#branding blunders

Branding Blunders That Can Sink Your Startup

Branding Blunders That Can Sink Your Startup. Branding in itself is a big and beautiful intense subject. And once the social media braggingin, the branding and protection domain has become even more hyped and tricky. Now a product or a brand can enjoy the global presence and engage & interact subsequent to clients even from overseas. But as soon as such omnipresent advantage comes immense…

Here’s How Pricing can be Manipulated to Benefit Your Small Business Pricing of your product (s) isn’t just an element which can drive sales of your small business or put a full stop to it; it’s an intelligent marketing strategy altogether.

Branding is one area where a small business cannot afford to go wrong. Older businesses have the benefit of brand equity, so their branding mistakes can be overcome with little damage.

The Brief: Stella Artois, a very popular Belgium Beer has announced what the company refers to as its “Chalice Can.” The big benefit? You can now have Stella Artois in a can.

The Blunder? Stella insults its customers by falsely creating a brand attribute. Specifically, giving the impression that something is special when it is without question completely ordinary. This is not Pet Rock brilliance, this is not Lucky Strike creativity, the Chalice Can is marketing pablum of the most grotesque kind.

Coke’s shapely new aluminum can is exotic and fun, Guinness's new can has a feature that activates on opening to recreate the famous Guinness poor. Stella Artois’s big can promotion offers nothing of the sort. It’s simply a can with a drawing of their famous chalice glass.

The ad gives the impression that the can is special in some manner. It is not. It’s a joke. It’s “branding BS”. The packaging offers nothing of value, other than the regular benefits of a can, which is to say, it’s cheaper than a bottle. This is the kind of “creative” that makes people suspicious of advertisers and branders. When you create mistrust, you put your brand at risk.

The Real SpongeBob SquarePants

According to Access Hollywood, SpongeBob SquarePants is a “Cash Cow” and generated “$8 Billion in merchandising revenue for Nickelodeon.” The 2009 report, covering SpongeBob’s 10th anniversary reported that President Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown were both fans who watched the show with their children.

The Brief: SpongeBob is an anchor brand for Nickelodeon and as a result requires great attention to detail when it comes to approving deals to license the character to manufacturers for specialty and retail products. Agreeing to poorly made products or products that misrepresent the character brand can cause great harm to the company who owns the likeness and it’s associated copyrights and trademarks.

For instance, you would not have SpongeBob in an advertisement promoting Shark Fin Soup. You wouldn’t have him shown behind a harpoon on a whaling vessel. While those concepts seem blatant and obvious blunders, what I’m referring to is a more nuanced, but equally important consideration–the unequivocal brand attributes of a product. To a brander, a product’s indisputable brand attributes make the brand what it is and directly affect how it is perceived in the public. It’s what makes it unique, sellable and defensible in the marketplace.

That’s why this licensed product, sold at Target, was so disturbing to me. Target, a well respected retailer, during this past week’s back to school sale had this SpongeBob Puzzle in a prominent place on its shelf and the shocking thing to me was that SpongeBob SquarePants was ROUND.

While I appreciate the clever product, which seemed well made, there are any number of characters the manufacturer could have chosen. I think that whomever is in charge of SpongeBob SquarePants licensing completely lost the plot on this deal. It’s not ok to have a product which is known (and loved) for being square and having a licensed application of it where it’s as round as round can be.

Is it a blunder? Yes, but not an end of the world sort. SpongeBob SquarePants, is about more than being a shape, SpongeBob’s brand attributes also incorporate his personality, which is “square” in the social sense. Squareness as it applies to SpongeBob relates to his ideology of looking at the bright side of life, naive, doing the right thing, being positive, upbeat and always helping friends in need. SpongeBob is not hip, he’s Square, and fans around the world love him for it.

Allowing someone to make a product whose main value proposition is that it’s a “round puzzle” should be an obvious no deal for SpongeBob. While the amount of income generated by this single product may equate to a financial rounding error, the real blunder is presenting a confusing message to young kids who are not completely familiar with the brand.

How to avoid this blunder: If you plan on making a licensing deal, think carefully if the licensee is introducing something which could present your brand attributes in an inconsistent manner. The Hulk is Green (not Gold), Steve Jobs wears Black turtlenecks (not Red) and most everyone knows that SpongeBob is Square (not Round). While some may think it’s a cute and ironic idea, I say agreeing to branding attribute confusion is never acceptable for such an important brand asset. Protect it with all you can muster, because allowing one deviation from the norm can create a very slippery slope. SpongeBob gets into enough trouble on TV and in the movies, let’s hope his handlers don’t make a mess of him in real life.

The Brief: Political season is upon us and although it’s a bit late, I thought I’d start this season’s political branding blunders with the introduction of the Democrats new logo. While I’m still a holdout for the President to pull something out of his hat and save our Economy, I can’t imagine from where DNC Chairman, Tim Kaine pulled out the idea for the new DNC logo. If you follow Branding Blunders at all, you know that far too often, not long before a defeat or period of poor performance, a hack marketer will push to create a new logo, thinking somehow it will fix everything.

You also know it’s a sign of desperation to engage in such a practice without having something new to offer. The Democrats are no exception to make mistakes in this manner. The new “D” logo was introduced two months before the Dems had their rear-ends handed to them by Republicans and Tea Party candidates in November of last year, who were able to tell a more compelling story and differentiate themselves more effectively.

NYC company SS+K  designed the logo, but I’m hard-pressed to think that they came up with this on their own, it’s just so “nothing.” More likely than not, they dealt with lots of folks who were unqualified to make such decisions. If you’re a small business owner, never risk your company’s future to the whims of staff members who are not professional marketers or designers. If you're a professional marketing or designer, politicians and small businesses need you to be courageous and lead them to success. if you cave in to be a people pleaser, than you have nobody to blame but you for your failure.

I can guess what kind of marching orders they received, something to the effect of, “Hey, we want something that looks like the Obama logo, that was so cool! Can you do that, but tie in something that says Democrat?” I’m sure SS+K got way more than they bargained for on this project, because politicians are not designed to be creative, they are designed to be consensus builders and great heart wrenching, life changing design is not built by consensus.

Is it a blunder? Oh yes! The new logo lacks any hint of America or patriotism. It lacks any hint at legacy. It lacks any hint for a vision of the future. Overall the new DNC logo is simply lacking and it's a horrible reflection upon the Democratic Party.

How to avoid this blunder: Do not allow your staffers to insert themselves to drive the development of your new brand. A great designer will tell you if you’re better off keeping what you’ve got, but staffers will be unable to make such a recommendation. The attraction of working on a project where they can pretend to be an artist and have no true responsibility will be far too enticing for them to reject.

The Brief: When it comes to Justin Bieber’s new “Singing Toothbrush” Point of Purchase (POP) display, I guess there’s not much to smile about. The teen heartthrob, is hawking a gimmicky new product on TV that clearly states “Get Your Bieber Smile Today.” Ironically, the junior pitchman is pouting on the packaging rather than presenting his pearly whites.

This is about consistency and making sure all the areas of your communications are in harmony and that everything is reinforcing the story you’re trying to convey to the market. In this case it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the kid should be smiling. If the tag line suggests you get your "Bieber Smile," then it would be helpful to reinforce the smile which one would be getting.

Is this a blunder? Yup, but perhaps a bit more nuanced than our normal BB posts. Clearly it's a mistake not to reinforce the product value proposition and tag line with the kid’s smiling mug. Quite simply, the Creative Director screwed up by choosing the wrong photos for the project. This also happens more often than you think and it costs businesses big. Convey the wrong message and you fail to close the sale. It's just that simple.

AdAge Website (Entry Page: Notice big YuMe ad banner top right)

YuMe.com Official Website

YuMe.com Product Page (remember, it's a video ad network)

YuMe.com Third level product page (and still no video)

The Brief: You’d think a high-tech video ad network would choose video to tell its story to interested prospects. If you’re in charge of advertising at YuMe, the video ad network in question, you’d probably think that’s too obvious and instead go for something even more edgy, like a “sexy” stock photo of a Swiss Army Knife. This pig is no prize. And trust me, spending 4 minutes on their site provides no reward for the effort. I was a perfect prospect for this company. Even if the product was for a large agency, I would have still enjoyed learning about the tech and promote it to all my advertising and marketing friends, several of whom have agencies that YuMe would love to hold a meeting with. Sponsoring a video advertising channel does not make you a video advertising expert, it simply opens the door for them to tell prospects their story. The company’s ad banner promotes the idea of “Taking control of your video revenue.” I’m not going to get into how uninspiring that concept is, and I engage in video advertising myself. YuMe’s combination of cheesy stock photos and dense, multicolored blocks of text shout that the Engineering Nerds are in charge of marketing at YuMe. Unfortunately for them, this is not 1999. It’s not even 2009. YuMe is so far behind the times, in fact, that I’m surprised they received any funding for their offering at all.  Even if I give them the benefit of the doubt that their technology is above reproach, there’s no incentive to dig through the company’s dense, visually noisy site to eek out a bit of understanding. They are likely suffering from a long sales cycle that’s terribly expensive. Is this a blunder? Yes. Why? Because the site offers no compelling incentive to contact a rep, schedule an appointment or download anything. If YuMe, does not have enough belief in video to use it to tell it’s own story, why should anyone believe that they know what they’re doing. Their focus on trying to deliver impressive data and analytics using colored blocks of text and random photos of dazed zombies looking at LCD panels is tantamount to a farce. (Now that I think about it, tying their ad concept to Hollywood style Zombies, watching video advertising would be a far more engaging approach for them.) YuMe, I’ll let you know where to send the check.

Advertising on AdAge is not cheap. Especially considering it was presented as though it was legit content from AdAge. In actuality, a little extra review shows that the AdAge page where YuMe resides is a “Sponsored Channel” (Read: Advitorial). 

The bottom line is that YuMe’s web site blew it. No video on its home page and no video on its two product pages. I tried random others and it took me nearly 4 minutes to find any kind of video on the site. By the way, that available video was simply samples of client videos, nothing promoting their own product.