 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
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....
There’s already an endless supply of LinkedIn B2B marketing best practices advice out there. So I thought I’d look at the worst practices. From over-promoting to lacking focus, here’s four LinkedIn B2B marketing don’ts you’ll definitely want to avoid.
On July 7th Marks and Spencer revealed that their online sales were down 8% v(compared to their typical 20% increases previously). What was conspicuously absent was any mention of the £150m investment in the site that they had been eager to boast about on launch in February.
M&S have a team of 50 software developers along with a graduate scheme and a specialist ‘digital lab’ dedicated to fostering a ‘start-up’ culture around the project, accompanied by management from the likes of Laura Wade-Gery – ex-head of Tesco.com and Tesco Direct. Together this seemed like a recipe for success, complimented by a generous budget that appeared to reflect M&S’s determined ambition to be taken more seriously by the modern world.
It’s difficult to pick apart where M&S might have faltered with the limited details and metrics they have made available, however it is possible to create a list of suggestions as to where they may have had problems. Should you want specific examples of broken links, error pages, incompatible browsers, unexplained changes to orders, and a whole host of other issues, simply check out the posts from customers to the M&S facebook page. From those communications alone, you could write a ‘how not to do e-commerce’ book!...
Two years ago Savannah Peterson worked as the head of marketing for a design firm in Silicon Valley. She was introduced to a company making a newfangled photo device. The gadget, called Instacube, ...
Instacube launched a Kickstarter campaign in August of 2012 with the promise of a March 2013 ship date. The Internet fell in love with Instacube, and the device raised nearly three times what it sought. Cut to March of 2014 and not one Instacube has been shipped. Today, at a one-on-one interview at South by Southwest, Peterson told her story....
It worked. Peterson was able to wrangle an article by Engadget, and from there the dominoes fell. Instacube was on CNET, Mashable, and TechCrunch. The campaign had intended to raise $250,000. Within the first 24 hours it had secured more than $100,000. By campaign’s end D2M had raked in $621,049.
Then D2M had to build it. This is where things begin to fall apart. The March 2013 deadline came and went and zero devices had been shipped. Backers, understandably, became impatient....
Domino's and Bank of America show that having humans handling social media doesn't mean they'll act human.
Last week, Domino’s stepped in it on Facebook. A customer took to the brand’s Facebook page to compliment the chain, which then responded with a rote “Sorry for your bad experience” response. Digiday, along with others, covered the snafu, which appeared to point out the perils of relying on automated responses in social media.
And yet the error was actually a mistake made by a human, according to Domino’s. In much the same way as Bank of America screwed up last month by having a social media team sounding a lot like robots, a Domino’s employee mistook the compliment for a complaint. The employee then, it would appear, gave the default response for social media complaints. Domino’s, to its credit, tried to regain its footing by taking it in stride. The rub with brands in social media is that they’ll need humans, who are prone to make mistakes....
For companies that haven't found a humorous voice on social media, the joke's on them. For those that have, here's how they leverage laughs....
Done well, tweeting can even land you a dream job. Here at Fast Company, our executive editor Noah Robischon even has a framed edict on his office wall: “Stop tweeting boring shit.” But stifling yawn-worthy tweets is one thing, composing a one-line comedic gem for the masses is quite another.
We’ve come to expect it from stand-up comedians such as Megan Amram, the spambot @horse_ebooks that posts bits of context-free hilarity randomly pulled from online texts, and formerly unknown Justin Halpern, who rose to fame tweeting the caustic observations of his father from @shitmydadsays. But brands bringing the funny on Twitter? Not so much.
To wit: @ChipotleTweets took to fake hacking its feed to produce a stream of nonsense notes meant to evoke a chaotic mirth similar to that of @horse_ebooks. Though the tactic earned the burrito chain several thousand new followers, Chipotle quickly resumed its regular (not particularly humorous) promotional voice....
Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense. youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...
|
Despite the abundance of social media marketing advice online, lots of businesses still get it wrong.The advice available to anyone trying to solidify their social media marketing strategies is endless. Still, many businesses run into the same pitfalls time and again. An infographic from entrepreneur Jason Squires details the nine most common mistakes.
Marketers spend most of their time trying to appeal to their target demographics, but when it comes to women, many of them are missing the mark. Given that women make up half the population and have a disproportionate amount of purchasing power, isn’t it in your best interest to try to understand them?
Here are 23 surprising facts you probably didn’t know about women and advertising. - Women account for 85% of consumer purchases (She-conomy) - Despite this, 91% of women say advertisers don’t understand them...
A brilliant and timely tweet, or a superb social media promotion that engages millions of consumers with your brand, can definitely break through and connect in ways simply not possible with traditional advertising messages. I’ve seen social media campaigns have a strong amplifying effect on the dollars spent in traditional media, and I’ve seen social media campaigns help brands to rise from obscurity to fame.
But what I see more frequently is brands trying too hard to be current, straining to entertain. In doing so, they lose the distinctive personality and character that made them unique. Think about the people you know who think they are hilarious or always struggling to be agreeable and popular. Do you feel you know who they really are? Do you like spending time with them, or do you find them pointless and obnoxious?...
I was lucky to start my social media journey when people were still trying to figure things out. It was a quiet place focused on people and relationships … almost to a fault. The pioneers in this space were radically anti-company, anti-advertising, and anti-measurement. I can remember one Chris Brogan rant in particular when he literally yelled at a corporate audience “This is not about your stupid company.”
Today, it is nearly ALL about your stupid company. The social web is like a carnival midway with shrill hucksters barking at you to come over to their stand.
And here is what most people have forgotten — Business has always been built on relationships, not people yelling at you. Social media used to be an extraordinary opportunity to build those relationships. And, it still can be....
Chipotle was the latest brand to engage in a “fake Twitter hack” marketing stunt, following in the footsteps of MTV and BET a few months ago. The intention behind these stunts is to clearly boost fans and followers for their brands, but, unfortunately, exposes a major flaw in how brand see their customers and how their perception of social is flawed. Furthermore, these types of theatrics deter from the game-change possibilities of how brands and customers can build mutually beneficial and long lasting relationships through these platforms...
While it may seem an oxymoron, the problem with marketing is it's full of marketers. Here's why we need to get back to "real" marketing....
I’m a marketer. In marketing, our mission, if you like, is to instill desire.You may see a product you like, but don’t necessarily need. Marketing’s job is to instill enough desire around that product to make you need, or want, it.While there are several facets to marketing – including the afore-mentioned desire, as well as awareness and promotion – the ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to increase growth of a brand....
At its simplest, marketing is the hub that holds much of sales, service, PR and more together. And while that’s part of marketing’s biggest strength, it’s also increasingly becoming its biggest weakness....
... What is it going to take to realize there's a better way to do things? It strikes me as odd that we've taken the old style of mass marketing, which itself has been competing for attention and eyeballs for years, and simply moved it over to digital marketing - and then, to make matters worse, have transferred that to social media. If we weren't satisfied with the results we were seeing in the primary model, what makes us think that repeating it elsewhere would solve our problems?...
|
Continuing my curated series of worthwhile "best of" posts from 2014, this one from Fast Company takes a look at some of the wins and fails in branding. Enjoy it over a relaxing eggnog.