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...

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.

24 Hour Marketing People

There is a new vision of the future…not in an Arthur C Clark style but more like an episode of ‘The West Wing’ on campaign night or ‘Broadcast News’. Being a 24 hour society, where opinions can be shared, praised then disputed so easily via social media, and where brands and their multi-million pound campaigns can be destroyed within the click of a mouse, marketing departments and their agencies now have to react as quickly as their journalistic and political party counterparts.

For a long time social media was feared by brands.  No longer could a brand control its look and language via simple marketing and ad campaigns.  When the consumer become involved, all control of a brand’s carefully monitored and honed values and identity became fair game to Tweeters, bloggers and Facebookers.     Now, crack ‘brand social’ teams can react in a heartbeat to try and field off any negative comment, or worse still, the complaint which has gone viral, and so threatening a new campaign.  A recent example of this being KFC’s breaded chicken kidney viral tweet, not ‘So Good’!

This shift in working style for advertisers was perfectly demonstrated this year at the Super Bowl. Typically, Super Bowl advertisers carefully plan every aspect of their presence months in advance of the game.  However, this time Coca-Cola, Audi, and Oreo opted not to sit back and simply watch the game but put in place ‘rapid response teams’ that adapted to events as they happened. So when the power outage in the stadium occurred (and who could have predicted that in advance!), the brands responded “appropriately and in their own brand voice”. Oreo’s now famous tweeted ad with the caption “Power Out? No Problem. You can still dunk in the dark” went viral in seconds and was the Monday morning office talking point

Many would argue that the campaign-based model of advertising for brands is heading for the bin, and tweeting during an event clearly isn’t enough – you need to be lightning fast, reactive and smart in your response.

Enter a new process that kicks off with ‘creative context development’, where brands and their agencies create reactive content through visuals, text and multimedia.  A fast online media purchase then occurs e.g promoted posts, ads etc, finishing up with ‘promotion and engagement’ through the distribution of content.   It’s quick and as The Harvard Business Review (HBR) suggested in its blog ”the future of advertising is for advertisers to act like newsrooms – to be prolific, audience-centric and agile”.

But it is questionable whether brand marketing departments and their agencies can adapt their working style sufficiently to act more like newsrooms to promote and protect a brand’s values. They are by trade different animals that operate in their own distinct ways.  Will we see more journalists in the marketing department so that they can continuously reflect the consumer culture?  Perhaps.

Ad Age’s Sarah Hofsetter disagrees that marketing departments need to change radically.  Writing after February’s Oscars, where brands delivering real-time marketing reached a new high: “Real-time marketing may not be right for every brand. Even for brands that have the strategy and structures in place to warrant it, not every major cultural moment deserves a real-time response…Real-time content can be created and distributed in minutes, but putting yourself in a position to do this successfully takes a lot of upfront planning. Brands need to create a strong social foundation in order to be ready for success when the right opportunity strikes”.

One thing is a given, whether your brand opts for real-time responses or not, every brand is required to develop a social persona, tone of voice and guidelines for how your brand behaves and converses in social channels.  As Hofsetter says “You must also ask some hard questions. How does your social personality impact the types of content you create, comment on or share?”.   A social response can raise your brand to the heady heights of ‘favourite tweet’ and water-cooler moment discussion which then leads to purchase, or it can damage a reputation, going viral for all the wrong reasons.