Both Porsche and Apple where having a hard time attracting new customers despite having a loyal client base. At the time, Apple had models such as the 7200, 8600, SE30, Qudra, Centris and Classic amongst others. Porsche had the 924, 944, 911, 964…you get the picture. Basically a bunch of products that to a potential new customer meant nothing. It was very hard for the customer to work out what they should be buying. So, to solve this problem both companies stripped their entire product lines to two core products. For Porsche it was the Boxster and the 911 and for Apple it was the iMac and the G4 (I worked at Apple at this time and it was a revelation to us all).

This approach would appear, by many CEO’s and Brand Managers, to be drastic and wrong, “how can you reduce your product line when we are losing customers; surely we need to add products?!” But this strategy enabled both companies to develop a clear strategy and message that everyone could clearly understand. If you wanted an affordable Porsche you bought a Boxster, an affordable Apple, you bought an iMac. People understood what they were buying.

Porsche and Apple addressed the needs of their audience and this key point is the most bypassed step in the development of many brands and products. Both Apple and Porsche have now expanded their product lines, but both deliver a new product with a clear message, making it easier for customers to make choices and because of their approach, both Apple and Porsche command a significant premium over their competitors.

The key point here is that brand strategy should focus on removing complexity from people’s lives. It’s about being humanistic and simple in your approach. Fewer products as opposed to masses of choice makes it easier for customers to make the right decisions.

 
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Get inspired If you’re struggling for inspiration – try something different. Look at poetry, song lyrics or foreign languages. Try putting relevant words or sounds in a hat for a new outlook.

Keep it short The last thing you want is a long, complicated name that no one can remember. A short name is catchy, it will give you a memorable logo and snappy, succinct URL.

Don’t be too obvious Many new companies feel they need to add a descriptor of what they do into the name. For example ‘Smith & Co. Computer Solutions’. In many cases it’s not necessary, and makes the name sound fussy. Think about it carefully and consider adding it as a tag line instead.

Don’t steal Rather an obvious one, but be as original as you can. You may think that picking a name very similar to an existing company will help you attract clients. I guarantee you will simply look like a knock-off version of a bigger brand.

Shout it, whisper it, stutter it Try saying it over and over. Is it a mouthful to say when you answer the phone? Is it clear? Are you going to spend all your valuable time spelling it out to people? It may seem like pure genius, but if people can’t pronounce it, don’t use it.

Think vowels Oddly enough in the English language, some words just sound nicer than others. It doesn’t always work, but as a general rule, words with a lot of frontal vowels  ( a, e, i ) are usually more pleasing to the ear than back vowels ( o, u ).

Enjoy the process With luck, you’ll be using this name for years to come, so relax and try to have some fun with it. If the name doesn’t inspire you, it won’t inspire anyone else.

Hopefully this will have given you some inspiration and got you’re ideas up and running again. If you’re stuck in a rut, just give us a call – we’re always happy to help brainstorm ideas.

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It seems that 90% developers ignore the potential of hoardings altogether and simply plaster the area with a soup of logos or a few clichéd stock photos. It does very little to inspire the passer-by, and causes resentment amongst current residents that they have to put up with a public eyesore on their street. We’ve all seen it and it does little to fuel the impulse to find out more, let alone selling the space as a home or destination!

Hoarding is a great opportunity, not to mention a vast space – in some cases we are talking about a mile or more of free advertising – to use engaging, impactful design and really shout about your brand.  In the majority of cases, the hoarding will be the first touchpoint for potential customers and as we all know, first impressions count.

Walking down one of London’s streets last week I came across a hoarding which simply said ‘For more information visit our website’.  I was lost for words when I noticed there was no website address to accompany it. The following day, I passed a hoarding, which gave no information and simply said ‘To let’. Within a week of the hoarding going up, it had been grafitti’ed to read ‘Toilet’. In this economic climate, developers desperately need to realise that they are missing a trick.

If developers want to stand out, rather than disappearing in the urban environment with the standard ‘wallpaper’ approach, then the opportunity is there for them. People will be far more excited about seeing something out of the ordinary, will naturally be curious to find out more and will want to be a part of what you are doing. Even if these leads don’t go on to be hard sales, it provides valuable data capture for future marketing.

We’ve gathered together a few examples below of hoardings that we think go the extra mile. If you spotted a great hoarding lately, why not share it with us?

And here’s one we did earlier!

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We’ve been talking in the studio recently about several companies making bold, public statements against their competition. While having a vicious swipe at a rival may seem like perfect publicity, it can easily backfire.

Take for example, the bitter battle that has raged between BT and Virgin for the best part of the last decade. After years of constant niggling, Virgin took things to a new level in 2008 by releasing a full-page advert with the headline ‘Truth, Lies and Broadband’ which launched a scathing attack on BT’s broadband service. Inevitably, BT responded with a similar advert filled with similar accusations. The result? A poor impression of both companies.

This kind of strategy carries a great risk that isn’t obvious until it’s too late. As public spending remains low, companies are naturally relying on price incentives to attract business, often to the point of over shadowing all other brand values and differentiators. The price war between the big five supermarkets is a perfect example. Over the last 6 months, all of the big five have almost abandoned their brand ideals to focus on heavy price-based incentives, swamping consumers with contradictory and confusing comparisons. A good deal of Tesco’s witting copywriting, Asda’s light-hearted humour and Sainsbury’s lifestyle photography, once recognisable differentiators of the brand, have been sidelined – leaving all 5 looking suspiciously similar. The result? Confused consumers and low profit margins for everybody.

Back-stabbing tactics employed by Virgin, Asda & Tesco

A far better strategy can be seen amid the on-going battle between Costa Coffee and Starbucks. The love lost between the two rivals has been well documented for several years, but Costa Coffee’s most recent campaign ‘7 out of 10 Coffee lovers prefer Costa’ sees them using their initiative to strike right at the heart of Starbucks…without resorting to slander. It is clearly obvious whom Costa is criticising, but more significantly, this is not their main headline, or even the point of the copy. The marketing bods at Costa have clearly remembered what they are actually selling, and focussed on the product value rather than price to gain the competitive advantage. We may all suspect that the survey was biased, but as consumers, we accept it as fair play as they have not gone to great lengths to discredit Starbucks, and have managed to retain their brand differentiation.

The subtle-side-swipe approach has worked well for several big multi-nationals in recent months, but in each successful case the focus remains on the product and the brand experience to create added value, rather than staging an all-out attack on a rival. Dyson have been executing the strategy perfectly for some time, and Apple hit the nail on the head with their 2008 ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ campaign.

Intelligent strategy use by Apple, Dyson & Costa

The important lesson to take from all of this is that it’s fine to have a stab at a rival – by all means exploit your product’s benefits over others, but remember to keep the focus on your own high standards, rather than your rivals inferior ones. If you resort to dirty tactics, the end result is always the same: poor profits for all, a distrusting audience and a nasty reputation for playing hardball.

Times may be tough guys, but keep it clean.

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But Web 2.0 goes far beyond just simple ‘spreading the word’ and we are currently working on some strategies for our clients that will encompass Web 2.0 through the entire lifespan of clients in markets that have traditionally been behind the technology curve. Web 2.0 can be used to excite clients, inform clients, convince clients and ultimately keep clients hooked so that they pass on the word and stay loyal to your brand. There are many ways in which this can be achieved and simply copy someone else’s good idea is not the way forward. As with all successful implementations, careful consideration is required and a strong strategy will often deliver the desired results.

Things to remember about Web 2.0

• Not a new version of the web but a realisation of the Web’s potential
• Websites that succeed exploit the opportunities of the web rather than graft old business practices onto the web

• Web 2.0 harnesses the collective intelligence and imagination of users
• Web 2.0 has changed the power of ‘word of mouth’ forever
• Web 2.0 allows you to see and respond to trends in comments about your brand and products

• Social networking is no longer just for 18-24 year olds
• The USA is ahead of the UK with companies such as Boeing, FedEx, Morgan
• Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo successfully harnessing Web 2.0 technologies

A few stats on Web 2.0

• median age of a twitter user is 31
• median age of a MySpace user is 27
• median age of a facebook user is 26
• median age of a LinkedIn user is 40
• 43% of twitter users are aged 18-34
• 33% of twitter users are aged 35-49
• 61% have no kids
• UK Twitter usage grew 974% from Jan ‘08 to Jan ‘09
• Oct 08 1.2million users – April ‘09 23million users

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Evolve Agency has always been good at project management, building long lasting working relationships with our clients by delivering work on time and on budget. Following a very successful start to 2009 and not wanting to rest on our laurels the directors at Evolve Agency felt it was time to enhance our project management and project handing skills further, hence the drive to find an application to assist us.

Evolve’s new extranet site now allows us to collaborate fully with our clients on projects, offering real-time updates to project tasks and time lines, access to quotes and invoices, the ability to sign designs off online and even the ability for us to share our desktops with our clients for live editing of design files. The added ability to access the extranet site from any computer connected to the internet makes the job of any marketing department that much easier. If you wake up in the middle of the night remembering that you need an advert re-sized just submit a project request through the extranet site. If you are in a meeting with your MD and he wants a status report, log-on to the project time line and see a full gantt chart.

As with all these things there is a balance. A piece of software will not always be the answer. For example, just picking up the telephone to talk to a client is often a better relationship builder than interacting with a piece of software. However, we have found that using the software to manage sign-offs, keep up to date with the status of projects etc has been a much more effective and efficient way to run a project.

As more and more people are taking advantage of Evolve Agency’s excellence in design and project delivery and with the talk of ‘Green Shoots’ appearing in the British economy then need to offer the best service to our clients is paramount and at Evolve Agency we will continue to improve on what we do to ensure our clients stay on top.

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The exclamation mark can be so powerful if used correctly. It can help stress a strong emotion such as excitement or anger. It can also be cleverly inserted to suggest sarcasm or humour, something only the spoken word could usually do. More importantly the exclamation mark can change the feeling of a word or sentence just by its mere presence. Take the phrase above ‘Under new management’. Without the exclamation, the average customer will assume that this means the pub has had a spring clean, that the service is better and the food menu has improved. Add the exclamation mark and we read something completely different. For me it suggested that it might be a joke or that it was sarcastically suggesting that it wouldn’t make any difference. In fact if I had to replace the exclamation mark with words I would translate them into ‘Yeh right’ or ‘and the rest’ or something more cynical.

So why are so many people compelled to use this simple and highly expressive symbol in everything they say? It may have something to do with the fact that more and more people are choosing to communicate by email or text, rather than talking on the phone or face to face, that people cannot find the words to express their emotions. If you can’t get across what you want to say without putting an exclamation mark after every sentence then why not pick up the phone?

Finally, the worst offenders are the ones who don’t just use one exclamation mark (which is all that is needed) but three!!!

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The thing that has always amazed me is the positioning and promises these banks come up with. Their brand taglines are quite comical. You can see it now…brainstorming in the boardroom with the marketeers, the creatives trying to come up with something remotely exciting for a bank brand. I know, how about ‘The worlds local bank’ now that sounds good. Or how about your ‘Friendly bank manager’! Give me a break. All the taglines in the world won’t help these banks until one of them starts to do things differently. You have to question ‘What is local about charging for an international transfer from the UK to France’?. ‘What’s local about money transfers still taking 3 days to clear (despite new laws in place)?’. The list goes on. As Theo Paphitis discovered in the Panorama show he hosted, mistakes are made everyday and the rules change just as regularly. No tagline or image will help, especially if they can’t live and breathe by it. If you can’t deliver on ‘your local bank’ don’t say it.

I remember working on a brand for an insurance company, another industry that suffers the same problem as banks. They are all the same. The Ts & Cs are pages long, with important information lost 2/3^rd of the way down page 4, none of which any of us has time to read and of course when you come to claiming, getting money back is a painful process. One of the ideas thrown at the table was if someone had an accident and needed to claim on their private health care wouldn’t it be refreshing and different to receive some flowers from your insurer. Logistically this idea was too expensive, but what a refreshing angle. The idea and sentiment was spot on. It was something different to the standard approach. If you want to get across being human, that really would cut the mark, rather than a picture of a happy face.

Give me a bank or an insurer who decides to spin their industry on its head and try something different any day. I’ll be there tomorrow.

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