It's Not Just a Bag

Anything that reminds people about your organization is a representative for your brand.

Hence we have logos - visual representations of the corporate identity of a brand. We have advertising campaigns, carefully planned to accurately convey a brand's identity and proposed value to consumers. We have colors, fonts, store designs, soundtracks, and even smells that are strategically chosen for what they say about their respective brands.

But other things speak for your brand as well:

          Your partners (I blogged about that last week).
          Your product packaging (I blogged about that two weeks ago).
          Your facilities (how tidy are they?).
          Your corporate vehicles (how often do you wash them?).

          Your shopping bags.

Shopping bags (and other distribution packaging) have great - and often underused - potential as branding tools. Well-designed and attractively-branded shopping bags provide two marketing tactics in one:

• First, they serve as free advertising - distributing your logo, willingly, through the hands of every customer.
• Second, they serve as social proof - every customer seen with your shopping bag indicates support of your brand to those around them. And as Robert Cialdini would tell us, observing the approval of others towards a brand gives permission to new potential customers to try the brand, too.

Bloomingdales does an outstanding job of using shopping bags as branded items. People notice the cute, clever "Little Brown Bags" with which Bloomingdales customers leave their stores. The more customers shop at Bloomingdales, the more those Little Brown Bags are seen by others, and the more other people see public approval of the Bloomingdales brand.

FedEx also uses their "shopping bags" (aka their boxes) well. Every time you receive a package via FedEx, you see the FedEx logo, and are given another example of a customer who used FedEx for their shipping needs.

Start-up companies can use branded shopping bags to great advantage as they work to build brand recognition. Each time a customer carries out a branded shopping bag, the organization receives another instance of free advertising in the community, and another testimony of a [presumably satisfied] customer.

And to be remarkable, shopping bags need not be simple plastic bags stamped with a logo (although they very well could be). Why not use your shopping bags as another opportunity to exhibit great design? Why stick with a one-color print on plastic? Why not make your shopping bags something that are fun and attractive to carry around? Something that reinforces your brand's personality?

So, how are your shopping bags representing you? Do they speak your name in a clever, fun, innovative, or attractive way? Or do they speak your name at all?

AT&T Takes a Step in the Right Direction

In case you hadn't noticed, AT&T has been receiving some flak recently for its less-than-market-leader 3G coverage. Verizon Wireless has been particularly scathing of its iPhone-carrying competitor with its "There's a Map for That" and "Island of Misfit Toys" commercials. AT&T, of course, has put up a defense with its "Postcard" and "Side-by-Side" commercials.

And now, AT&T has put forth a "make-good" effort, in the form of a free iPhone app.

Yesterday, AT&T introduced its new Mark the Spot app into the iPhone App Store. The app enables users to submit a notification to AT&T whenever and wherever they experience dropped calls, failed calls, no coverage, data failure, or poor voice quality. The app can pull the iPhone's GPS information to tell AT&T where the failure happened; alternately, users can manually select a location on the map to indicate where the coverage failure occurred. With the notification, users can also submit additional comments, as well as tell AT&T whether the problem occurs only once, seldom, often, or always.

FAQs within the app reveal what AT&T plans to do with the feedback it receives:

"AT&T will utilize this feedback to optimize and enhance the network. Problems will be clustered to highlight areas for investigation. However, multiple submissions at the same time for the same issue by the same user do not receive higher weighting."

Other commentators seem skeptical about whether AT&T will actually use the feedback submitted via the app to begin patching its coverage gaps. Assuming, though, that AT&T has the resources and infrastructure in place, the company would be unwise to not improve its 3G coverage based upon this information. Not only would such improvements benefit its customers, its reputation, and its sales, but AT&T's Mark the Spot app sets expectations that the carrier will take customers' feedback seriously and work to fix the problems.

Congratulations, AT&T, for taking a step to improve your customer service and effectively repair your reputation. Don't let us down now by doing nothing with the valuable feedback you receive through your new app.

The Home Depot and Edutainment

Majesco Entertainment Company recently released a game for the Wii, featuring home improvement retailer The Home Depot. The game, "Our House: Party!" features 175 mini-games in which players (up to four) complete home improvement projects in order to make their homes the best in the neighborhood. These projects include tasks like construction, demolition, plumbing, wiring, landscaping, decorating, and, of course, racing through The Home Depot store to get the necessary power tools.



Majesco also released a similar version of the game - "Our House" - for Nintendo DS. In the DS version, players start as contractors who must build customer's houses in order to save up enough money to build their own home.

The first brilliant thing about these games is that they're just plain fun. (Or at least they sound fun! I haven't tested them out yet.) The second brilliant thing is that, in the midst of all that fun, Majesco and The Home Depot have combined education (learn, loosely, how to do various projects), branding (The Home Depot, of course!), and entertainment. The game provides instruction and fun in a positive brand experience for The Home Depot's potential customers.

The Home Depot creates other positive brand experiences, too, without forcing customers to pay them a dime. In addition to the caricatured "do-it-yourself" projects of the "Our House" and "Our House: Party!" games, The Home Depot shares scores of free, real-life "how to" videos on their YouTube channel. And, as I understand, anyone can visit a Home Depot store during their project workshops for hands-on instruction in home improvement.

These are the kinds of things that attract customers to a brand. Give people something useful, teach them, provide them a service - for free. In the process you will be building trust, building rapport, and building relationships with people. And then, when those people really do need a product that you sell, with whom will they prefer to spend their money? You've proven yourself trustworthy in a service that does not earn you money; now those people will be ready to trust you with a service that does.

How can your organization provide an honest-to-goodness, helpful, positive, fun brand experience for people, before they ever have to spend a dime?

Voice Mail Message = Radio Ad?

Hammerhead Advertising in Hoboken, N.J. is making a bold (read: brazen?) attempt to woo new clients. Apparently the ad agency has been leaving voice mail messages for the CMOs and VPs of Marketing at several hundred target companies. Except they aren't real voice mail messages; they are radio ads for the agency.

Neither are the radio ads disguised to sound like voice mail messages. They sound like a radio commercial that one would hear on the morning commute. You can listen to three versions of the ad here, here, and here.

I don't know about you, but if I were a busy Chief Marketing Officer checking my voice mails in the morning, I think I would be rather annoyed to find someone wasting my time with a radio ad in my voice mailbox. If you want my business, don't be spamming my voice mail. My customers don't want spam from me; I don't want it from you.

According to MediaPost's Media Creativity blog, apparently many of these targeted marketing directors feel the same way. They are disgusted with the move.

But then there are others who actually love the ads. Hammerhead has gotten a 3% response rate from the campaign; many of the respondents are delighted with the ads and excited to enlist Hammerhead in creating their own radio spots.

After listening to the ads, which are admittedly humorous, I could see how some people would appreciate Hammerhead's creativity and initiative enough to want to hire them.

And perhaps generating that "love me or hate me" attitude is good for the brand. Potential clients have to take sides. Hammerhead is defined; they're not just another humdrum agency in the sea of virtually identical ad agencies. They have personality. They are memorable. And even if that memory is distasteful to some, in others it may spark an immediate (and hopefully, lasting) fanhood.

Hopefully the customers of the clients who employ Hammerhead's unusual advertising tactics will feel the same way.

MySpace Has Found Itself!

Less than two weeks ago, according to TechCrunch (yes, the same publication now notorious for publishing the stolen Twitter documents - I'm almost loathe to reference them), MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta admitted, in short, that his company was in the middle of an identity crisis.

In an email to employees, Van Natta explained, "Our users don’t know if we’re a social portal, a music site, or an entertainment hub." He also reported that MySpace was taking steps to unify the site and "lay the groundwork to provide more clarity on our brand and business."

He wasn't kidding about taking those steps. MySpace seems to have made short work of that, announcing just this Thursday that MySpace will soon be repositioned as an "entertainment destination" specifically focused on gaming.

With Facebook and Twitter leading the myriad social networking sites, iTunes and Pandora topping the various music portals, and YouTube and Hulu dominating video outlets, online gaming seems like a good space for MySpace. The site already has several games available; it seems reasonable to believe that they could successfully expand that offering to define their entire brand. Perhaps MySpace will distinguish itself among other gaming sites by reconfiguring its "social network" aspect to remarkably facilitate and supplement its new gaming core.

Doubtless there will be much public discussion and debate in the coming days, weeks, and months, about the upcoming changes to MySpace. If minor updates to Facebook's layout can spark hundreds of "Change it back!" groups among Facebook users, it will be interesting to see what outcry arises from a complete brand overhaul of MySpace.

I, for one, am happy for the folks at MySpace, and optimistic about the future of the once-leader of social networks. This new identity may or may not be successful at rebuilding the brand; but without it, MySpace had no chance in the world at holding together. As Someone Wise once said, "a house divided...."

Lame Excuses for Being Boring - #2

Excuse #2:

"We've always been this way. This is who we are."

Being creative in your work does not mean departing from your identity as a company or as a brand. Being creative does not mean that you must become Apple, or 3M, or Southwest Airlines, or Starbucks, or Procter & Gamble. In fact, imitating other "innovative" companies is not "innovative" at all.

Being creative means proactively looking for ways that your brand can be even better at who your brand is supposed to be. Becoming even more aligned with your corporate identity, by creating greater value for your customers within that context. Be creative within the boundaries of who your brand is.

So who is your brand? What is your brand promise? Is your brand about luxury and status? Then find ways to pamper your guests in even better, more serving, more extravagant ways than before. Is your brand about family fun? Then spur on your imagination - and create amazingly fun products and environments that encourage kids (and their parents) to use theirs, too. Is your brand about bare-bones, no-frills, low-cost? Then be innovative about how you can cut non-necessities to help your customers save money. Is your brand about customer service? Then bend over backwards for your customers. Is your brand about drawing people together? Then probe for ways in which your products and locations invite people to share life.

Let your brand be itself. But make it the absolute best self it can be.