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?

Viral Marketing Failure du jour

As a general rule, I shun Facebook applications. I dislike the way they clog up your profile, and I dislike the way they require you to allow them to access all of your Facebook information (which is usually unnecessary, and is not used for reasons that benefit the end user).

But today I saw in my News Feed that a friend had taken a Facebook quiz entitled "What Does Your Day Mean?" which purported to report the implications of being born on a particular day of the week. It sounded interesting (though I would never take it seriously). I was curious. I decided to add the application and take the quiz myself, just for kicks.

As was to be expected, the application required me to allow it to access all of my Facebook information. Okay. But then, an epic viral marketing failure: before it would allow me to take the quiz, it asked me to invite my friends to add the application, too.

Forget it.

The creators of the application are making an attempt at viral marketing by asking people to tell their friends. But they are going about it all wrong. You cannot force someone to recommend your product. And you cannot expect someone to recommend your product if they have not yet tried your product. You would not expect someone to recommend a movie they have not yet seen, or recommend a clothing designer whose clothes they have not yet tried, or recommend a restaurant at which they have not yet eaten.

You must let customers experience your product first. And their experience with your product must be remarkable enough that your customers want to talk about it. They cannot help but talk about it. Talking about it benefits their friends, and builds coolness points for themselves. (Thanks, Seth Godin, for your great book on ideaviruses like this.)

If you force people to talk about a bad product, the opposite happens. They hurt their friends; they hurt their trust with their friends; and they hurt their coolness points. People do not want to do that.

I did not want to invite my friends to add the application, and, in so doing, to stamp my recommendation on a product I had not yet tested. Neither did I want to spam my friends with one of the Facebook application invitations which I so despise. (Disclaimer for my friends who have sent app invitations to me: I still love you. You are forgiven.)

Granted, this application did have a "skip" button to the "invite your friends!" plea, for those users who take time to search for the button. But the inconspicuousness of the button makes the invitation stage seem unavoidable. And if the user does skip the invitation stage, they will likely never recommend the app to their friends.

If these Facebook application creators truly want to enhance their viral marketing, they need to save the "invite your friends!" request until the user has already completed the quiz, or joined the cause, or played the game, or done whatever the app does.

Let the user experience the product first. Then give them an easy way to invite their friends. If they like the product, they will often be more than happy to tell people - especially through the click of a button on a social media site like Facebook.

Survival of the Journalists

As a follow-up to my blog post of 27 July, refuting the concept of a "Balkanization of the Web," I must share this excerpt from Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine blog from yesterday:

"It is clear that if journalists want to be supported – let alone have impact and influence and find their days worthwhile – they need more people to spend more time with news. I believe they should be doing the opposite of what is being suggested in many quarters: clamping down controls to try to fight aggregators and search engines, threatening to build pay walls, consolidating content into destinations they’d have to work harder to get people to visit.

"Right now, news organizations should be trying to reach more people and engage with them more deeply. They should seek hyperdistribution.

"Since when did it become OK for media people to shrink their audiences? Since they gave up on the ad model, that’s when. But I am not ready to surrender to the idea that advertising, which has supported mass media since its creation, is over. Yes, ad rates are lower; welcome to competition. That’s all the more reason why publishers must attract larger audiences publics – make it up on volume – as well as more targeted and valuable communities."

(Read Jeff's entire post, by the way. He has some outstanding ideas!)

I completely agree with Jeff. If suppliers of premium content (aka newspapers and journals) want to survive, they have to become universal within their online target markets. Newspapers cannot charge online subscription fees, nor can they "Balkanize" by withholding their news from search engines who refuse to cut them deals. Newspapers cannot afford those tactics - they don't have the market share. (Nielsen Online data shows that newspaper sites currently capture less than 1% of time spent online.)

Essentially, newspapers are starting from scratch. They are not re-inventing their reporting methods, no. But they are releasing a new product within an entirely new marketplace. They do not have the luxury of already dominating online news. They must fight to build their readership - and fight through excellent reporting (through all sorts of media) and exceptional customer value. It is time for news sources to unleash an ideavirus.

Lame Excuses for Being Boring - #3

Excuse #3:

"We're just a little local shop. We/Our clients can't afford any expensive 'new media' or outdoor stunts."

Actually, it's less expensive - and more effective - to do something outstanding and creative that gets people interested in your brand, than it is to keep cranking out boring, unremembered print ads, billboards, and tv spots.

When people see something new and different and crazy and remarkable, they pay attention. They tell their friends. With the near-ubiquity of cell phones, your story can be spread around the globe - literally - within minutes. For free. If it's worth talking about.

CiCi's Pizza recently launched their Penny Picker Upper campaign, in which they dropped 1 million pennies ($10,000) outside of 650 of their stores. Those who picked up a penny might find a ticket for a free drink or kids meal or buffet. They accompanied this campaign with a website, beapennypickerupper.com in which visitors can create a virtual bobblehead of themselves on a penny. Think this got attention?

Other companies have dropped wallets containing business cards and coupons around city streets. Some have anchored vehicles to the sides of skyscrapers, or "accidently" blown up the "wrong" restaurant. Think they got attention?

How much did ideas like this cost, in comparison to the exorbitant costs of television commercials, or newspaper and magazine ads, or billboards? And which produces more impressions, more responses, and more brand awareness?

Yes, you can create really amazing traditional ads that capture attention (think Super Bowl commercials). But why not save those hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to simply get the ad running, and use that same creativity to do something that gets you free marketing from viewers and the press?

(For more words of wisdom on how to get people talking, visit www.ideavirus.com to download and read the free e-book, Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin.)