There’s a word for that – brand language that makes a difference.

I was introduced last week to a genuinely fabulous organisation called Free Word. Their mission is both worthy and joyous – to promote and protect the written and spoken word.

We spent an outstanding evening in Farringdon in the company of some of the country’s finest young poets, including the current Young Poet Laureate for London Aisling Fahey, DJ James Massiah, and polymath Mark Rylance, whose ability to soothe, cajole & excite simultaneously through speech, whether writing or performing, is simply remarkable.

That evening I learned that our language houses a word for the state of finding it hard to get out of bed in the morning: ‘dysania’. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

We also own a word to describe your hesitation when introducing someone whose name has temporarily deserted you: ‘tartle’. And what a fine word it is too.

I left inspired by the wonder of language, and wondering why so few brands ever use its power and range to genuinely attempt to stimulate emotions and to differentiate. 

We’re all taught one or more languages from a young age. Most of us then shuffle our vocabulary like Scrabble pieces throughout our lives, here and there picking up a new word to drop periodically into our familiar speech patterns. As we saw in last month’s blog, the same is true for whole categories of brands.

If this sounds familiar and you work in branding you’ll find yourself at a distinct disadvantage. For whilst the visual impact of any branded experience has immense and instant power to persuade, it is the sound of a brand that lingers long afterwards.

This is because we access and communicate our thoughts and feelings using words. Which means that the words we use to describe our brands have the potential for greater long-term persuasive impact than what it looks like.

As a brand owner, perhaps spend a little more time crafting the sound of your brands, rather than the logo, for the simple reason that you can create a longer lasting impact on the brands’ performance and that of your business.

So this afternoon, why not follow the Twitter hashtag #freewordoftheday for some verbal inspiration instead of striding around as though you’re busy even though you’re not. Yup, there’s a word for that too...

Brand language: it all sounds the same.

Some years ago I took my new wife to our first ever gig, a now commonplace comeback of a band of my youth.  Child number 1 was imminent and it looked like the last opportunity for a DINKY night out for before life changed forever.

In advance I thought it wise to prepare my eager but musically inexperienced partner for the evening’s entertainment.  I played her the band’s greatest hits, confident that she’d fall in love with the mellifluous tones and waves of dynamic variety and of wryly-observed insights about life in my youth.  

Except she didn’t.  “It all sounds the same” she confessed.  And, disappointingly, she was right.  The key, rhythm, timbre, structure, subject matter and idiosyncratic quirkiness that made the debut single so engaging had been repeated so faithfully and repetitively that it wasn’t clear where one song ended and another began.  It also quickly became very dull.

Whole brand categories fall into this trap.  A player creates a new and different category and others plough in to enjoy the growth. They do everything right except create or describe anything different, therefore offering consumers no reason to choose them.

For example, here is the language used on the websites of the top 8 UK gyms and health clubs last month.  It reveals the generic language of the category.

And here’s the language used by one of the follower brands.

So, how does this slavishly imitated language help prospective customers to choose this brand?

Of course, it doesn’t, which leaves price as one of the main drivers of choice.  And typically this means these prices are forced downwards as customers don’t know what extra brand value to pay for.  This removes financial value from the sector, making it harder to compete.

So if your brand language sounds the same as the rest of the category you need to plan for margins to be squeezed.  Alternatively, surprise yourselves and your customers by singing a different tune.

Brand man: the role of communications in our survival.

We wouldn’t be here today but for our extraordinary ability to communicate. Me, you, the kids next door.  None of us.

You see you don’t have to travel back very far to the days when we (Homo Sapiens) were not in the comfort of a monopoly that we are today. We had competition at the top of the food chain. And it wasn’t just from sabre toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. There were other species of humans built much like us, doing much the same things as us, with the same needs & intentions. We were in a competitive market.
 

In the excellent 'Sapiens' Yuval Noah Harari suggests that a mere 170,000 years ago we (Sapiens) lived concurrently no fewer than three other 'Homo' species. Yet 100,000 years later only one had survived. Why?
 

Harari concludes that our dominance as a species was not due, as is commonly suggested, to superior brain size (all boasted brains of similar size). The difference between winning and losing was down to our ability to communicate.

Us Homo Sapiens used our resources (our similar sized brains) in a different way to the competition. We developed more sophisticated ways to communicate, and in so doing managed to engage, direct and mobilise people on a much larger scale than the others.

A critical element of this was our ability to use language to create stories above and beyond  "Watch out, there's a tiger behind you".  Uniquely, Sapiens created fiction, we could talk about things that we hadn’t seen, smelled or run away from. This was immensely powerful.  It was the start of myths, legends, gods and religion, which enabled us to imagine things collectively.  It was this that enabled us to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and thus take over the world.

All this may sound a familiar pattern to brand people. At its core, branding unleashes the power of storytelling to galvanise large groups of people. Brands aren’t ‘real’: the AA, Downton Abbey and Moo.com are businesses, experiences and feelings, but you can’t touch them any more than you can touch religion, laws or limited companies. At one level, brands don’t exist.

Yet brands create imagined realities out of words and symbols, and thus offer powerful ways to engage the masses around commonly held beliefs and values.

So, the moral of this story is simple: when you don’t enjoy a relevant competitive product advantage, you best invest your time creating and communicating a story and set of beliefs (branding) that can engage and galvanise large groups of people. It’s worked for us for 170,000 years.

Top 5 branding tips for your start-up business

Here at Mimo Brands we've put together here top 5 branding tips for your start-up business. New and early stage businesses usually have an unwieldy quantity of issues on which to focus their limited time. Those activities that look like delivering the least prospect of early returns often get left till later. And later can easily turn into never.

In the case of branding, this can be an expensive decision. For global giants and start-ups alike, our brands are an essential part of helping our customers to choose us over our competitors. If you don’t crack this at the outset with your start-up business, you may never get a second chance.

These top 5 branding tips for your start-up should give you a good start. 

      1. Don’t mistake your logo for your brand.

The logo is simply a visual element of your brand. Think of it as the tip of the iceberg that you can see.

The main elements of your brand will lie beneath the waterline. It is much more important to understand and define who you are as a management team and why you exist as a start-up business beyond simply making money, what position you’re taking in the market, and what you promise your fellow workers and customers alike. 

Most importantly for your start-up, you need to understand why the world is going to be a better place with your business in it (i.e. what problems are you solving).  

2.   Differentiate or die.

There are usually only 2 ways to make a success of your business: be cheaper or be different.

Even the most cursory understanding of supply chains reveals that, unless you possess a particularly smart business model, sustaining a lower cost base is mighty challenging if you want to make a profit.

Being different is easy to talk about but strangely difficult to deliver, rarely because of a shortage of ideas, but usually because human nature drags us back to behavioural norms as soon as there is a whiff of resistance. In short, we like the idea of being different somewhat more than the reality.

Furthermore, to be useful, your point of differentiation needs to be valued by your customers so much that they will pass on their usual choice in favour of your brand. 

3.   Have a point of view.

Today’s brand development is more akin to joining debates than it is to shouting your message from a soapbox.

The starting point is, unsurprisingly, your customers, about whom you should understand much.  What are the pressures and interest in their lives?  What makes them tick? What gets on their wicks? What helps them to decide which brands to choose in your sector? 

Don’t guess. Find out and offer an opinion on how to improve their lives through what you do, how you do it, and why you’re doing it.

Once upon a time you could make up your brand’s heritage, and so long as you could tell a good story, you could convince an unknowing public that you were the brand of choice amongst the Tudors.  Not any more.  Social media has put an end to that. 

4.    Be open.

Like differentiation, genuine openness is easy to talk about but unintuitive to most people.  This is because it requires letting go and trusting others unconditionally.

It is important because being a brand owner today doesn’t mean you own your brand.  Your brand is like a small child growing up in the world – you can guide and direct, provide support and encouragement, but ultimately he/she/it will be a product of nurture and nature.  And you’ll struggle to control the nature part.  You have to place your trust in others.

At one end of the scale you have Ricardo Semler who built his business on such levels of trust that he let his employees decide how much they got paid and the number of days holiday they could take.

At the other end it involves engaging with your customers publicly (usually through social media), quickly and honestly.

5.   If you are genuinely different and better than everyone else, and will continue to be, you can worry less about your brand.

I keep hearing how the Googles and Facebooks of this world never spent a dime on advertising, so why should a start-up?

The answer is threefold:

• Advertising isn’t branding, it is simply a communication channel. They have invested heavily in their brands since day 1.
• They had game changing business models that gave them distinct and sustainable advantages in their categories
•  They’re advertising now.

Good luck.

If you need any help with your brand simply drop us an email at giles@mimobrands.com 

Be confident in naming your brand

If I got an English pound for every time a business asked me to give them a name like ‘Google’ I’d be a wealthy man.  Their thinking is usually sound – it will help them to differentiate from the crowd in their market. The trouble is, when presented with names like ‘Google’ or ‘Yahoo’ the business suddenly loses all confidence.  It seeps from them in front of my very eyes as they contemplate their new logo on their website, in a supermarket aisle or store frontage. Google-type names sound just too...different. The trouble with made-up or ‘clever’ names (that have a back story) is they tend not to trigger any familiarity bells, so they get rejected by businesses.

“It should do exactly what it says on the tin” I hear. No it shouldn’t if you are late to the market and there are already 1001 competitors already trampling on your new patch.

So they are offered names that communicate invariably generic attributes or benefits, literally and metaphorically, which of course they think are too dull. And the .com domain isn’t available. So off we head to Google-land again.

There are some great exceptions to this rule – Moonpig, Moo.com and Ocado being a few - fun and distinctive names that mean absolutely nothing, but which we can remember with relative ease. Unlike easyprint, cardsmadeeasy and other slightly dull generics.

Our Story

Mimo was created from the names of our director’s children. It also means Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs, which describes our approach to brand development, and is therefore what we do every day to create lasting differentiation for our clients.

On discussing the subject of naming your brand on Twitter, there is a common theme emerging with these successful businesses:

Branding, Naming, Name, Creation, marketing

Branding, marketing, naming, brand name

The simpler your business name, the more impact it will have.

A great, simple, short name can create a real buzz and position you as a real competitor. You will differentiate yourself from the crowd with an aspect of mystery from the offset. Just like if someone tells you that they have a secret, you will instantly want to find out more. It is that level of power that really makes a great brand.

Your brand values are important too and remember to keep this in mind. A way to support your brand name further is to use a 'tagline' for example, Nike's 'Just Do It' and you should refer back to this tagline when presenting your brand to someone new and to the public.

Mimo Hints:

1. Like so many things in business life, the whole process should start with a written brief that both parties agree to and sign in blood.
2. Agree the success criteria and stick to them. (Ignore the CEO’s wife who doesn’t like the name because it reminds her of a family pet.)
3. Reject the existing language of the category unless you’re first or second in.
4. Acknowledge inevitable early discomfort of sharing your chosen name (like when you announced your first born was to be called Isambard)
5. Remember, a name is what you make of it.  Google, Apple, Virgin are global brands which we now think are great names, not the other way round.

If you need some advice with your branding strategy please feel free to get in contact with us at Mimo.

Branding in the iGaming sector

There are a multitude of similarities between the sectors of online gaming and video gaming; each driven by the latest generation of technology; skilled teams looking to create hit graphically charged games; boasting multi-million budgets and followed by a dedicated base of players and fans. However, according to Giles Thomas, founder and partner, MIMO Brands, the similarities are as nothing compared to one striking difference - where video gaming has its iconic brands such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Lara Croft and Call of Duty - there are, in his opinion, few if any defining brands in online gaming yet. Mr. Thomas is a branding expert with experience across a range of different categories and has acute knowledge of the video gaming sector as the former European Marketing Director at SEGA, having also worked in the same role for MTV Networks Europe. His view is that all marketers can benefit from the learning and experiences of their piers in other sectors, and that an insular approach can only lead to isolation to a sector, including potentially igaming.

Brands People Love

"If you look at the brands people love, the ones they most associate with, you’ll find none currently from the world of igaming, which I believe is a missed opportunity given the size of the online gaming business” states Mr Thomas. "The online gaming sector is at the point the video gaming industry was before the arrival of brands such as Sonic, Tombraider, Harry Potter and Call of Duty. These new brands were driven by a different approach to brand development and marketing, and they set new benchmarks for their industry. iGaming marketers can choose to embark on a similar path to create brands with meaning and value, to spark their own brand revolution, or to continue to rely on the trench warfare of free trial and incentives."

Mr. Thomas references numerous industries in which the creation of brands redefined the sector. Mobile phone industry branding and marketing were revolutionised by Hutchinson Telecom launching the Orange brand that promised a brighter, wire-free future in a sector previously content with fighting a coverage and price war. In so doing the brand created customer preference and enormous value for then and future parent companies. Apple changed the multiple clone PC sector into the biggest brand on the planet. And the question is, can the online gaming sector do the same? "Online gaming can enter a new phase and begin to think bigger about brands - it needs to move from 'look what we can do' into customer orientated brands whereby players think - 'that's the brand for me,'" states Mr. Thomas.

There are strong parallels between the igaming sector and the early years of the video gaming sector; each with very fragmented markets. However, as we saw in video gaming, the online sector will consolidate and as that happens the combined budgets allow for the creation of a different type of branding. It's not entirely budget led - but the desire to build long-term properties is about more than quarterly revenue figures. "Currently, the online gaming sector appears to be dominated by the short-termist view, whereas building brands requires quite opposite thinking," explains Mr. Thomas.

Current iGaming Campaigns

If you look at some of the advertising campaigns currently promoting igaming businesses, there remain massive cliches and stereotypes that are actually being encouraged by the companies involved. Actors renowned for playing gangsters help to reinforce perceptions of the category held by the wider public. "The semiotics of gambling communication have not only remained largely the same, but usually been reinforced - the strong common visual language that portrays poker in darkened rooms, betting conducted by hard men, and a sector that celebrates a slightly seedy image," said Mr. Thomas. "Given the technology behind many of these sites is much the same, every brand has the opportunity to think about building their own unique attributes. The makers of fizzy coloured water in cans can create brands as different as Coca Cola from Pepsi. Lager is very similar whatever can it is poured from, but the way the brand is perceived by the public is down to the way the owners have branded their products, injecting attitude, meaning and values that differentiate the product experience."

The negative public opinion surrounding betting and online gambling isn't something that phases Mr. Thomas or dampens his view of the potential of brands in igaming. "The video gaming industry received an enormous amount of stick over the last 15 years for its pedalling of increasingly violent games, partly aimed at young people," outlined Mr. Thomas. "The igaming sector must tackle similar challenges by really engaging with their customers. Branding helps define how you talk to your customers and behave around them - understanding your customer relationship is key, and the relationship between players, games, money and the emotional benefits of igaming. For example, there are many different types of players from novice to hard-core gamer, all playing for a slightly different combination of reasons. Businesses need too understand everything they can about their customers and build their brands around these insights."

"In my view, PaddyPower has demonstrated best an intention to create a differentiated brand. They have adopted some of the language of lager brands to create preference, and in so doing have managed to stand out from the igaming crowd. Their communication is usually unmistakably their own, which is a claim that few if any other igaming providers can make. This is a sector currently occupied by ‘brands’ where the customer is selecting their product of choice through promotion and convenience, rather than through brand association. Which is a shame, because there are multitude of opportunities for them to differentiate. Frankly, if insurance companies and price comparison sites can successfully differentiate, then you can bet that igaming brands can."

What is a brand? And building brand value.

Your definition of a brand will be different to mine. The Intellectual Property Office says this about a brand

A brand can be a trade name, a sign, symbol, slogan or anything that is used to identify and distinguish a specific product, service or business. But a brand is much more than this; it can also be a ‘promise of an experience’ and conveys to consumers a certain assurance as to the nature of the product or service they will receive and also the standards the supplier or manufacturer seeks to maintain.

A brand is an intangible asset of your business and is often the most valuable part. So how much is a brand worth?

Brand Value

A brand is really only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it. If you were to try and calculate what a brand was worth on a business already for sale then in theory you could take the amount the business is to be sold for, deduct its fixed assets and the remainder, often referred to, as "Goodwill" is essentially the value of that businesses brand.

Calculating the value of your brand is a far greater task and there are many methods that we will discuss another day.

Building Value in Your Brand

If you are looking to sell your business then developing your brand is going to be key. Here are a few areas we suggest you focus to add value to your brand and increase its value.

• Develop Brand Guidelines and stick to them. Deliver what you promise, and don't promise more than you can deliver.
• Use Brand Targeting to find the people who will drive revenue and profits into your business.
• Engage your employees and bring them into the brand, they will probably be around for the new owners of your business and they are what makes the machine work.
• Clearly define your brand in a document that allows anybody to continue your work. This reduces the work involved in taking over a business and allows the new owners to focus on other areas.

A fun graphic

I should be so lucky

Did you know that Angry Birds has thus far been downloaded over 1.9bn times, putting it in the hands of almost 1/3rd of the world’s population? Truly astonishing, and hats off to Finland’s finest.

As a curious brand person I wondered what was the secret of their unbelievable success. How did they manage to turn flying fowl into a worldwide phenomenon bigger than Manchester United? What was the magic potion?

I sensed that they have played a very smart hand indeed. Their monthly user base of 263m is second only to Facebook, and as I write over 400bn birds have been shot.

They have clearly done plenty extremely well.

They crafted the game well – learning as they did from at least 30 previous games before hitting the jackpot.

accel

They’ve recruited well – securing Accel in 2011 has provided cash, momentum and expertise. They’ve monetised the core product well – each in-game upgrade is increasingly successful.

They’ve innovated well, eg Star Wars themes and location-based gameplay.

They have extended the brand wisely and well, taking in books, learning, drinks, retail, activity parks and an impending full-length film release.

slash

And they’ve partnered well – from Slash to McDonalds to NASA.

mcd logo

This is all very well, but does it explain the success of a property that is currently the fastest growing consumer franchise ever?

I think not.

Like most mega-mega-properties (those that even my mum has heard of), I suspect that the biggest single contributor to worldwide success and untold fortune was…..luck.

Lady luck has shone brightly in Finland since 2009. Rovio didn’t plan for the iPhone to be the runaway platform it became. It didn’t plan for Apple UK to promote the game in the early days of the app store. David Cameron’s admission of his bird habit was not in the PR plan.

But to be fair, were the Rolling Stones ever the best band in the world? Or did they arrive with an anti-establishment message during a perfect storm of social change?

oasis v blur

Or would Oasis have ever been so shatteringly important without the fortuitous foil of Blur?

For all the expert delivery of a winning strategy, and the onions & pyramids that so many brand people peddle, it is usually a massive and unscheduled dollop of luck - being in the right place at the right time – that turns something good into something priceless.

Google Zeitgeist 13. It's not about the money money money.

Google Zeitgeist 13 provides a much needed relief from the hurried, urgent and short-term lives that many of us lead.  As well as inspiring with wild visions of the future, the real benefit of this gathering of young and old wisdom to remind us what all this is for, and to give us time to ‘Rethink. Reset’.  

As usual, Google gathered the great and good of politics, technology, the arts, military, media, charity, academia, business, and of course Google, to educate, enlighten and entertain.

As a brand man, I wondered how any of the above luminaries could usefully instruct our craft of brand building?  Quite considerably, as it happens.

For starters, all the invited speakers I caught were successful ‘brands’ in their own right – elevated above their peers through a combination of being in the right place at the right time (luck), strength of conviction (belief), infectious charisma (personality), persistence (hard work) and a fresh, relevant perspective on the world around us (differentiation).

My favourite example of all the above was Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who confessed to living her life by diving in, never walking on tip-toes.

They were also, unsurprisingly, great communicators.  Each had a different and interesting story to tell, they had insights that were fresh and challenging, and they made the audience feel things they weren’t feeling before.  This included conductor Charles Hazlewood who, against seemingly insurmountable odds, succeeded in getting 300+ weary executives enjoying themselves singing together in 3-part harmony.

Most concluded that success in most things is to be judged over the long term, so much that it leaves a legacy.  General Sir Michael Jackson shared some of the challenges of long-term strategy building (eg 25 years in his case), and in so doing relegated most of our ‘strategies’ to the short-term box.

jesse 2

And we were also reminded that if we don’t think there is a relationship between money and happiness, we’re clearly not spending our money right.  We should be spending it on other people!

And lest we forgot, Jessie J reminded us in person in song after dinner.

So the shared metaphors with the world of branding are obvious - courage, conviction, communication, long-term, and being good to those you value.

Congratulations to Google for providing the space to think…about brands.