Thu, Jan 29, 2009, Denver, CO – The contest presenters of Denver’s Making the Brand (www.denversmakingthebrand.com), a contest to award a single Denver-based small business a $25,000 branding and marketing package, announced today that they have extended the nomination deadline to February 14, 2009. The decision was made in order to assist as many small businesses as possible in their struggle to return to economic health.

In addition, the contest presenters have decided to expand contest eligibility beyond the retail sector of the local economy, which had been their initial focus for 2009, and to reinstate the more inclusive policies of last year’s contest.

Last year’s winner, Renaissance Adventure Guides (www.raguides.com) – a Denver-based adventure travel company – received their Grand Prize package in mid summer, just as economic warning signs were starting to appear. “Even with the economy beginning to slow down,” says Max Young, owner of Renaissance Adventure Guides, “our sales increased by about 50% after we began to implement the new brand. And, we’re shooting to close the year at a 200% increase.  All the collateral looked great, but more importantly we saw a significant increase in sales as a result of the new brand rollout.”

Kandra Churchwell, founder and Creative Director of Phases Design Studio (www.designfiles.net), says she and the other presenters and sponsors felt that a deadline extension to February 14 and an expansion of business category eligibility “would give even more local, independent companies the opportunity to break out of the economic doldrums with a professional identity and marketing package.”

Run by a consortium of independent branding and marketing firms, Denver’s Making the Brand was founded to allow small businesses to get in the ring and compete with larger companies through professional quality services that are often perceived to be out of the reach of small businesses.

Travitt Hamilton, owner of The Write Stuff (www.travitthamilton.com), says, “It’s easy to sit back and complain about how bad things are. What we want to do is take action. Small companies are the core of the economic engine that’s going to pull us out of this slump, so we figured the more we can do for these folks, the better.”
This year’s contest will award a Grand Prize Package including, if necessary, a new logo, a new name and tag line, a marketing plan, layout, design services and copy for a website – including Search Engine Optimization – print collateral, product photography, a 30 second commercial or web video, outdoor advertising, screen printed garments and more. Everything a small business might need to implement a successful new branding and marketing strategy.

Small businesses in the Denver Metro area, which have been in business for at least a year are eligible for the contest. Nominations are open through midnight February 14, 2009. Anyone, including the owner, can nominate a business by visiting the contest Web site, www.denversmakingthebrand.com, clicking on the “Nominate” button and filling out the entry form.

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W00t!

Kandra will be on 9News Friday morning discussing Making the Brands’ deadline extension and category expansion with Jack Maher.

OK, here’s the bad news… She’s scheduled to go on at 5:10 in the AM. Yikes! But Kandra is an old pro at this now and always rocks the house, even in the middle of the night.

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Greetings, Making the Branders; it’s been a while since I’ve been around ye olde MTB blog.

Apologies for my scarcity. I’ve been experiencing an unbloggable, long-term personal crisis which has pretty much resolved itself, so hopefully I’ll get into some regular brand blogging.

Before starting that, though, let me say that Beth is in recovery right now from a fairly serious illness, so if everyone reading this could send she and her familia some good vibes, they’d appreciate it.

So the big branding story I missed during my travails was probably the election (maybe you heard about it?).

All politics aside, I think that Obama’s victory was in many ways a triumph of good branding and brand management over awful brand management. The 8 years of the Bush presidency have been very hard on the Republican brand (small, pro-business government, run by socially conservative, competent managers), as the size of the government has ballooned, the economy has gutterred, and one Republican sex and corruption scandal after another have tarnished the GOP’s image.

So the party selected the one Republican who probably could have won in 2008, because McCain had a history of pushing back against the Republican brand. His own brand (the Maverick!, bi-partisanship, competence) was strong and well-known. And then he spent the next several months after his nomination systematically taking his own brand apart through a combination of what seemed like incompetence and a willingness to accept any and all aspects of the party line, even those aspects he had formerly dismissed. Every week seemed to bring a new message from the McCain campaign, often totally at odds with last week’s message (the fundamentals of the economy are strong! I’m suspending my campaign to deal with the economic crisis!).

The Obama campaign, on the other hand was a model of brand positioning and messaging consistency. He managed to position himself as the only true agent of change so effectively that both Clinton in the primaries, and McCain in the general election tried to piggyback on the message of hope and change he was promulgating. And there were very few messaging inconsistencies from the campaign, from the beautiful logo, to the nicely produced collateral, to the campaign’s response to possible controversies.

The operation was designed and executed to, with ruthless efficiency, put out a single overarching brand promise (change), and every interaction with the electorate had to reinforce that message. And it was remarkably successful. When the Reverend Wright situation almost blew up into a racially charged controversy, Obama crafted and delivered a speech that not only silenced his critics, but positioned him as a new, almost post-racial black candidate – a candidate of true change, totally divorced from the civil rights holdovers of the 60s who are largely discredited (rightly or wrongly) in the great American middle. A possible disaster was turned into an opportunity to reinforce Obama’s brand promise.

And that was largely the story of the election, I think. A flawlessly executed brand strategy has opened a new era in American electoral politics.

Next week: the auto bailout and the Branding of Detroit.

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As Beth is working out the marketing plan, Kandra and I also get to work – Kandra on the logo and imagery, me on the messaging.

The logo is probably what most people think about when they think of branding. When you say McDonalds, what pops into your mind? The golden arches and the scary clown. With Nike, the swoosh.

The other element that people key on, and my area of expertise (such as it is) is the slogan or tag line. Are these the same thing? The words are often used interchangeably, but I think they’re different and have different uses. I think even wikipedia doesn’t really get at the differences, but here’s what I think: A slogan incorporates a call to action of some sort. “Just do it.” “Reach Out and Touch Someone.” “Don’t Leave Home Without It.”

A tag line is similar, but doesn’t incorporate a call to action. It doesn’t mean they’re less effective necessarily, but it does mean they have a different purpose. They are more descriptive than a slogan, but don’t ask the target audience to actually do anything. “Little, yellow, different, better.” Movies have tag lines rather than slogans, because they’re not really selling you anything – they just want you to remember the film: “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream” (from my favorite movie evah, by the way).

To my mind, the slogan empowers the prospect by putting the the need for action on their shoulders. The tag line empowers the company or product by focusing strictly on describing it or its benefits. Tag lines change more often than do slogans. How long has it been since Coke was “the real thing?” A long time, but Nike has been telling us to “Just do it,” for more than 20 years.

I think, actually that “Just do it,” is the best slogan in branding history. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of Nike the company, but Nike the brand is almost pure genius. The slogan itself incorporates a call to action, but it also communicates a sense of urgency bordering on impatience. And it puts the impetus for action and focus purely on the customer.

I think that if the slogan was tweaked just a little, it would be a disaster. One of the more common and least effective constructions in sloganeering today is “giving you the strength, power, or control…” or “putting you in charge…” – We, the company will give you control or the tools to do something. The focus is on the company, not the customer, and the customer is disempowered. Its as if Nike’s slogan was “Letting you do it.” Nike’s core brand message is empowering the individual athlete, so their slogan subtly reinforces the idea of empowerment by calling on them to do the work and reap the rewards (using Nike shoes as a tool, of course).

All small companies could learn something from Nike’s branding. After all, they started out as 2 guys selling shoes out of the trunk of Phil Knight’s car. One of the ways they have thrived is by making sure that they reinforce their message of empowering the athlete at every turn. Their slogan is the most obvious and successful example of this.

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After the intensive marketing and business brainstorming session with Max and Lyle from RAG, Beth got to work on the marketing plan, researching and planning strategies for reaching Renaissance Adventure Guide’s (RAG) target markets. The marketing plan for RAG was a little different and more complex than your typical small biz marketing plan, because Lyle and Max are intent on growing fairly aggressively, and they have 3 distinct markets they’re trying to reach. So that means their marketing plan will have 3 channels, each of which has a unique set of goals, tactics and collateral, all of which have to establish their own identity without contradicting or undermining RAG’s corporate brand.

For example, if RAG wants to establish a family friendly identity to attract tourists to their rafting trips, but also wants to capture, young, male locals who snowboard to the kayaking trips, they’ll need 2 distinct sets of materials. These 2 sets of materials will be targeted to 2 totally different audiences, so they’ll have different content and imagery, will aim for a different call to action, and will be distributed differently. And at the same time, both of these campaigns must reinforce the company identity.

A similar example: several years ago Disney had an opportunity to establish a cable channel in Europe, but their partners in the venture wanted to also show, on the same channel but during different dayparts, films with some adult content. This would have been a completely different audience (obviously), but the ads for the adult content would have appeared with the Disney logo, and other branding. This is a case where the new product brand contradicted and may even have damaged the company brand – in this case, so seriously that it’s hard to imagine what it would have looked like or how it would have succeeded. And the Disney folks must have felt the same way, because they ultimately decided not to take the plunge.

In the case of RAG, the stakes are not quite the same. We need to establish an image that is attractive and empowering to families, while emphasizing that some of the products on offer are tailor made for rough and tumble thrill seekers. Reaching such different audiences effectively has made this a more complicated than usual marketing plan, and I’m glad it’s Beth’s job to sort it all out rather than mine.

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As you might know if you’ve been following along, we’ve begun work on Making the Brand’s winning company, Renaissance Adventure Guides‘ new brand. In addition to the Grand Prize, we awarded 2 runners up (Gift Basket Junction, and M&D Kitting Solutions) Brand Navigation Systems (BNS).

The BNS is a good alternative for a company that isn’t sure they’re ready to go whole hog with a branding or rebranding project, but still wants their current brand and marketing collateral evaluated, would like some suggestions on what to do next, and would like to keep their options open when it comes to working with other marketers, designers and writers.

A BNS starts out somewhat similarly to the heavy duty business and marketing brainstorming session that any branding process should begin with. Beth and her giant sticky notes lead us through the process of establishing a profile of the client which you can read about in a bit more detail at the first link above. Then, rather than Beth getting to work on the marketing plan, Kandra hitting the drafting table and Travitt chaining himself to the typewriting machine, the 3 of us sit down and draft a Brand Navigation System for the client that summarizes the meeting and our thoughts on their brand.

Besides a summary of the meeting, based on Beth’s, and Kandra’s notes and Travitt’s doodlings, the BNS includes an overall assessment of the client’s current brand (based on our examination of any current collateral), Kandra’s thoughts regarding the logo, typography, color choices and layout options if appropriate, Travitt’s on the current messaging, and Beth’s on the marketing. The BNS may include logo, color and typeface suggestions, core message, slogan, and name suggestions if requested by the client, possible budget and timelines – in short the BNS is a creative brief that we can use to craft a great brand for that client, or that they can take to another team to slap together a slightly less great brand.

Whether or not a client continues with us, goes to another branding team, or decides to abandon the project altogether, it’s a valuable exercise. Closely examining your brand (or correctly branding a start up), is a process that provides a type of business focus that you don’t get in any other way. It ties together all the thinking that might have gone into your business and marketing plans, guides your hiring practices and helps you qualify clients, and forces you to make vitally important choices regarding how you want your business to be perceived in the marketplace.

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The New York Governor’s recent troubles got me to thinking about a certain aspect of branding that we haven’t really touched on in the brief life of this blog – the brand promise. Also, I figured putting Client 9’s name in the headline might get us a little extra traffic.

A brand promise is “what audiences are assured of receiving as a result of their relationship with the brand.” It’s the one major core benefit your customers or clients should expect from your company. Apple’s brand promise is ease of use and great industrial design. Microsoft’s brand promise is universal compatibility. That’s why when you switch to a Mac after years of using Windows, it’s frustrating that you have to unlearn your old habits. The brand promise implies that there won’t be a learning curve. When your printer doesn’t work with Vista, the real reason it’s aggravating (beyond the lost productivity) is that the brand promise implies that because Windows is so pervasive, everything will work with it.

Spitzer’s downfall was so sensational and such big news all over the world not just because he was the governor of the 16th largest economy in the world, but because he had come to prominence based on his very effective anti-corruption branding (scroll about 1/2 way down the first page to the paragraph about “the Spitzer brand”). If he had been caught simply cheating on his wife, he would have been embarrassed, and his popularity and ability to govern might have taken a hit, but he probably wouldn’t have had to resign. Because his brand promise implied that he would be a crusader for clean government, however, his behavior was seen as a betrayal of the relationship he had built with his constituents.

The lesson for business and branding professionals is this: make sure your company’s behavior is in line with its brand promise, or get ready for a spectacular meltdown.

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About 2 weeks ago, Lyle and Max of winning company Renaissance Adventure Guides (RAG) sat down with us for the first step of their rebranding: an intensive brainstorming session where we grilled them for 4 hours about their business’ past, plans, and hopes for the future. The branding purpose of this session was to establish the identities and habits of RAG’s target market(s), its competition, its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and internal and external threats to its success, and where and what the company will be in 1, 3 and 5 years.

Under Beth’s direction, and using no enhanced interrogation techniques, we were able to glean valuable information that’ll help Beth create an effective brand strategy, Kandra to design a logo that embodies the sense of professionalism, safety and trust necessary for RAG’s target market to feel comfortable hiring them, and Travitt to craft a persuasive slogan that will lodge itself in the brains of everyone who sees or hears it.

Really, what it all comes down to is this: to effectively brand a client, we need to figure out what the business and marketing needs of that client are. The brainstorming session allows us to figure that out, while also giving us a sense of that client’s business culture, how the people who own and work for the company think about and speak to each other about it, and more generally, what their aspirations for the brand are.

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