If you’re an owner of content, you are faced with the rock-and-a-hard-place discussed below: content is plentiful and plenty of it is free, so how are you going to make money?
Yes, you can make your content the absolute best in class, and you will find a fraction of your audience that will pay because your content is just so damn good, but on a grand scale you can’t really add value to content. You need to come at the problem from the other side and add value to the consumer.
Social media, the tools we have now to learn about people, and the new way we build relationships between people and brands- these are the ways you’ll make each and every consumer more valuable. Display ads are nowhere – they’re a megaphone to an undifferentiated and indifferent world. But if you tell me you can reach Northwest dads in their 50s who rock climb and recently quit smoking (which you easily can, by mining plentifully available data) – and if you are a modern brand that’s built direct and personal relationships with those consumers- suddenly you’ve added value to those consumers, who, in turn, add value to you.

Great article by Martin Lindstrom in Fast Company yesterday on the most “addictive sounds” in the world – measured using neurological studies. Here’s his list of the top 10 branded sounds (i.e., sonic brands of one kind or another) in terms of their effect on the brain:

Top 10 Branded sounds:
1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
7. State Farm
8. AT&T Ringtone
9. Home Depot
10 Palm Treo Ringtone

It’s amazing to me that there are so few contemporary examples of a “sonic brand”, “sonic identity”, or “audio signature”. Look at (or listen to!) the sheer memory power of these brands. The MTV guitar riff (created by Elias Arts and originally accompanying the “moon landing” visuals at MTV’s launch) is a million miles (and many years) away from what MTV is today- yet it’s familiar to so many.

There are quite a few great companies out there in the world of sonic identity, yet it’s a field that receives little attention.
My experience when attempting to evolve audio brands at corporations has too often been that people just don’t get excited about them. At one company, I had over half a million dollars in my budget for a visual identity and fairly basic website. After much case-making, I got $20,000 to try to develop an audio brand.

We are bombarded with visuals today. Millions of dollars are spent on creating a visual identity – why so little attention paid to a few notes that impact a different part of the brain, literally increasing “mind share”?

1) Choose a name that reflects both your brand soul and what your business actually does. “Brand soul” is the spirit you want your company to have: energetic, happy, meditative, efficient, etc. This is hard to quantify but is made up largely of a) associated meaning and b) sound. “Metaphorical” names can fit this bill. A metaphorical name is a real word or compound of words that relates to your brand and to what your brand wants to say- but is not purely literal.
Java is a great metaphorical name for a product – fun to say, easy to spell, and while it’s both a little bit exotic and slang, everyone knows that it means something that wakes you up- something exciting.
Basecamp is another great product name in this category. It connotes structure and reliability, yet a sense of adventure. A basecamp is what you return to for comfort after, say, a foray up Everest. A project/task management tool is what keeps you sane while climbing the young-company mountain. (Note that Basecamp doesn’t have basecamp.com – they use basecamphq.com – and still returns at top of search.)
Personally, we’re not haters of all “nonsense” names, because they can be playful and fun-sounding. I think the much-maligned Google is a great name: it’s fun to say, it can be used as a verb, it has a meaning that’s cool for early adopters and employees, and they get to call their campus the Googleplex.
Want some terrible nonsense names? Flisp (makes you feel dyslexic just reading it). Plurn (playlist + burn). Oooooc.com.
Don’t go for a soulless corporate compound name (this seems to happen most often in rebrands): Accenture, Brand-Image, Integy, Xfinity. You want love for your brand. It has to have a personality.

2) Try to stay away from naming trends, particularly ones that arose from a dearth of available domains (i.e., the post-Flickr dropped-vowel trend). Not only do they get annoying, it’s instantly clear what year your company was founded.

3) Avoid the “Chevy Nova incident”**: Run your proposed name through as many translators, human and digital, as possible.

4) Pronounceability: If you want a global brand, think about people who do not natively speak your language (whatever that might be). Avoid sounds that are hard to say in your target markets. We had this issue with HauteLook, but the company gained so much traction that management decided against a name change.

5) Spelling Bee: Likewise, if you say the name to someone and they later search it, do they have a hope in hell of spelling it the way you do? Three-and four-letter names get a bit of a pass on this.

6) Uniqueness: Consider how your user will search for you. If you’re consumer Internet, for instance, it’s very likely they will type the brand name into the search bar rather than search for “cool Net utility I might like”. While we’re all for a name that relates to your business, don’t use generic words. (If we called ourselves “Strategy”, we’d be unsearchable. If you search for str.ate.gy, though, you will find us – although if we were the kind of company that gets business through search, we wouldn’t have named ourselves that, nor used a domain hack. We are actually called this because we didn’t want to fall into the agency trap of names like 27GreenFrogs and CandleMoo***. )

7) The “Beavis & Butthead” filter: If it would make a ten-year-old boy snicker, that’s not good.* You can be immature enough, just this once, to do this test. If you can’t, a) you might want to get help with that; b) go find someone with a refreshingly juvenile sense of humor and read your name shortlist to them. Names that fell into this pit: Fairtilizer, Tailrank, Ainol, Flowtown, and Nook*.

*Yes, a lot of people think iPad falls into this category. Apple isn’t perfect.

**The Chevy Nova story is actually an urban branding legend. The Mitsubishi Pajero, however, is a cautionary tale. As is WaterPik in Denmark.
***These are made-up names. I’m actually kind of liking CandleMoo.

We do quite a bit of naming here- companies and products- but we don’t usually blog, tweet, or generally gab that much about the process. Having hired a few naming firms myself (or been subjected to someone else’s hire), I’ve learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t work, and what is simply wasting time.
A few key things to remember in choosing a naming firm:

1) Work with someone who sets clear deliverables. Know how many names you are going to see on first pass, second, etc., what you need to do in response, and what the process is of getting to a shortlist.

2) Choose a firm that can work to your understanding of what a name should be. Given free rein, we tend to go for names which are both cool words and reflect what exactly your business does. Yes, you can brand names which have zero to do with your business, and that can be great, but if you don’t have to, why would you? When we named WeFi, a wifi hotspot-based social network, we got it all- a name that reflected the biz, a cool word that was fun to say and easy to spell, and a FOUR LETTER DOMAIN which we were able to purchase for about $2500.00.
That said, we have a lot of fun creating names that are less literal, have hidden meanings, or are just real imagination-catchers. You want a company that understands your parameters and priorities, and the kind of names to which you gravitate; a company that works with those guidelines- without delivering bad names just to please you. Also, if you’re going to purchase a domain to go with the name (as you almost certainly are), clarify whether you must have the .com (ideal of course) or whether you are open to a .net, a version of your name (getnewco.com), or even a domain hack (like our own http://str.ate.gy). We don’t love domain hacks except for very specific, somewhat renegade businesses, but it worked for del.icio.us (who eventually were purchased by Yahoo! and could then quite easily afford to buy delicious.com), and it might work for you. Make sure your namers know your stance on this.

3) Choose someone who understands and respects your resources and time.
For instance, regarding domains, you shouldn’t be given a bunch of names far outside your budget or (pet peeve here) names that have not been vetted at all for availability. This particularly applies to “parked” domains, because many of the early mass domain acquirers do not sell even when offered a huge multiple of what they might get from search. They think they have oceanfront property and you will never convince them otherwise. Once you are into the home stretch and looking at (in our process) 20-40 names, you should have at least a ballpark idea of whether each domain can be purchased and what it will cost (or if miracle of miracles, it’s available). Throw your namer a hundred bucks or so to register anything that’s actually available that’s close to the shortlist. We usually register all the domains we think are really cool ourselves for later use, with a clear clause in our contract that we have to GIVE the name our client chooses to the client.
There may be a few names that you love where the domain holder can’t be reached easily or is a pain to negotiate with, and in our naming projects we will include these, because and only because they are great- but we are always upfront that this particular name may just not be possible and that there must be a backup. We never want a client to fall in love with a name only to be told, with no prior awareness of issues, that it’s just not going to happen, or that the price tag is far out of their budget.

4) Once you are into the “homestretch” of 20-40 names, someone on one side or the other should have done at least a cursory trademark search. This can be done via the U.S. Patents & Trademarks Office (USPTO) and some judicious search. Clarify with your namers whether this is your responsibility or theirs. Trademark is a complicated area and can’t be assessed rapidly, but, like the unavailable or out of reach domains, why waste your time on a name when there is a clear trademark issue one search away?

5) Finally, it should not need to be said, but work with a company that follows the most basic rules of naming, which will be in the next post or so, but which include things like avoiding the “Chevy Nova incident” and running the name through the “Beavis & Butthead”/ten-year-old boy filter.

Happy naming!

Following upon the really interesting coverage Marc Gobe did in São Paulo – where no outdoor advertising of any kind is allowed, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers- The Artvertiser is a brilliant next step in public spaces, blurring the lines between public advertising and public art. From the site:

The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.
The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual ‘canvas’ on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device.
After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn’t matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.

Right now you need the Artvertiser’s own binoculars or webcams to see the substituted art, although an Android port is in the works.

Cool, yes? Everywhere a particular brand or campaign appears, it is replaced with a new image.

We live in a time when not only does advertising constantly use art to its own ends, but art subverts advertising.

image courtesy of the artvertiser

The New York Times yesterday announced its paid online model. The model’s very much like that used by The Financial Times: a visitor may read a certain number of articles for free, and after that is asked to subscribe for a flat fee.
The Times has been racking its collective brain for a couple years on which model to use and how to implement it. The thing is: the online newspaper is far more valuable than the print version. The core audience should be willing to pay, if they can also be made to recognize that fact.

What makes the online paper so much more compelling? It’s alive and evolving. In a time of instantaneous news, what will make an institution like the NYT relevant and valuable is layers of content and perspective.

No paper can compete on news, but today, the initial coverage of, say, the crisis in Haiti (it’s hard to think of much else right now) can be overlaid with new information (as facts come in), new perspectives (from different reporters and civilians on and off the scene, photos and video from those who are on the ground, and human stories from those affected. The story never ends; it is constantly augmented and remains relevant.

News is a universal commodity and it can’t be sold as-is. But if the New York Times can find a way to be the best at creating this kind of deep, evolving, honest, relevant story, then readers will pay.

(I wrote a post on this last April and have reposted it below. It’s about NYT entertainment content being made more valuable by the participatory nature of the Web. Also, Fred Wilson just wrote a great piece about the NYT and the “Freemium” model.)

I’ve talked about blogging vs. microblogging and do on occasion make my blog solely from my tweets, but I think one of the best uses of both forums is in a case where I want to expand past 140 characters on something that’s come up on the Twitter feed.

This came up today on Twitter – companies using recession/recessionary thinking in campaigns. Is this effective? (Yes, you’ll have to read the below Twitter convo bottom up just like in the Twitterverse.) The gist of this is: recession as marketing tool and is it effective, particularly in lifestyle businesses?

I don’t think so. I think consumers want reality, not recession talk. Instead of inflationary thinking (make your product so aspirational that you can charge whatever you like), they want realistic thinking (good product at an acceptable price point). That’s an appropriate response to recession. I think in olden days they called it “value”. Perceived value can be everything. Will write about that later, especially as it relates to digital entertainment content.

Anyway, the CEO of Citizens of Humanity denim gave me this excellent mini-case study. As a response to the economic climate, Citizens dropped a particular style’s retail price to $149 (Citizens jeans tend to start around $175, standard for premium denim). They did not reduce the quality – in fact they used a slightly more expensive fabric. Like smart businesspeople they asked their retail partners to participate in the bite and set the wholesale price a bit higher than normal, reducing the retail markup.

The jeans sold like crazy. Meanwhile- Rock & Republic, which is a highly aspirational brand- is not doing well with its “Recession Jeans”, which are actually called that, at an even lower price point.

Recession isn’t fun, and when we integrate it into our lifestyles as consumers, I think we want to call it “value” or being “conscious” – something that makes us feel as though we are gracefully relating to reality- maybe even making reality cool (as in, it’s now cool to downsize your lifestyle). I don’t want to wear the recession.

BTW, @bkm55 is Brian Mitchison, VP of Marketing at Blast Radius. They do GREAT work.

@bkm555 I don’t think “recessionista” has worked as a term that resonates with consumers, do you? Who wants to wear the recession?about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck in reply to bkm555

@bkm555 Exactly- the appropriate action in a recession is more or at least the same for less, not less for less with a cute name.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck in reply to bkm555

bkm555@elizabrooks great example. I understand appropriate actions are required in a recession, but not marketing spin.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck in reply to elizabrooks

@bkm555 Rock&Republic did “Recession Jeans” at about $120 & failed. Citizens did $149 jeans @ usual quality & no recession talk w/successabout 1 hour ago from TweetDeck in reply to bkm555

bkm555Using recession themes in mrk seems too contrived.about 2 hours ago from web

bkm555Journalist request: looking for companies that are using the recession in their campaigns. Not a big fan of this approach.about 2 hours ago from web

Just finished lunch with Marc Gobé, friend, mentor, and the man behind Emotional Branding (where I’m an advisor):
emotionalbranding.com
The topic of conversation was largely…conversations. The conversations brands have with their customers, the conversations customers have with and around brands, and how to aggregate the conversation in a way that makes sense. For instance, I’m working my way through and testing the available Twitter tools so that I can ask a question both here and on Twitter, and bring the various comments and discussions back here in one place, making the discussion more immediate and vibrant.

The conversation idea is of course not new. It’s the tools we have to engage it which are multiplying. But does every brand need a conversation? If I’m P&G and a majority of my brands improve various areas of the home experience, I’m going to build something successful like homemadesimple.com . This is an ongoing engagement with my customer and although my brands are present throughout, it’s not blatantly brandcentric nor intrusive, and in fact it’s possible to completely miss the branding (this is a good thing). So, P&G and Tide, Cascade, Dawn, Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Febreze, etcetera, definitely benefit from having this conversation and so do their consumers.

Marc and I wondered, though: does a company which makes, say, galvanized pipe for irrigation need a brand conversation? What attributes does pipe need to have besides being strong, not leaking,  and being well-priced in its market? It would seem ridiculous to have social actions for a pipe manufacturer, right? Well, yes, and no.
For the sake of galvanized pipe discussion, I looked at Morrill Industries . Turns out there are an awful lot of attributes to galvanized irrigation pipe, none of which are probably fascinating to brand people- but they definitely justify a conversation about “Couplers, Tees, Crosses, 90° Ells, 45° Ells, Hex Bushings, Bell Reducers, Reducing Tees, Street Ells……..” – in the right venue.
Facebook’s the wrong place for this, as is any broad-based social application which is difficult to shrink to a specialization- but an aggregated Twitter discussion group could definitely work. Morrill could have the only hex bushing for particular situations, and its audience would never know that if it were not engaged in the conversation. (I have absolutely no idea what a hex bushing is, btw.)

Moral of the story: yes, Dorothy, you can engage social media, but not in a paint-by-numbers way. Find the right destination; don’t just toss darts at Twitter and Flickr; and if what you do/sell is specialized, corral that community even if you do so within a larger social context .