The Tortoise and the Hare

The other day, we were hanging out around the water cooler, shooting the breeze and talking about branding, like we like to do, and the conversation turned to metaphors for branding, another thing we like to do, and someone from the typing pool piped up and said that they thought that branding was like Aesop's fables: a seemingly endless trove of tales, each one designed to illustrate a particular point.

They added that good branding is the tale that tells the truth of individual goods or services and that whereas Aesop's fables each have their individual moral (the tortoise and the hare, for example), each brand has their individual deep brand truth. Or brand essence, or brand DNA. Or whatever you wanna all it.

Well, we were liking this simile a lot when our chief, cook, and bottle washer (not to mention head of the typing pool), took it even further. (Background: Recently we had lost a pitch to a local logo mill and when fearless leader asked the once-prospective client if the logo mill was going to be doing any branding for her, she replied: "Oh, yes! They're going to make the logo AND the letterhead AND the website ALL have the SAME look!!" This did NOT make him happy, highlighting, as it did, his evident failure to make the client understand what branding actually is.) ANYWAY . . . he took the metaphor a little further and noted that if the moral of the Aesop's fable is the "brand essence" and the way the tale is told is the "brand personality", then perhaps the title of the tale is the name of the product and the illustrations are the symbolic equivalent of the logo. Each of them individually (and all of them collectively) reinforce the story, but none of them, on their own, is the whole story. Much less, the moral of the story.

Here below is a title of a story and a single illustration from that story. Pretend for a second that you don't already know the tale of the tortoise and the hare and ask yourself: from the title and an illustration (a logo and a look), how much of the story do you really get?

For us, the answer is clear: not enough. From just these two elements, you simply don't get enough information to truly understand the richness of the story that's behind them, and the moral of the story? Completely lost. And THAT'S the moral of THIS story!

Here at Woodstock Organic Concepts, we identify and leverage unique brand stories to help brands succeed in their competitive environments. A name, a URL, a logo and a letterhead are all part of it, as is a unified look and feel that extends to all media and expressions of the brand. But it's the gestalt of it all that can really help clients win the race. And that's where we come in, the tellers of tales and painters of pictures in the interest of our clients' success.

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And now, for your viewing pleasure, take a gander at how Walt Disney told the whole story and painted the whole picture in 1934: "The tortoise and the hare" Animated. Disney. 1934.

If you want even more, check out our story "What is branding? (Or: the lazy KY)"

The competition

We're not exactly sure how it happened, but somehow, about a year ago, we started getting a joke a day in our corporate in-box. This being not the worst thing in the world, we never opted out. Sometimes we share the jokes with friends or with the kids, sometimes they're downright stupid and we're sorry we wasted any time reading them. Today, for the first time ever, we're sharing the joke here:

The shopkeeper was dismayed when a brand new business much like his own opened up next door and erected a huge sign which read BEST DEALS. He was horrified when another competitor opened up on his right, and announced its arrival with an even larger sign, reading LOWEST PRICES. The shopkeeper was panicked, until he got an idea. He put the biggest sign of all over his own shop-it read... 'Main entrance.' 

The moral of the story: you can't control the competitive environment, but you can control how you stand out in it. And sometimes, when you're really on your game, you can do so with intelligence and wit.

Raincoat case study

Over on our case studies blog, we just posted a fresh one!

Check it out here!

Branding is not a logo.

More and more people are talking about "branding" these days and it's becoming increasingly apparent that what they're really talking about is a logo. Nothing more. It seems that, for many people, the idea of branding is kinda, well, superficial.

As long-time practitioners of what we used to call "positioning", this misperception irks us. Oh sure, maybe we shouldn't take it so personally, but we do. Which leads us to frequently say (or at least think) "harrumph!" and also leads us to frequently direct people to our most excellent and still-fun company white paper on branding. As we're doing right now: click here to read it.

But we've already written that paper. This one's on a different topic altogether: expressing the brand through the logo.


THE LOGO AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE BRAND


Oh, we love logos as expressions of a company's brand essence. Some of them are kinda literal in expressing it: think of the puma (symbol of speed and strength) for sportswear company Puma or the running greyhound (symbol of speed) for bus company Greyhound; others are a little more symbolically rich like the apple (symbol of knowledge ever since the garden of Eden) for computer company Apple. Others don't really reflect the brand essence but rather, the brand's name: the red target for big chain store Target, the red cross for the Red Cross, the aforementioned greyhound and the big yellow shell for the oil company named . . . anyone? Bueller? Still others really don't seem to relate to the brand name or the brand essence very much at all: the Nike swoosh, the Mercedes-Benz three pointed star and, say, the bat inside of a circle for Bacardi.

For us here at Woodstock Organic Concepts, however, the logos we like best actually have a meaningful connection to their brand's deliverables, if not the exact brand essence. Take a look through this random sampling of logos below and name the company they represent and what that company does.

Really, apart from that shell and the DHL logo, they all relate pretty closely to the goods or services they stand for.

So. So much for the classics made by other people. Some of them big famous hotshots. (We love that Westinghouse logo by Paul Rand and others, including Charles Eames.) What about the Woodstock Organic Concepts classics?

Well, there are some, and you're about to see them. Mostly, we do logos as part of an overall branding job, but sometimes we get a gig where the client understands their brand, already has a brand identity and simply wants a logo to express it. So, without further ado, here are are a few of our favorite logos from over the years and a short explanatory text (we'll try to keep it short, really we will) connecting the logo to the brand idea. Enjoy.

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THE WOODSTOCK PUBLIC LIBRARY

The Woodstock Public Library was a great gig, we helped them identify what they should stand for: access. The client wanted an iconic logo to express that thought and we gave them this:

Here's the logo with the tag line:

For the entire library branding case study, including a lot on logo development, click here.

ENERGY TRANSFORMATION GROUP

Another of our favorite logos is for a company that helps buildings to become more green. We visually showed the transformation from dirty to clean by using color stripes that ran from black to white and muddy to pastel. Again, it's fairly iconic and ownable.

PINKO RECORDS/THE JILL AND JULIA SHOW

Next up is a logo we did for singer/songwriter and all-around amazingly creative super star Jill Sobule. She wanted to start a record company where the profits would be in the hands of the artists, not the management. Naturally, we called her a communist, which nicely reinforced one of her ideas for the label's name: Pinko records. Naturally, we thought of the Chinese flag, with one big star and a red background. In this case, we made the star out of a vinyl record, had an actual flag made up, ran it up the hill on a windy day and shot a photo of it. Bam! Instant logo. Jill has the flag now and trots it out for various events.

Jill also needed a logo for her traveling show with SNL alum Julia Sweeney, a mini case study of that logo can be read here, and the finished product is here below:

VINTAGE VACUUM AUDIO

The logo below was done for a company that restores old tube amplifiers, stereo components. They specialize in MacIntosh amplifiers. We were messing around with the sound waves of oscilloscopes (a tool of his trade) and realized that the waves, if looked at just right made the letters of the company name, VVA, as well as representing the science behind the scene of the company's work.

SUNFROST FARMS

An oldie, but a goodie, was this logo we did for our local farm stand, Sunfrost Farms. Our thought was so simple: update the classic fruit carton label. Below is our logo and tag line as well as a few mock-ups of business card backs.

RADIO UNLEASHED

One of our very favorite branding case-studies is for a nationally syndicated radio program, radioUnleashed. (read it here.) The logo that came out of the brand exploratory continues to delight and the tag line ain't half bad either.

OTHERS

Another hand-drawn logo for another music business, a small record label in NYC that was putting out funky and fun music:

For the 1/2 a percent for AIDS charity meme:

For our friend the reflexologist, kinda explaining the concept of what she does. (We love the fingerprint in the shape of a brain.)

For a now defunct organization that helped kids by helping them make movies and short films. You can also see a fine example of our original concept: the "dynamic tag line":

Patches for the Farber Brothers' sailboat for hire, Ophira. They already had the Farber brothers emblem.

For the green candidate who was not seen as the green candidate: (read the case study here.)

For two organizations that help those exposed to toxic dust during the 9/11 clean up:

For Samuel's, the best coffee in Rhinebeck, this little 'king of coffee' logo was designed to be used in conjunction with the pre-existing Samuel's logo (which we always wanted to update):

And finally, for our own little fun company, we use a fresh logo whenever we come up with one, but that little light bulb is really our fave for expressing our brand personality: fun, creative, unusual. Just what you want in an ad agency.

There you go. A little logo round up showing hopefully, how logos can really be a strong way to express a brand essence and brand personality. Logos are important tool in the big branding tool box. But they're certainly not the only tool. So please, from now on, remember: branding is not a logo . . . but a logo should definitely be branding.

#2 in the series for fab client O'Hare+Associates

Featuring the lovely and talented Audrey Rapoport. Scroll down to the next post for the first in this series, "Are you a Creative Director?"

Feel good food

By and large, we, here at Woodstock Organic Concepts, like to swoop in and come up with the BIG IDEA, thus saving the day and leaving everybody marveling at our creative genius. Once in a while, the client comes up with the big idea, executes it better than we ever could and our main task is to just keep outta the way of progress and figure out how we can take credit. This is one of those stories.

Mary Anne and Richard run Blue Mountain Bistro-to-go and Blue Mountain Catering. It's an upscale catering business and upscale retail store (mostly take-away business) on ever busy route 28 near Woodstock. They're both very creative people with good insights into their business and what it stands for. When we first started working on their branding, they had more good ideas than you could shake a stick at, all of them true to their brand.

But they didn't have a clear focus. There were too many delicious canapés to choose from and so they kept them all.

THE MISSION STATEMENT

Turns out they didn't have a mission statement either. So I sent them a questionnaire full of thought-provoking stuff and each of the three of us filled it out for their business and before long, we had a swell mission statement that could be the foundation of creating a strong brand. (see our white paper on mission statements here.) Here's what we came up with:

Sweet, right? Each of them, independently, noted prominently that they wanted to help make the community and the world a better place. Beautiful.

THE BRANDING

So now, mission statement in hand, we proceeded to figure out a brand umbrella under which all of their Bistro to-go communications could exist. They already had advertising and signage and business cards and whatnot on a variety of ideas: "the life of the party", "every day's a celebration", "local ingredients", slow cooked fast food", "Mediterranean cooking style" and "feel good food." Well, it didn't take too much time to see that the biggest, broadest, funnest umbrella under which all of these thoughts could happily exist was "feel good food." All the other stuff seemed more like supporting points; there were so many of them, we put together a little flow chart to keep it straight (we're a company of visual thinkers, don'tcha know):

They had even previously connected the dots between what they do and the concept of "feel good food". From their website: 

FEEL GOOD FOOD – feels good when you BUY IT: because you know that you're buying something that's been hand selected by our chefs, been locally sourced, and handled with years of experience!

FEEL GOOD FOOD - feels good when you EAT IT: because we make everything from scratch, with the freshest herbs and spices, local farm produce when in season, and lots of love!

FEEL GOOD FOOD - feels good when you SHARE IT: because you know that your friends and family will love you for giving them food that really tastes good!

So a communications umbrella was born. (Okay, not really "born", more like picked out of the umbrella rack by the door).  The client loved the idea (it was theirs already anyway) of standing for "feel good food" and saw how it nicely encompassed all their other brand thoughts and they had a bunch of previously committed to magazine ad pages so we started executing immediately. 

THE EXECUTIONS

Well, the idea on how to express "feel good food" for their take away business came to us right away: virtuosic, hand-made ads and signage drawing on the current craze for chalkboard art. Perfect. The chalk board is a classic fixture of bistros all over the world and it could be used in their store and in their ads and other materials. Beautifully executed chalk boards convey concepts such as "fun" and "home made", "locally crafted" and "friendly" - all of which nicely back up the idea of "feel good food." And when those three words are all over your store and in every communication you send out into the world, that doesn't hurt either. Chalk boards just like you see in so many places around the world, only better. Just like their food: nothing too unusual, just regular stuff done much better.

Our first ad was to promote the grand opening of their new bakery and it looked like this:

And for inside the new bakery, we did an actual chalkboard:

Now, we were feeling pretty fly about the whole thing when our client Mary Anne (who is an awesome artist, too) asked innocently if she could try one. "Sure", we said, well practiced at the art of humoring clients who want to try to do our job for us, "go ahead." And she did this:

Well, it's a funny feeling when you see your usefulness slip right out the door, but that's how we felt. Mary Anne knocked it out of the park. A beautifully masterful execution of our concept and, truth be told, better than we could do. 

Later, the local Jewish congregation was celebrating its Rabbi and she made this for the event:

Well, you know what they say: Give a client a fish, you've fed them for a day, teach a client to fish you've fed them for a lifetime. But if that client just happens to cook fish really really well and you're working on a barter arrangement, then it's not actually such a bad deal. 

Business cards, front and back:

Playing on the idea of the chalk board and writing and giving a nod to the fact that people write on business cards all the time, we used one of Mary Anne's pieces of art on the front of the business card and left space for people to "write something good" on the back. An execution built around a universal truth. Can't beat that.

Other ads and other ideas followed, all of them using the chalkboard to express the idea of feel good food, and we could go on and on about these interesting executional decisions, but the truth is, we're boring ourselves. So we'll save it for another day. Right now, we're gonna go get us some feel good food. Yum.

FEEL GOOD FOOD PART 2

One of the other  interesting things we did for our wonderful client was to help them put their media ducks in a row. To do this, first we took a look at who their target currently is and who it should be.

TARGET AUDIENCE

Someone who lives a few towns away or across the river is simply not going to come get a panini from Bistro-to-go. So we winnowed it down and recommended to them that their target audience be defined as: people who pass by their store but don't stop in.  And if that's your target and you've got a big sign out front, then you already own the most perfect media for your message. We continue to recommend topical, on-message signage to delight their passers-by and draw them into the idea that Bistro-to-go serves feel good food. Which they do. Much to our delight.

LOCAL MEDIA

They had been advertising their to-go business in regional publications and on a local, broad-reaching radio station. We moved around their advertising placement so that all of the broad-reaching media were advertising their catering business and so that their Bisto-to-go business was only being advertised in local media. Some of it, really, really local:

Naturally, we had a recommendation for the design of their sign, too. Here below is our rough, rough, quick and dirty recommendation:

So, there's a short recap of our thinking for their to-go business; some day soon, we'll write about the branding and communications ideas we helped them make for their catering business -- separate but related.

Make it about them

Reading through this morning's emails from my assortment of marketing experts, we came across a theme, one idea that has appeared in so many of these "articles". (Seriously, the content marketing is getting a little bit cumbersome these days.) It's the idea that you shouldn't make the story you tell all about your product. You need to make it about your customer. Make the customer the hero. Now this brings up old Rosser Reeve's fabulous and timeless USP concept, naturally, (the basic format of which is "if you buy this product, you will get this unique and meaningful benefit.") but it also brought to mind "The smart growth manifesto" that we posted about a few years ago. We revisited, we re-loved, we've reposted. Re-enjoy:


The smart growth manifesto

Tired of looking backwards and finding, each week, something new upon which to hang the blame for our current economic woes?  Look forward for a sec with Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab, as he lays down a road map for Capitalism 2.0:  The Smart Growth Manifesto.  Its basic pillars are:

1. Outcomes, not income.
2. Connections, not transactions.
3. People, not product.
4. Creativity, not productivity.

Read the whole short thought-starter of a piece right here: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

What is branding? (or: the lazy KY)

What is branding?

Branding is the act of burning a letter-based design onto the side of livestock with a hot iron stamp.

It’s also the creation of an important, intellectual and emotional connection between a product or service and the consumer who may use it.

But let's stick to the cattle kind of branding for a while, because our pal Jim from Missouri explained it to us not too long ago and it seemed to present a lot of useful parallels for the modern day concept of "consumer" branding. Both leave indelible marks, both require a certain amount of skill to do just right, are easy to do wrong, and can be incredibly useful to protect or create profits.

Behold below an instructional image from the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association "Texas Brand Registration" page on "How to design a brand".

Front and center in this lovely chart we can find the Woodstock Organic Concepts rule #1 for creating a consumer brand: keep it simple. Complication equals confusion and let's not forget the words of the infamous cattleman Oscar Wilde, who said: "to define is to limit". The more we define the brand with needless complexities, the more we have defined it into a narrow corner. Pigeonholed our cow, so to speak. Not a good idea. Simplicity in the branding will allow for complexity in the messaging later, if that's really what we need.

Now let's look at the painting below: "The lazy K Y", by Charles Marion Russell. Look closely and you'll see a brand on the steer. The "K" is on its side so it's called a "lazy K" and the "Y" is to the right or below it so it's read second.  The brand is, as the title of the painting says: the lazy KY.

This brand, the lazy K Y, happens to be a really good brand. Why do you think? Here's what Jim from Missouri told us:

Well, for starters, it nicely embodies rule #1: it's simple -- a "K" on its side and a "Y". Not complicated in the least. Secondly, the letters are not easily transformed into different letters by the addition of lines. Here's what we mean . . . take the letter "F" for example, burned onto the side of a hypothetical cow. A cattle rustler could, with the simple addition of a short arced line, transform the "F" into a "P". A branding design flaw. A vulnerability. In the same way, an "I" could be easily turned into a "T" or a "V" into a Lazy "A". (an upside down "A"). Not good at all, but it brings us to . . . 

Branding rule #2: make it ownable for you and not ownable by your competition. Now this is a great rule but there are a lot of ways to do it. One way is to cultivate your brand's honest eccentricities, i.e., what is it that your brand has that your competition does not. Kent cigarettes famous "Micronite filter" from the Mad Men days or Ivory soap's "99 44/100% pure", which is still in use today. No competitive brand can make those claims, as opposed to, say, Nike sportswear company's claim "Just do it." Those 3 words, so well-owned by Nike, could actually be used by lots of different companies: "Weight watchers . . . Just do it!", your local car wash or bowling alley, and "Trojan" to name a few. It's just not inherently ownable.  BUT!!! Nike has spent a gadjillion dollars connecting those words and the thoughts behind them to their company. And now they really and truly own that sentiment. So that's another way to own it: burn it into people's heads with repetition on a large scale.

So back to the lazy K Y, it's a brand identity that could be put on anything: a cow, a horse, a barn, a ring, a t-shirt, a print ad. It's versatile. Which brings us to branding rule #3: it should work everywhere -- in all media and for every story your company needs to tell. The brand part is the umbrella under which all your communications can comfortably fit. If you're Volvo and you need to introduce consumers to a new car, you can tell them about the engine and the suspension and the chassis and the interior and you can discuss how all those important elements add to the overall safety of the vehicle, that is, you can discuss them all under the umbrella of "safety".

But the branding here goes both ways: the micro feeds the macro and vice versa. The details support the umbrella, which in turn shades the details. It's what we here at Woodstock Organic Concepts have dubbed a "reinforcing branding loop": the details validate the overarching brand idea which validates the details and so on ad infinitum. And ad nauseum, too: it works in all media: print, radio, tv, web, outdoor, etc. WHEN it's executed just right.

Another strength of the lazy K Y brand is that when it's executed, it's not likely to become confusing. Just suppose you're burning that brand onto your cow and you hold the iron in place a little too long or maybe the cow's hide is wet and the lines you intended spread out and fill in in ways you didn't intend. Well, in the case of the KY, those lines are not likely to touch, so they're not likely to be confusing. They radiate out from their centers and are easily recognizable. Which brings us to branding rule #4: make it clear. This will help you to avoid creating confusion in the minds of consumers when things go well and even when things don't. You can probably guess by now why the lazy QO might be confusing. Beware of traps like that.

To review: simple, ownable, versatile and clear. These are the elements of good branding. (As we've identified so far.) Piece of cake. Now let's look at some examples. In the marketing arena, not the livestock arena. Who are the companies that elicit an immediate visceral reaction just when you hear their name or see their logo? -- Apple. Volvo. Nike. Starbucks. Google. To name a few. Not surprisingly these companies, these brands, beyond creating an emotional connection, have backed it up with an intellectual underpinning: smart, safe, striving, delicious, helpful (respectively). This combination of appeal to both emotion and intellect creates the simplest, most versatile, clearest, and most ownable branding.

It's something that every company, big or small, should have to help them communicate most effectively with their clients. It's the difference between generic and premium.  Between "that'll do" and "I've gotta have it". It's the difference between a product and a brand.

Branding, as the landing page of our site puts it, is the speciality of Woodstock Organic Concepts: "helping clients to better understand and leverage their inherent strengths in an increasingly competitive marketplace." Let us help you create your brand. It's what we do.