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Do Brands Matter Anymore?
There’s an old joke, “What’s the difference between a porcupine and a BMW?” Answer? “With the porcupine the pricks are on the outside.” I think it’s very funny and, quite often, not far from the truth. Not withstanding what you think of people who drive BMWs, in this auto-obsessed country, nothing says as much about us as the brand of car we wrap around ourselves.
The last time I looked, all cars have four wheels, an engine and a steering wheel. But it’s the external image of the individual brands or models that often drives our purchasing decision. It’s essentially a positioning statement of who we are and our value propositions. So what do some car brands say about us?
Chevrolet: “I’m an American, dammit, and I refuse to send my money overseas for a good car.”
Accord: “Who cares if a gazillion people own one too? I’ll never be stuck in the repair shop.”
Mercedes: “Hey everyone, it’s wonderful in here. Sorry you can’t be here with me. Ha, just kidding!”
Prius: “See me? I paid more for this so I could save the planet for the rest of you.”
Hummer: “Screw the planet and the rest of you. I deserve to get where I want in the biggest hunk of metal I can afford.”
Okay, those are just my impressions, but the point is, brands do matter, even as our global economy continually puts more and more low priced commodities out there for us to choose from. In fact, your brand matters more today than ever before. Are you taking care of it? Or does it need a good wash and wax, perhaps some dents straightened … and hey, is that duct tape holding your old logo and positioning line together? Brand image will always affect the market’s interest, the price you can charge and the number of customers who will come back for another purchase.
What do I drive? Um … a BMW. Yeah, some people would probably say that joke was written with people like me in mind.
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
HRB’s Week in Review – March 5th
In a blaze of smoke and flame this week, the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce unveiled to the community its new brand identity that includes an updated name, new logo and tagline – created by Henry Russell Bruce.
After research was conducted with members and community leaders, “The Chamber” was chosen as the organization’s name. The new logo features a hand and torch, which personifies the active leadership of The Chamber. The bright flame represents igniting business opportunities. The tagline “Champion for a Greater Cedar Rapids” reflects the proactive nature of The Chamber’s mission and speaks both to its purpose and the geographic reach of the community it serves.
For nearly a month before the brand launch, The Chamber ran a teaser campaign showing a flame and asking, “Are you carrying the torch?”
In creating the new logo and brand identity HRB took The Chamber through its extensive proprietary BrandPlan™ process.
HRB created two additional elements for the brand launch: a 10-second Flash animation for the Web in which a flame burns through the old logo to reveal the new one, and a 15-second animated commercial to air on KCRG.
Our Senior VP and Director of Internet Operations, Jeff McEachron, made two highly successful social media presentations in the Quad Cities this week – one to a major university and the other to a group of top corporate marketing managers.
HRB has finalized its live 2010 seminar series for Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and the Quad Cities for the remainder of the year and will be posting the content on the Web site soon.
We added a new healthcare client in the patient transportation field. We’ll be doing rebranding and public relations for this essential community asset that helps save lives.
For our earth stabilization client in Iowa City we developed a new name and new brand identity, including a logo and tag line. Currently HRB is managing a large event scheduled for mid-April for the client and will soon be starting a public relations campaign.
We’ve started work on the next direct mail campaign for a large casino and hotel client in Illinois. That will hit the mail in the next couple of weeks.
Planning for a large live seminar in April for an Iowa City client is underway. It will include continuing education credits and media coverage.
Jim Thebeau
Partner/CEO
Follow me on Twitter @JimThebeau
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jimthebeau
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Building a New Web: A New-level of Interaction
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At the heart of the new development process while working on websites is the emphasis on improving how we interact with the websites we visit, and making them more intuitive to use for those that haven’t learned how to use a computer yet. Ideally, the websites will be intuitive enough that people will no longer need to use trial and error or follow tutorials before they understand how to use the site. A key element to that is providing real-time feedback without the need to take the user to a new page or make them refresh.
Now that the more basic elements of website design are well established, people are free to focus on making sure that the site is user-friendly and a joy to use. One way to accomplish this is to make the site more lively with subtle animations that give the user hints that they can interact with it. Users can hopefully appreciate the time that is saved whenever an action is made or feedback is given without the need to take them to another page. Instead, JavaScript is used to make the update right on the page they’re already on. It can show it instantly if it’s a small amount of information, but if that’s too jarring the developer might add in a little animation.
JavaScript has influenced a large part of the development of HTML5, and is also available to a larger percentage of the users on the internet than years prior. That in consideration, interactions in the way that provides real-time, easy to understand, and a level of consistency will most likely use your web browser’s built-in JavaScript capabilities rather than using an external plugin.
In my last post about animation, I mentioned how Flash still has it’s place in web design but simple interactions are the first thing to be changed from being programed in Flash to JavaScript. This really furthers the point.
Kurt Zenisek
Web Developer
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kzeni
Henry Russell Bruce is a full-service advertising agency and Internet marketing firm that focuses on branding, developing and executing marketing roadmaps, and growing companies.
Social Media Make Muffins Disappear
As we all learn more about the power of social media we are also learning about the best uses of it. Not every type is right for every business. We’ve seen businesses make mistakes of trying them all on for size and ending up with a mess.
It is just like public relations, advertising or marketing, there are strategies and tactics that work well for certain audiences as well as what you are trying to sell. One of my favorites and one of the most effective social media campaigns is the Intern Hero campaign orchestrated by Little Debbie (a brand of cookie- and cake-based dessert snacks from McKee Foods Corporation headquartered in Collegedale, Tenn.)
Wanting to reach the college demographic, Little Debbie decided to reward our nation’s interns and to promote Little Debbie Muffins. It created a campaign that caught on quickly. The summer of 2009, Little Debbie gave out 200 large sampler boxes of Little Debbie muffins to currently employed interns in the continental United States.
All they had to do is take a picture of themselves with a sign asking for muffins. Little Debbie put up a Twitter page, Facebook page as well as a blog where they posted these antics.
In the end, “everyone” was talking about it. People were blogging about it. That means people were reading about Little Debbie muffins. And, when you go to the store this week, you just might buy Little Debbie muffins.
The success of this campaign came from the fact that it was simple, targeted, viral, and fun! These are all elements that are needed to make any social campaign a success.
Now, I’ve not tried the muffins, but Little Debbie is a staple at my house. My favorite is the Swiss Cake Rolls – what is your favorite?
Shelby Kraus
Vice President, Public Relations
Account Manager
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
Social Media Monitoring: Automate It
Twitter just released a report saying that there are now 50 million tweets every day (600 tweets per second). With such a substantial volume of people messaging each other it’s good to know that there’s tools out there to help you find, monitor, and automate exactly what you’re interested in. There’s tools that range from simple and easy to use to ones that provide a feature-set that is seemingly endless. So let’s start out covering the tools that everyone can jump in and start using before we go into the more advanced managing and monitoring services.
Seesmic Look (Twitter)
Seesmic Look is the latest Twitter application to be released, and is also one of the most interesting. It’s unique focus on making it obvious to the that the information being received is updated “real-time” helps beginning users grasp the concept of the always connected and always up-to-date websites that have been emerging. In addition to it’s new interface, it provides the ability to easily browse other users and popular topics people are talking about. The most useful feature is its search functionality. You can search for a term and Look will give you a list of “tweets” where the term was mentioned. The search term can be saved and easily monitored throughout the day.
Google Alerts has been around for years, but it’s still greatly valuable. Google has been watching social media sites very closely and has been integrating them into search results. One benefit of including social media sites is you can use a Google Alert to send an email to you whenever a certain term is mentioned on the web. This great because these notifications include every result in Google’s massive search index.
Seesmic Desktop (Twitter & Facebook)
What if you’re active on both Twitter and Facebook and require something more real-time than Google Alerts? Surely you don’t want to use separate applications for each website when there’s Seesmic Desktop. With the integration of both Facebook and Twitter, Seesmic Desktop takes the browsing and searching features of Look and makes them more customizable.The multiple column layout might take some time to get used to, but the ability to monitor multiple social media accounts, saved searches, users, and groups of users at all at once is a great time saver.
There’s also Seesmic Web, a website with similar features & functionality but is lacking facebook support.
HootSuite (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, & more)
HootSuite is one of the most robust social media tool available today, and is a publisher’s best friend. It shares the same column view that Seesmic Desktop uses and includes all of the features that the program has to offer. That’s just the start though, because there’s a pretty large feature list. The way it handles accounts is pretty unique, and very useful. They allow you to add “editors” that can access/update your accounts (you choose which accounts each editor has access to). In terms of posting, you have the ability to schedule a tweet/post/etc. and even have it publish out to multiple accounts at once. You can automate your posts by attaching an RSS feed to an account and choosing the behavior of how it’s going to publish new items. Being a publishing tool, they allow you to take any of the columns you create and embed it on a website as a self-contained widget. An important feature that most tools are lacking is the ability to track referrers, click throughs, and other statistics for each of your accounts. HootSuite is highly recommended if you’re taking your social media relations seriously, and are willing to spend the time to learn the tool.
With out using tools, social media and brand monitoring and be a very expensive and time consuming task. These are a few solutions that will help automate the process, save you time, and save your organization money. In terms of tools, there’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking whether you’re a beginner or someone or social media junkie.
Jeff McEachron
Senior Vice President
Director, Internet Operations
Follow me on Twitter @Jeff_McEachron
Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmceachron
Henry Russell Bruce is a strategic marketing and Internet marketing firm that uses research, brand-building, advertising, media buying and planning, design, public relations, Web design and strategies to help clients grow market share, generate new business, create brand loyalty and measure marketing results to build and support its clients' brands. HRB, founded in 1973, has offices in Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa. For more information, contact HRB.
