 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Brandless, a company which can best be described as an online hybrid of Trader Joe’s and Ikea’s kitchen section, just raised a $35m Series B to be the “Procter & Gamble for millennials.”
Their site launched yesterday, and is already selling everything from colanders to quinoa puffs — all for a flat fee of $3 per item.
And they’re doing it all without a “brand”…or are they?
Fighting the “false narrative” of consumption
Created in 2016 by entrepreneur Ido Leffler and Sherpa Capital partner, Tina Sharkey, Brandless has raised almost $50m thus far on the bet that younger consumers don’t care as much about brands as big CPG companies would like investors to believe....
Traditional advertising went after “share of mind”–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one. Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single USP and a single message. Tell them we’re the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute. It hasn’t worked online. Audiences have stopped engaging with advertising. Big brands like Pepsi and P&G have slashed investment in Facebook spending. The agencies’ response has been to create new formats of ads that take over a page, dominate our mobiles’ screens, and generally scream at us. And when somebody screams at you for long enough, you put in earplugs and ignore them. Or, in the case of the online world, you install an ad blocker, as much of the U.K. population has now done. Yet there are many brands online that people don’t want to block. We asked over 5,000 people around the world to tell us about the brands whose content they actively sought out, then analyzed what those brands did. The results were surprisingly consistent. Popular brands had multifaceted personalities. They could make you laugh, or cheer, or lean forward and take notes. They’d stopped hammering away at a share of mind, and were expanding to achieve a share of emotion....
Josh Tetrick was standing in a Dollar Tree in Oakland, California, when he asked a customer which brand of mayo was best. The woman pointed to a gleaming white jar of Kraft.But Tetrick asked, “What about the Just Mayo?”–the flagship product of his company Hampton Creek–which sat nearby. “She said, ‘No, that’s the private-label brand at the Dollar Tree,’” Tetrick recounts. In other words, Just Mayo’s craft paper label–a label that had first been X-Acto-knifed, one at a time, for its initial appearance on shelves at Whole Foods–it didn’t register as some Brooklyn-inspired, vegan artisanal good to this bargain shopper in Oakland. It looked like the generic stuff sold by a budget retailer. “That was an important learning for me,” says Tetrick. “It shows how important context is in design.” And it cemented a hunch, that Hampton Creek, with the lofty, sometimes controversial goal of bringing sustainable, transparent, healthier processed foods to the mainstream consumer, simply didn’t make sense where many low-income and middle-class consumers were shopping: Walmart and Dollar Tree....
When does a sneaker become more than a sneaker? What makes a consumer choose one seemingly identical gown or coat or swimsuit over another? Emotion. Branding at its best, speaks to its intended audience like a BFF – it, like, really gets you. And in fashion, it stands up for you, becoming the outward-facing expression of your personality.
For small brands and emerging designers, widespread logo recognition is an unattainable (or at least very far-away) goal. But branding is more than a logo. It encompasses values, voice, and design choices that run like a continuous thread through product and packaging and online presence. Good branding is storytelling – a consistent and continuous message, weaving meaning into every piece.
How do your nail branding for your own fashion brand? 14 experts weighed in on the discussion. These are their words:...
Over the past three years, Scotch whisky has struggled to regain growth, hit by softness in key markets, notably China, Russia and Latin America.
However, the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA) recently confirmed that the sector’s export declined slowed to -2.4% in 2015, compared to -7% in 2014, indicating positive growth prospects for the year ahead.
Growth is skewed towards single malts as the blended category declined in terms of both value and volume.
This dynamic is reflected our list of the top 10 best-selling Scotch whisky brands – all unsurprisingly blends and many still struggling to claw back growth....
Millennials make up a crucial group of consumers.
Ad agency Moosylvania asked over 3,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to select their favorite brands over the past three years.
Great Questions, LLC helped rank the winning brands.
These brands are the ones that came out on top.
Some are surprising — others, not so much.
A common theme for successful brands? Engaging with millennial consumers via social media....
Brands talk endlessly about attention to individual customers. But Brazilian telecom company Oi has extended that idea to its very logo—a shapeshifting mark that responds to sound and looks different to every customers who speaks to it. "We developed an interactive approach to the identity, experimenting with sound and touch activation, so that there could be as many subtle variations of the Oi logo as there are people who interact with it," says Wolff Olins, the design shop behind it. Wolff Olins worked with digital art and design studio Onformative on the concept. Onformative built bespoke software that allows anyone to animate the Oi logo with any sound at all—including voice, but other things like music too—and then to save their own unique version based on that sound input....
Today, you probably know Diet Coke for its silver and red branding—which is more or less how it’s looked since Coca-Cola’s sugar-free alternative first launched in 1982. But starting this month, in a market where diet soda sales are down, Diet Coke is going bespoke, as millions of unique designs are hitting U.S. shelves for the first time as part of a campaign called "It’s Mine."
So for the next several months, no two 12-ounce bottles of Diet Coke will look exactly alike.
"Personalization and customization is a huge trend, obviously," says Rafael Acevedo, group director of Diet Coke in North America. With Coca-Cola’s first major personalization campaign, Share a Coke in 2014, the company put thousands of people’s names onto bottles. The idea was that you’d spot someone’s name and want to buy them a Coke—and it’s an idea that worked, with measurable uptake in both short term sales and longer term brand loyalty. For Diet Coke, that concept got a tweak. "In this case, it’s more personal, "Acevedo says, "to have that sense that Diet Coke is giving you something no one else can have."...
Many (but not all) might argue that a tweet isn't nearly as powerful as a lightsaber. However, last week a number of brands joined the Star Wars frenzy on the platform, helping to churn out an impressively high number of tweets that could potentially populate a small planet.
Conversation on Twitter related to the newest movie was massive. According to Twitter, "Star Wars" was mentioned 6.5 million times in the week leading up to opening night, with 2.4 million of those happening in the final 24 hours.
The tweets, brand partnerships and overall collectively massive campaign paid off, with the movie breaking box office records on its opening weekend and taking in around $238 million.
Here's how five brands celebrated Star Wars: The Force Awakens.....
A recent ad for Clinique lipstick proclaims: "Have it all", suggesting that a simple cosmetic product is the answer to one of the most complex questions of our time; that ever-elusive quest for balance in our ‘always-on’ world.
Yet, somewhat ironically, the brand’s own research suggests that more women than ever are rejecting the empty rhetoric and bluster implicit in this strapline. In fact, according to its ‘The Truth About Happiness: What Women Want’ research, 77% of women in the UK feel that trying to have it all has actually served only to make us more unhappy....
A few well-chosen words is often all that is needed for a consumer to recall a favorite brand. But today, marketers and advertisers tend to rely on visual cues -- a font, a color, a spokesperson, or even an icon -- to inspire.
Consider this: What phrase do you associate with Nike? Would the brand symbolize the same attitude without their famous "Just Do It" tagline?
There is power in right words. But if you still don't believe me, take our quiz below. Can you guess the brands behind these famous taglines and slogans? And how do these phrases change the way you think about each company?...
Great branding is more than a logo. It’s more than a list of acceptable fonts, too, or even some 100-page PDF containing everything from measurements on proper margins to deep verb-subject-adjective explorations on writing the proper "voice." Great branding is really the DNA of product or company, manifested through various media in ways that the public can recognize and understand.
With that in mind, above is a collection of our biggest branding stories of 2014. It’s not just a highlight reel of great branding. You’ll see some of that, of course, but you’ll also see some of the worst branding of 2014, too, along with essays on branding from some of the best names in the business....
Like it or not, your surroundings inform the special little bubble you live in. Just when you thought you couldn't be stereotyped, well, here are some handy maps that define each state by the brands they Google the most.
The results are pretty fascinating, too, from the obvious to the surprising. I had no idea Grand Marnier was so popular in Delaware, or that American Eagle was so in vogue among West Virginians. Less surprising results are Microsoft in Washington and Disney in Florida.
Where it gets super interesting is when competing brands bubble up in adjacent states, like Jose Cuervo and Patron in Arizona and New Mexico, or Dodge and Chevrolet in Montana and North Dakota....
|
It's all in caps and punctuated with a small maple leaf at the end. And it only took three years to develop. "This is our one-word brand," said Brad Ferguson, president and CEO of the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation, as he presented a picture of the so-called wordmark to city councillors Tuesday. The wordmark is one piece of the redevelopment of Edmonton's overall image, brand and reputation that EEDC has been working on for years. It will be used to promote the city to an international audience. ...
Colors can affect our feelings and behavior in ways so profound that studies have been conducted on how we can better use them in life, and in society, to “hack” culture. This covers subjects from what colors to wear to a job interview … to the ideal shade for prisons. Because of this odd relationship we have with color, the colors we choose, and what we name them, become meaningful shorthands for much bigger stories. Every year, Pantone selects a “Color of the Year” that thematically puts us on the right track for the next 12 months. We project as much onto Pantone’s choices as the brand seeks to project onto us. (This year’s color was “Greenery.”) With all this in mind, research scientist and neural network geek Janelle Shane decided to see how well artificial intelligence fares at both selecting colors and naming them. A writer at Ars Technica calls her results “the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.” On Tumblr, Shane describes both the terms of the experiment and its output. “I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values (RGB = red, green, and blue color values),” she writes. “Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?”...
Seventy-seven percent of B2B buyers said they speak with a salesperson only after they’ve performed independent research online.
More than 50% of decision-makers have eliminated a vendor from consideration based on information they found online.
With this many eyes watching, it pays to build your personal brand in the most effective way.
I’ve had success with growing my personal brand because of careful planning. I had things ready to go before I started promoting myself.
Here are the things you’ll need to have in place as you work to develop your personal brand....
You know what's really difficult?Being succinct. Seriously ... it's ridiculously hard. If you don't believe me, just grab yourfavorite copywriter and ask them. It's especially difficult to express a complex emotional concept in just a couple of words -- which is exactly what a slogan does. That's why we have a lot of respect for the brands that have done it right. The ones that have figured out how to convey their value proposition to their buyer persona in just one, short sentence -- and a quippy one, at that. So if you're looking to get a little slogan inspiration of your own, take a look at some of our favorite company slogans from both past and present. (Note: We've updated this post to include some suggestions from the comment section.)...
The world might be a mess, but look on the bright side: Men’s shaving products are much better than they used to be.
Thanks to several online shaving start-ups, razors, creams, gels and other paraphernalia are now cheaper, of higher quality and more convenient to purchase than ever before. Last week one of the upstarts, Dollar Shave Club, was acquired by the consumer products giant Unilever for $1 billion. For shaving behemoths like Gillette, it is the first skirmish in the coming guerrilla war for men’s faces, not to mention other parts. (Dollar Shave also makes bathroom wipes for men.)
This column usually focuses on the technology industry, an area that sounds far removed from shaving. But the Dollar Shave acquisition signals something bigger than a mere improvement in shaving — it also underscores a consumer products revolution that would not have been possible without technology.
Hilarious online ads passed along social networks allowed Dollar Shave to create instant customer recognition — in other words, a brand — far more quickly, and for far less money, than a shaving company could have managed a decade ago. Online distribution allowed it to get products into consumers’ hands without a costly retail presence. In fact, by cutting out on retail, and shipping products to people’s homes on a subscription basis, the company made buying shaving products more convenient than going to a store....
BRANDED CONTENT: A SHORTSIGHTED CON
But branded content isn't a long game. There are several reasons why. The first issue is intent. The essence of branded content is deliberately blurring the line between editorial content and advertising. Hiding your true colors is never a good idea. Another issue is the logic behind branded content itself. It’s misleading to use a totally different set of qualities—good stories—to sell a product that has intrinsically nothing to do with these qualities. Hiring a top filmmaker won’t improve the quality of your energy drink. Brands cannot deliver what they advertise. Shoes or coffee can never live up to their brands’ promises—they are just shoes and coffee. You could even say that the better the stories, the more dishonest the companies are being.
A camouflage strategy also complicates an already too complex world driven by hidden agendas. Even well-informed people who are able to both enjoy branded content and take it with a grain of salt will subliminally become accustomed to the new branded content standard—not to mention more vulnerable groups such as kids and adolescents. And what about the stories no one wants to hear, stories incapable of selling something? People are more likely to follow a happy, undemanding brand instead of bonding with real people and real-world problems. A brand will never ask you for help. It won’t confront you with difficulties or opposing views....
Earlier this month, Uber unveiled a new look, including, among other things, a new app logo. In a complete departure from its original icon featuring a stylized “U,” the new icon is a non-distinct image of a square embedded in a circle (in rider apps) or a hexagon (in partner apps).
According to Uber, the square represents the bit (as in the basic unit of information in computing) — a concept central to Uber’s business philosophy.Uber argues that its new look would “…provide consistency, highlight information and make our brand easy to recognize.” While Uber’s new logotype and website design might be aligned with this goal, its new app logo is not; the new logo is far less recognizable as representing the Uber brand than the one it replaced....
As digital video and streaming services continue to recast the viewing landscape, a handful of digital executives and Sundance Film Festival attendees pushed to have the burgeoning videosphere represented during one of filmmaking's highest-profile events—and Rick Parkhill, CEO of VMA Media, made it happen.
After securing support from sponsors Twitter, Fullscreen, Maker, Zefr, Above Average, Hulu and Naritiv, he persuaded festival organizers that this was, in fact, a viable extension, and Digital Storytelling was born. The event kicks off Thursday, Jan. 21, on the eve of the film festival, with additional sponsors including CNN's Courageous content studio, Fox Network Group's True(x) and The Huffington Post signing on....
Brands looking to be successful in the world of fragmented, distracted and time-crunched consumers, might not be rated just on how well they serve customers’ needs, but how well they work with others to combine forces.
In the latest edition of its Sentinel Report, software developer and technology services company Globant suggests companies that find partners to provide a “seamless ecosystem” will be well-positioned to meet consumers’ needs in the future.
“The main goal for brand ecosystems is to lean on the best attributes of both companies to improve the offering with the clear goal of making life easier for consumers,” Martín Migoya, Globant CEO and co-founder, tells Marketing Daily. “As a result, consumers are often more engaged with brands and share a greater stake in their success.”...
“No other brand will make you feel so …” That’s the basis for a great brand promise – and very, very few brands deliver on it because they confuse operational excellence with promissory distinction. They promise great service or great features because they want the world to know they’re very good.
The thing is – the world already knows, or rather it assumes. That’s not a promise. It’s just a reassurance (and one that consumers increasingly take for granted). We keep thinking promises are made in words. They’re not. They’re captured in words for organisations’ convenience – and in phrases that marketers and senior teams feel good about but that, in reality, consumers are oblivious to....
Hand-picked collection of brand style guide examples, pattern libraries and design manuals for inspiration. Find all the best style guides in one place. Maintained by Saijo George, find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Many agencies have launched their own incubators and accelerators in the past few years. Learn about 16 cool products agencies have launched.Agencies have, within their walls, some of the most brilliant creative and strategic minds. But these creatives are subject to the volatile business of agencies: Project work that comes and goes, relationships with risk-adverse clients, and billing rates that are stagnant.Agencies believe they are in the services business, so that is what they do. But in reality, they have the knowledge, expertise, and experience necessary to create products, services, and software.That's why so many agencies have launched their own incubators and accelerators in the past few years....
|
The "brandless" brand that's getting traction with millennials and other consumers.