of where it is sold. Sites like Yelp, Lonely Planet, and Zagat point consumers to restaurants, hotels, or shops that provide real value and good experiences even if they are off the beaten track. And we think Apple’s retail success has a lot to do with creating an amazing brand experience that is an extension of the product experience by offering a real service (the Genius Bar). If you have an extraordinary product, customers will find it and buy it in a transparent economy.

So, is a brand strategy more important than a marketing strategy? Can a company with a strong brand stay afloat with a small advertising budget? Can a company with a lousy brand make it by pumping money into marketing? Or, are they both necessary?

Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

how apple and google came to dominate the world

Apple and Google. They are respectively the number-one and number-two brands in the world, according to BrandZ’s ranking of the Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands of 2011. Compared to other brands in the top-10 — such as IBM (1911), McDonald’s (1940), Coca-Cola (1886), and Marlboro (1924) — Apple (1976) and Google (1998) are relatively new brands. So, how did they come to dominate the world?

At the center of brand building is creating an idea in the mind of a consumer that his life will be improved should they buy your brand. This is what industry jargon terms as the “value proposition.” However, Apple and Google have gone beyond simple value proposition and have built products that consumers feel they can’t live without. They reinforce this “life-altering” benefit through simple, yet powerful, advertising.

See for yourself with one of Apple’s advertisements for the iPhone 4S and Google’s “Dear Sophie” campaign. Both commercials are simple in their execution, which allows them to masterfully drive home the value proposition built into their brands. The truly genius aspect of the brand advertising is that it injects their products into the consumer's life through the timeless technique of “demonstrations.”

As I wrote in “Why Apple Can Get Away With Murder,” Apple and Google didn’t build their brands through things like product quality or the exclusion-factor inherent in luxury goods. Google offers many of their products for free, and there isn’t an Apple product launch that isn’t followed by days of consumer gripes about build quality or battery life. Apple and Google built their brands on the idea that their products were not like anything else, and that your life is made significantly better by their use.

Small-business owners with struggling brands may look to Apple and Google and say, “Well I could never do that. They have the most brilliant minds in marketing, and a massive advertising budget, to help them stay at the top.” While this may be true now, it wasn’t always like that. Apple began in the family garage of Steve Jobs, and Google started out as a PhD research project.

Brands with larger advertising budgets than most companies gross in an entire year, who hire the best and brightest from Madison Avenue, have failed miserably in launching new products or even keeping their current brand alive.

The key to Apple and Google’s success was building products that set themselves apart from all other competitors and provided benefits to consumers that they cannot now ever live without. Does your brand do that? If not, focus on how you can get it there, then align your entire organization behind that idea.

why apple can get away with murder

Last week, Apple moved ahead of Google as the world’s top brand, according to research group MillwardBrown, who tracks the top 100 global brands at BrandZ.com. “It earned an 84 percent increase in brand value with successful iterations of existing products,” such as the iPhone and iPad, as well as future anticipation of Apple’s product and service development.

Also making it into BrandZ’s Top 100 list for the first time was social media network Facebook. Facebook’s brand value jumped 246 percent in the last year, earning it the number 35 spot on the list.

Despite the tremendous gains of Apple and Facebook, and the continual brand-dominance of Google, 2010 was not exactly a banner year for these brands in the news. Google is facing challenges across the world to its “Street View” option in Google Maps. And, the company faced the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission after its Google Buzz application was shown to have severe privacy flaws. Facebook also had a litany of privacy flaps as it continued to develop commercial applications, which exposed sensitive user data to third parties.

Apple also recently experienced its own privacy headache, as reports emerged that the popular iPhone was tracking user location. While Apple denied the report, saying that it was merely keeping a log of WiFi hot spots and cell towers around the users location, Congress is now putting the company (and, its rival Google) under the privacy microscope. Apple also had an embarrassing quality issue with the release of the iPhone 4. An engineering flaw with the placement of the antenna caused the device to lose its signal if it was held incorrectly.

Yet, even with quality issues, privacy woes, and sometimes questionable relationships with Federal intelligence agencies (Julian Assange, the infamous founder of the WikiLeaks organization, called Facebook “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented”), these are some of the world’s top brands.

How, then, can they seemingly get away with murder? The answer is simple: branding.

Apple, Google, and Facebook have all developed such entrenched brand identities with consumers that it gives them a Teflon-like exterior that protects them from controversies that would mortally wound lesser brands. They didn’t do it through flawless quality, or even building a solid level of trust with consumers. These brands did it through creating products that consumers can’t live without.

Consumers know that Facebook has issues with leaking (accidently, or on purpose) the plethora of personal information uploaded to the site. But, does that stop people from using their account? No, just as people will line up for hours to be the first to buy the next generation of iPhone despite previous quality issues. For better, or worse, consumers are hopelessly addicted.

No matter what happens, Facebook users will not terminate their accounts, owners of the iPhone 4 are future owners of the iPhone 5, and Gmail account holders will not be switching over to Yahoo!.

The sheer power of these brands is a testament to product differentiation, and the predominant role differentiation plays in establishing brands. The products produced by these brands aren’t just different than their competitors; they’re different in ways that consumers consider to be invaluable. Consumers value these brands so much that they have become too deeply imbued in their day-to-day lives to use an alternative, or give up. Differentiation, above any other branding element, has elevated these brands to immortal status.

Brands looking to increase their value in the minds of consumers should focus on the difference that makes them more significant than their competitors. It is unquestionably the “secret sauce” to a lasting brand.

The difference doesn’t necessarily mean “higher quality.” There are thousands of brands that produce a higher-quality product than the brand leader. It’s just that the brand leader has done a more effective job of demonstrating to the consumer how their product will make their life better. A quirky commercial isn’t going to get a consumer to change from one brand to another, but showing them how their life could be improved will.

singularity and consistency

If there are two words that you need to know in branding, it’s singularity and consistency. These two branding concepts are the building blocks of establishing a strong, dominant brand. Singularity means that you keep your brand narrowly focused and constructed around one central idea or theme. Consistency means that you keep this focus unchanged.

Brands are ideas. They’re not a physical product, or a logo on a building. In order to get your idea inside the mind of a consumer, you must break through all the noise and clutter of competing brands in the market. Because the mind of a consumer has a finite amount of space it is willing to commit to brands, complex, ever-changing brands have a hard time winning the war for the mind.

In order to grab a spot in the mind of a consumer, a brand should be simple. Allen Adamson, managing director of Landon Associates and author of BrandSimple, calls this the “elevator idea.” If you can’t explain your brand’s idea in the time it takes to ride an elevator, it’s too complex. “People are busy, they’re inundated by message, and there are too many brands for them to choose from,” says Adamson. “Make it easy for them to get the idea.”

Keeping the brand narrowly focused ensures simplicity. And, simplicity means you can begin to “own” a term in the mind of consumers. It’s this term that consumers use to define your brand. When you think of some of the most powerful brands in the world, a “thought” or “idea” immediately comes to mind. Google elicits the idea of the simplest search engine, which they created by building a search engine page free of the clutter on pages like Yahoo and Lycos, their rivals at the time. Apple brings about the idea of “sleek technology” because of a product line with a very modern, streamlined look (they even replaced their rainbow logo with a simple, monochrome Apple to reinforce this look). And, Marlboro is the ultimate “cowboy” cigarette.

These brands are successful because they stick to the basics, and don’t undermine their core brand by making it more complicated. Consumers don’t like complicated. The more complex or complicated your brand is, the less likely they’ll commit your product to the limited amount of storage space they have available in their mind.

They also stay consistent with their image. Apple knows that if they started producing computers that were bulky or boxy, they would lose their image of innovative design. And, if Marlboro released a line of cigarettes for women, it would destroy its rugged, masculine perception.

Xerox saw firsthand the dangerous repercussions when they deviated from simple and consistent. In the 1970s, Xerox was relishing in the success of their copier. They began exploring the idea of expanding their services to include computers. However, the idea never took off with consumers and cost Xerox millions of dollars. To consumers, Xerox was copiers. Xerox was not computers. As a result of changing the brand and making it more complicated, Xerox allowed other competitors to gain ground against them.

A narrow, unchanging focus is more important to a brand’s strength than the mass appeal of a product. Without a narrow focus, your brand lacks relevance and a core idea. Without consistency, your brand will never have a firm root in the mind of a consumer.

think simple.

"Some copywriters write tricky headlines -- double meanings, puns, and other obscurities," David Ogilvy, one of the greatest minds in advertising, once wrote. "This is counter-productive…your headline should telegraph what you want to say."

"Iconic designs that stand out apart from the crowd have just one feature to help them stand out," writes brand identity guru David Airey. "That's it. Just one. Not two, three, or four."

More recently, AdAge Editor in Chief Rance Crain flatly stated, "Good ads are simple and direct."

"Bad ads aren't," he continued.

If there is one ubiquitous theme throughout all the disciplines of advertising, it's simplicity. Simple headlines. Simple logos. Simple ads.

Unfortunately, as Crain points out, simplicity is "a characteristic that advertisers have a woeful lack of these days."

Simplicity seems like a simple concept for advertisers. You only have 30 sec. in which to sell a product to a customer, so it would seem like ad should be as concise and direct as possible. Sometimes, in the case of print, the time to capture a prospect's attention is even shorter -- three seconds at most.

So, why then do copywriters write blind headlines, or creative directors piece together television spots that waste 80 percent of the airtime on setting up some plot or twist unrelated to the actual product?

The war for consumer "attention" is certainly not anything new. It's a battle advertisers have been fighting since the days of Claude Hopkins and before.

The new war, however, has evolved. Advertisers now seem certain that in order to grab a consumer's attention, a commercial must be "novel," "sensational," or "spellbinding." They try to engage audiences with complex plots or graphics, or either misguided attempts at comedy.

The result is often a complete bust; for example, Kia's cosmic adventure advertisement during the Super Bowl.

Do you even remember what car they were advertising?

Simple and direct ads are, many times, very vanilla. They don't have the "wow" factor. That is, they're not built to entertain.

They're meant to sell product, which (used to be) the purpose of advertising.
And, you don't have sacrifice engagement for simplicity. Apple ads (agency: TBWA\Chiat\Day) are some of the simplest campaigns running right now. Yet, I bet after reading that sentence, you immediately thought of an iPad or iPod.

The Reese's "Perfect" campaign, from ArnoldWorldwide, is another exam of utterly uncomplicated ads accomplishing everything they need to do.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking you have to trick the audience into being engaged. As Leo Burnett said, there is "inherent drama" in every product. The true skill of an advertiser is to find this drama and bring it to life. That is, without tricks and games.

Think simple.