Brand Central Station

It seems like some marketing questions can never be answered, doesn’t it?  Well, when it comes to who’s brand is better, the folks over at Brand Tags have the solution.

The Battle of the Brands.

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Jameson Hsu reports about in-game advertising online on the Adotas blog.  It’s an excellent report on the popularity of online gaming and how to leverage their advertising value.  Web-based games are extremely popular, visted by over 30% of all online users around the world.  As Jameson points out:

“(Online) games appeal to teens, moms and seniors alike who fuel the enormous demand throughout the world to play them. In parallel with this trend, game advertising technology has emerged enabling advertisers to reach the engaged gaming audience with rich, targeted ads that allow independent game developers to make money.”

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Sometimes the infatuation Apple brand evangelists feel is a bit too much for me.  I’m not so proud to re-count the nightmarish experiences I’ve had with random Mac-heads in airports – but that’s another story for another time.

This picture gives you an idea of what unbridled brand loyalty can do.  In this particular case, an APple fan in Japan “branded” his crop of Fuji apples with the Apple trademark, iPods and Apple/Heart marks by adhearing stickers to the fruits while they were rippening.  You can read more about it on the PSFK blog.

For those of you living under a rock, Quantum of Solace opened this weekend and did pretty respectable numbers ($30M more than Casino Royale).  So, in honor of the new James Bond and the very 60′s ideals represented by the franchise, I give you …

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdLYvvzOX0g]

Enjoy.

Laura Reis’ blog post about focusing brands on owning the category and not the name is right on the money.  Too many marketers are looking for the next big brand extension – the equivalent of a profitable sequel in the movie business (like Toy Story II or Godfather II or James Bond 20+).

Sequels, like all brand extensions, are desirable because they are “safer” than developing an idea from scratch.  If successful, a “defining” brand becomes synonomis with the product it represents.  This is part of the cognitive process for humans and it’s part of the reason why drastic logo changes for established brands can cause such angst among consumers (re: Pepsi).
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Skip Lindberg, resident genius at Maple Creative and author of the Marketing Genius blog gives us a good rant about what’s not quite right with Walmart’s identity makeover. 

Skip brings up a problem faced by dozens of brands going through an identity re-boot: a mark that looks too much like another brand that may – or may not – be complimentary.  In this case, Skip says (and I agree) that Walmart’s new mark looks too much like the Holiday Inn mark located on hundreds of marquis signs throughout America.

Yikes.

I have another problem with the new Walmart mark and that goes directly to the discount chain’s “every day low pricing” positioning.  The retailer offers that positioning as some kind of guarantee.  But the new mark looks too much like an asterisk for me to take any kind of guarantee seriously.

Am I reading too much into this or is it a real problem?  Let me know what you think.

Rick Houcek, a regular contributor to the Marketing Headhunter blog, offers seven helpful tips when it comes to mentoring (no matter whether those being mentored are employees, co-workers, friends, kids, etc.).  Rick’s tips include the following:

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As in many parts of the country, it’s been “Obamamania” here. Expectations are being set very high, despite the incoming administration’s best efforts. But if Americans are anything, they’re optimistic and President-elect Obama’s soaring rhetoric seems to reinforce that.

But what is the “upside” to an Obama administration as viewed by those people not living in the USA? We took a moment to ask some of our partners in the ECCO International Public Relations Network – all owners or managers of small and mid-sized public relations or marketing consultancies. What they told us was insightful, especially for those US-based brands who rely on exports to buoy sales revenues when the going gets tough at home.

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The adgoodness Blog featured this clever guerilla marketing campaign for The Modern Shoe Hospital (a place where you can take your worn-out shoes for a re-tread/repair and extend their life).

The campaign involves distributing “camoflauged” band-aids, sticky side up, on sidewalks all over the city (St. John’s, Newfoundland).  Littering issues aside, the campaign is pretty clever for delivering a relevant message right where it needs to go (on the sole of one’s shoe).  Click here for a larger image of the campaign.

The Modern Shoe Hospital’s agency is Target, located in St. John’s.

Received a press release from out-of-home media group, Encompass Outdoor, touting the success of their advertising program on the outside of dry cleaning bags.  The bags, millions of them, are distributed throughout major metro areas like New York City and feature full-color ads for advertisers, thereby bringing an out-of-home message into the home.

According to the release from Encompass:

In 2008, Encompass Outdoor introduced eco-friendly, biodegradable dry cleaning bags and accented their first program for Bank of America with branded dry cleaning recycling boxes in each participating location.

The stongest feature of Encompass Outdoor’s dry cleaning bag programs remains the vibrant, 4-color process, magazine quality printing that clients have come to expect. This printing capability offers clients all the flexibility and quality they need to convey their message.

We enjoy creative new approaches to out-of-home advertising – you know, stuff that goes beyond the reach of transit ads or painted sides of buildings.  Given the market segmentation/message delivery possibilities of a medium like dry cleaning bags, this may have some real potential. 

The assumed impediment to real, measurable success is the dry cleaners themselves and just how much work they’re willing to put into their “message delivery” service beyond getting the right clothes to the right customers.

File this one under: Interesting.

Polaroid, that once proud brand of “instant” photography is still alive and kicking – as an international brand of digital photography.  The Polaroid web site features palm-sized, instant photo printers, digital frames and the like.  They’ve re-positioned the brand to be all about the technology.

But someone has hijacked part of the brand equity they left behind though, and gone retro with it.  In fact, Poladroid has released a computer application that takes your old-fashioned, digital pictures and makes them sooper-cool, Polaroid-esque images.

According to the Make The Logo Bigger blog:

This is pretty damn cool. Poladroid is a desktop app that takes any digital image you have and converts it into the classic look associated with the brand. While it probably uses Photoshop algorithms to create the effect, you don’t need no stinkin’ Photoshop—just drag and drop a photo on the app and watch it slowly convert like a real Polaroid™ image. (My before and after test.) They also have a Flickr group to upload images to.

It’s fun, if not particularly useful.  But for 40-somethings like me, it’s a worthy 15-minute diversion on a workday and an interesting use of what remains of Polaroid’s brand equity.

Of course, I’ll have to wait until the Windows version is released.  Poladroid is only available for Mac-heads at the moment.

What started out as a humorous video we found on The Hidden Persuader blog turned us onto a much more interesting story of intellectual property protection involving a small development firm (Hottrix) and Coors – with Apple stuck in the middle of the entire imbroglio. 

Hottrix has produced a number of applications for the iphone that leverage the device’s unique sensing features.  One in particular, iBeer, is a favorite (#22) on the iphone appstore and costs only $3 to download.  But its vaunted position and revenue potential were initially threated by a free application offered by Coors called iPint.

According to news sources, the two applications were virtually identical and Hottrix moved quickly to have iPint removed from the appstore and made a $12.5 million claim against Coors.  You can read more about it here.

For marketers, the implications are pretty clear: intellectual property for new media devices (like iphones) is subject to the same protection as other entertainment property like music, images, etc.  And in a social media environment, there is a high likelihood that a staggering financial loss can be racked up in a very short amount of time.  Check your sources carefully and make sure you take the right precautions before giving away “the next big thing” for free.