Category Archives: Branding

Landor on “High Street Dreams”

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Left to right: Ben, Brett, James and EllieIf you can watch BBC iPlayer from your location, my Landor colleagues have made an appearance tonight on BBC entrepreneurial reality show “High Street Dreams” and I think came across very well, while producing their usual stunning work and knocking spots off the other agency on that show.

Link to start:
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/i/t154d/

Link to first appearance of Landor:
http://beta.bbc.co.uk/i/t154d/?t=31m33s

BTW One thing they don’t show, is that a couple of weeks later, blacksmith-lady Becks has made a tattoo of the pink anvil logo designed for her. How’s that for a client advocacy of the work?!

Don’t fall into the creative industry’s well curve

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I stumbled across an old Dan Pink post, referring to a yet older article of his in wired, talking about well curves.

This is a recurring pattern in many industries, where it replaces the more familiar bell curve. A simple example will be the fact that while big companies are getting bigger, we now have new small companies which are smaller than companies ever were.

It his post, Pink links two news items showing how the middle tier of the legal services industry deteriorates. On the low end – people will just get basic services online, which started with simple contracts, but quickly progressed into more complex services like divorce agreements. All for record-breaking low prices. On the other end of the well you get the big offices charging record-breaking high prices for high-end, bespoke services.

If you’re a law firm that used to make a lot of money out of divorce contracts but can’t justify a price premium any more – you’ll be falling into the well…

Make no mistake – this is happening in design and across the creative industry .

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Branding reconstructed, further reading

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This is a list of suggested further reading I made for my post-graduate  lecture series at the London College of Communication. Sorry, but I don’t have the time to add links to amazon today…

Semiotics, cultural theory and media studies

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Barthes’ short passages are prototypical examples of a semiotic critique of culture. The distance between what he does and practical marketing may seem big, but hopefully our course demonstrated this is not the case.

Hall, Sean. This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics. London: Laurence King Publishers, 2007.
A lucid visual introduction to semiotics. Compromised of extremely concise essays, each opening with a question using signs and images, followed by a debate of possible answers introducing key semiotic concepts.

McLuhan, Marshal. Understanding Media. New York: Routledge, 2005.
It’s worth travelling beyond the more common text of “the medium is the message” to get better acquainted with McLuhan’s seminal work. He explores the ways we reinvent ourselves through our technologies and make them our extensions, mainly discussing media related technologies and their sociological and psychological implications. Marketing, being a communication based practice, makes these dense, abstract, ideas surprisingly relevant, if not useful.

Marketing & Branding, theory and practice

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There’s permission marketing and there’s attrition marketing

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Oh, Virgin, Virgin, this is not how I’d expect a so called rebel brand to behave.

The oldest trick in the spammer’s handbook, brought up to a new level. Just how convoluted is that?

Sigh… The road’s still long.

 

(This was encountered on a credit card application)

“Brand strategy reconstructed”, a series of lectures at the London College of Communication

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I’ve been invited to lecture at the LCC, one of London’s finest creative education institutes.
Starting next Monday, I’ll be giving a series of six lectures/talks (with view to extend them if it all goes well) to postgraduate students across the different disciplines. This adventure was sparked by prof. Ian Noble while collaborating with his “Graphic Branding & Identity” students on a Brandinstinct pro-bono project.

I’ve always rejected the myth of the suits/creatives split. Have always maintained a common language between marketing, design and other media is important and empowering to everyone involved. Hopefully, I can introduce some useful concepts and break some myths.

(And in case it doesn’t come through: OMG!!!!1! I’m so bloody psyched about this!)

Brand strategy reconstructed
How marketing lost the plot and how it might find meaning again

Marketing is a discipline in crisis. For the last decades it has become evident to practitioners and scholars alike that many of the trusted old methods were just not cutting it any more. Worse, it now seems some of them weren’t valid in the first place. This series of contemplative talks brings together ideas from narrative studies, semiotics and cultural theory to drive design thinking in solving the challenges of postmodern marketing. Numerous examples will be given from actual projects, popular culture and recent marketing cases.

The first six talks:

1. Marketing, meaning & decadence: an introduction to the sophistication of marketing sign-systems and their tendency to degenerate.
2. Suspicious minds: the myth of “a consumer subject”.
3. On branding and meaning: can a simplified theoretical tool-box cut through buzzwords and hype?
4. Advanced narrative marketing: the untold story of brand stories.
5. Marketing plots: cultural pattern-recognition as a strategic tool.
6. Embracing the mess: how clients and agencies are changing their work culture and methods to encourage more sustainable marketing strategies.

Mondays@17:00, Starting May 18th, excluding 25/5 (bank holiday) and 8/6 (prior obligation).

To my non-UK readers: London College of Communication, formerly London College of Printing, is the largest constituent College of the University of the Arts London, Europe’s largest university dedicated to art, communication, design and related technologies.
Two graduates Israeli readers will know are David Tartakover & Alex Livak.