"I wanna send out a letter to drum up some business . . . "

Went down to the city the other day to talk to our headhunter, Marie, about drumming up some freelance work. She said "no problem" and then asked if we'd be interested in helping the boss write a letter to send out to prospective clients.

Well, the boss came in, the big cheese, the head honcho, the guy with his name on the door and it turns out he's a most excellent guy and we totally hit it off. In addition, we successfully talked him out of sending a letter and into doing something a little bit more noteworthy.

Our point of view on this is pretty simple: your target audience gets a lot of letters exhorting them to use this service or that and, honestly, their assistants, the people who open the letters, don't even read them. So don't waste a second writing a letter to try to reach and persuade them. Just don't.

Well, the honcho bought our argument and away we went to the drawing board to create an ad that would drum up some business. We pitched him on doing a top to bottom branding of his company, complete with in-house and out-of-house image research, but he just wanted an ad, so that's what we did. A few of them. And some other stuff too.

Now, the client's competition is not just the other recruiting firms, it's also the online job boards and, increasingly, LinkedIn. The job boards are a little impersonal and so is LinkedIn; headhunters, on the other hand, do all of their real business face-to-face. They meet with the clients, they meet with the candidates, they make a match. They are much more like old time matchmakers, while the job sites are akin to online dating sites like match.com or okCupid.com.

So with all that in mind, we started our look at their branding with a look at their logo. Here's what it was:

And here's what we wanted it to be: (click on any of the images on this page to view them bigger)

Seems sensible enough. If your major benefit is the human touch and actual face-to-face contact, why not try to include that information in your communications. Starting with your logo.

Well, the logo idea got dinged, but we still had a couple of fun ad ideas. The best of them highlighted people's ability to exaggerate themselves online, something that is an impossibility in person. For this ad, we created a tri-fold mailing piece that would go out in a branded envelope featuring their new logo. (Still hopeful we could sell it.) When removed from the envelope, the piece showed a person typing their specs onto their laptop. When unfolded once, it showed that the person doing the typing, though literally matching the specs, was actually a very different kind of person. When unfolded again, it showed a bar graph we'd made that highlighted attrition rates amongst employees hired through O'Hare and through other channels.

Here below are the two rough options we created to visually display the quantitative information the client had on attrition: 

 

Well, this mailer was popular, but not enough so to build a consensus amongst everyone in the office, so it got dinged too and we sent out our one last idea, stolen from a circa 1979 poster that was very popular back in the day:

Created by a student at UVA, Tom Shadyac, the poster was wildly popular and right on the money. Shadyac went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood (more here). And, following in the footsteps of so many other advertising greats, we stole the idea. Got theft? Our version is here below:

Yeah, that's right, we stole a photo of Bradley Cooper, too. Well, we really really liked this idea and so we sent it off to the client. Never heard back. Sent another email asking again how he liked it. Never heard back. So finally, guessing that perhaps he was sick of all the hoop-la, and just wanted his damn letter, we wrote the letter. It turned out nice; here it is:

So we sent it out, our proposal for a one-sheet mailer, and it was something really really close to a letter idea he originally wanted, and when we finally heard from him, he said, "great copy, whoever wrote is a genius, but I like the other idea better." Well, that was music to our ears and so off we went, producing and revising and getting approval signatures and all the fun stuff that goes into actually making an ad. We considered using stock photography and illustration (below) . . . .

. . . . but in the end we decided to cast and shoot it ourselves. Right here in Woodstock. One call to uber-makher Abbe Aronson of Abbe Does It and we had ourselves an amazing photographer, Franco Vogt, and a handsome and perfect model, local luminary and illustrator extraordinaire Jason O'Malley.

And before too long, we had our first, finished and approved ad:

And not too long after that, the client asked for 6 more. As of July 23, only one more is finished starring big time actress Audrey Rapaport:

The next ads in the series will be for representatives of other departments in a typical ad agency.

The client hopes this campaign will help them sign up a few more small to medium sized agencies. While there's no way of knowing for sure how these direct mailers will do, we hope that they'll be successful in engaging the target audience (250 or so ad agency HR folks) and we expect that, at the very least, they'll certainly a lot more successful than a short note on letterhead.

Other details

• The posters are 17 x 11", suitable for hanging on the refrigerator in the common area of each agency.

• Instead of folding, we recommended sending the posters out in 2" diameter mailing tubes, so they'll arrive at their destinations not looking like all the other direct mail.

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.

Test schmescht.

Yeah! That's what we always say! Testing creative sucks!

Actually, what we actually say always is this: testing is useful in a direct proportion to your willingness to ignore its findings. Right. That's not confusing, is it? Here's what we mean: test away, get your copy tested and your tv tested and test 'til your heart's content and your ass is covered out the wazoo, but don't be a slave to the findings. Learn what you need to make your creative more of what you want it to be. Don't use the findings to make your creative something that you didn't want it to be: a watered down version of an interesting idea.

You're probably wondering why we bring this up. Yes, yes, you are. If you read this far, you are. Admit it. We brought it up because the other day we accidentally got some focus grouping that saved our bacon on a creative project.

Here's how it went down:

The problem

Client radio Unleashed is a nationally syndicated radio program and they wanted to send out a letter to prospective stations that might be interested in picking up their show. "A letter?" we said, with full-tilt maximum disdain and condescension, (we're trying to become more tactful, really we are), "letters are stupid!" (see above parenthetical note) "What you need is something that will cut through the clutter." It's true, it's totally true. Our point of view on letters is exactly that: you send a letter to a prospective client, that client's secretary isn't even gonna read it. Send something fun and funky. Somethign that makes your point in a way they haven't seen before. Something memorable. And so that's what we came up with.

The creative solution

Pee. Yup. Pee. Specifically pee stains on a piece of newspaper. Make pee stains on a piece of newspaper and send it out to your people with a little note on the bottom of the paper that says something like "Good radio is no accident." Fun. Different. Gross. Still, it will totally cut through. How many times do people get something like that in the mail? And if your whole branding is your dog logo and your line "music with teeth", then it's perfect. No? Yes! (see branding case study here.)

The creative

So here's how we did it. Yellow food coloring in a spray bottle sprayed on newspaper pages, a sticker on the bottom and nice printed letterhead envelopes. Like so:

Genius! Everyone said so and we were so happy to have once again come up with a great idea! The only rub: half of the people who were looking at it were looking right through the pee stain and reading the newspaper behind it! Nooooo! That's not the point! "It's the pee!" we screamed. (silently)

While at lunch, Dave, the radio Unleashed client gave the envelope to Richard, the proprietor of Bistro-to-go, where we were dining and Richard (no dummy) opened it up and started reading the article on the newspaper under the stain.

What to do? Well we came up with a simple solution that addressed what we'd learned through our small sample of testing. And here it is, on the back of the envelope:

Simple. Write on the back of each envelope: "(not real pee)" Fabulous!! It serves so many purposes. First, it intrigues. Come ONNNN! You gotta open an envelope with that written on the back. Right? Secondly, it focuses the reader's attention on the pee once they open up the envelope, and draws their attention AWAY from newspaper text. Lastly, and most literally, it helps diminish the gross factor. Yay! And since we're only sending out 200 pieces, it's easy enough to execute.

So here's how it goes now: (sorry, we took the photos and we're gonna use them)

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the true story of how a little focus group feedback made our creative a lot stronger. Live and learn.

New and improved with double-plus yum yum!!

Being old and grouchy as we are and having been around the block quite a few times, we usually approach these "how-to" things with a little bit of an "I'll tell YOU how to!" attitude. And that's exactly how we approached this list (but we clicked through on it anyway! see notes below on the effectiveness of top 10 hoo-ha.) brought to us by something called Copywriting 101 through LinkedIn. Lots of attitude and a modicum of condescension. But it was great! We actually learned something. So you can just take your "old dogs . . . " homily and shove it someplace new and improved.

Click here to read the article: 7 scientifically-backed copywriting tips.

The story

Here's what came to us on the old FB the other day:

Whenever the owners of this house with a pool came home, they found puddles
of water near their pool. 

They believed the neighbours’ kids waited 'till they went out, to use the pool……
So they installed a camera and this is what they saw……



How awesome is that?! It was shared and shared and reposted out the wazoo and why not?! It's a great story.

The best part of this story though is the fact that it's entirely fabricated. The camera is moving, someone is obviously filming and a simple search of youtube finds a longer version where they actually move in on the dog. Filming their dog in their pool with their camera while they watch, poolside. No mystery. The real story appears to be:

Our dog likes the water slide in our pool.

Not nearly as exciting.

Hemmingway said all you need to tell a story was 6 words. He supposedly provided the following to illustrate his point:

For sale: baby shoes. Never used.

The moral of today's post: tell a story. Stories are sticky, stories are fun.

The end.

WOC Digital

Someone asked for our digital portfolio. The links below should give a decent top line:

The company primer on email marketing:
http://woodstockorganicconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/09/email-marketing.html

A short assortment of email images:
http://woodstockorganicconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/10/email-creative-case-study.html

Woodstock Organic Concept's take on going viral:
http://woodstockorganicconcepts.blogspot.com/2012/11/viral-schmiral-redux.html

Website design work:
http://woodstockorganicconcepts.blogspot.com/2011/06/web-design.html

Norm's educational app company:
http://www.fishthemousemedia.com/home/welcome.html

January is poster month!

Well, it's been a good January for us here at Woodstock Organic Concepts, we've learned a few new tricks in the kitchen just in time to not need them since we're now getting all our food from our new client, Blue Mountain Bistro to Go. And boy is their food delicious. Owners Mary Anne and Richard are a pleasure to work with and a joy to dine with. Stay tuned for some fun work we're doing on their behalf.

In the meantime, January brought us an opportunity to get a lot of personal work done (read: kinda slow again) and do a few posters for various clients and good causes.

Top: A fun poster for Performing Arts of Woodstock's 2013 Winterfest. It was fun bending the fork and coming around the corner at the office just as the sun ducked down toward the horizon and seeing that the long shadows of winter were perfect for this shot.

Dj and all-around great guy Dave Leonard is once again raising money for a good cause with his annual pisces party. After we made this poster, we recommended that people with pisces tattoos get in for free. (You'll still be hit up to donate to the cause though.)

Client Rhinebeck CSD PTSO needed a poster for their cool cookie-gram idea.

We threw in the new logo (bottom) for free. 

Mission statements

Over the years, we’ve really developed a healthy respect for the power of putting your business and marketing ducks in a row.  Toward this end, we always like to start our branding efforts by taking a gander at our client’s mission statement and, if there isn’t one, we get them to write one. Oh sure, we’ll wordsmith it for them later, but as we always say (okay, this is actually the first time):

More than any other piece of communication that will be developed during the course of a marketing and image management campaign, the thoughts behind a mission statement need to come straight from the client.

So. Why does a company need a mission statement?

A mission statement is your company’s reason for being. It should perfectly and honestly reflect why your company exists and what you want it to do.

Is your mission to make people happy?  Walt Disney company’s mission statement: To make people happy.

Is your mission to make people money? At Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, our mission is to help you build a secure financial future.

Is it to save people money? Wal-Mart: To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same thing as rich people.

Is it to save the environment? Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Is it to save the world? Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Or maybe it's to explore the universe? The USS Enterprise's 5 year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

A mission statement is your organization’s reason for being. It succinctly states the goal(s) of your business and, if it’s done well, it can and should be an inspiring and useful guide for the bulk of your business decisions.

How does one go about writing a mission statement?

Here are some guidelines:

• Make it super honest. If your mission is solely to build up your soda pop company so that you can eventually sell it to Coca-Cola, say so. If the mission of your association of evil geniuses is complete global annihilation, say that. Don’t be shy and don’t be coy. Say what it is that you dream. Make it personal.

• Make it short. Seriously, the best mission statements can be easily remembered by everyone who has a hand in making it come true.

• Make it clear. Please. No jargon, no needlessly big words, no attempts to make it sound important. It IS important already just by the fact of it being your mission.

• Make it simple. So that it will look good on a bronze plaque and on a cotton/poly blend t-shirt.

• Make it inspiring. Make it important, make it meaningful and evocative: dream big. This thing is going to be your road map for a long time.

• Make it about you and about them. Unless your business only exists to profit itself, include your customer in your mission statement.  Disney, Morgan Stanley and Wal-Mart (above) all do so explicitly. Patagonia and Google do so implicitly.

• Keep it current. If you wrote it 5 years ago, your mission might have changed since then. Revisit and start again at the top of this list.

Mission statements vs.vision statements

Many marketers split up the mission statement into two distinct-ish parts: a mission statement that answers the question “what do we do?” and a vision statement that answers the question “why are we here?” Some use the vision statement to put forth their grand goal (“To make the world a better place for humanity”) while others put that in their mission statement. Some use the mission statement to share how their company might make that grand goal a reality (“A laptop in the hands of every person.”) while others put that in their vision statement.

Here at Woodstock Organic Concepts, we like to put them all together in a mission statement that answers both questions: what does your company do and how will it help your customers.

A strong mission statement provides a strong foundation upon which you can build a strong company. If your company doesn’t have one, just sit down and write one, there’s nobody better equipped to do so than you.

Once you’ve got your mission statement done and you’re ready to move on to the next step of image management, give us a call, because…

The mission of Woodstock Organic Concepts is to help clients to better understand and leverage their 
inherent strengths in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Holiday card smorgasbord

Every year, just before Hallowe'en, we start getting calls from clients wanting to rush to press with their holiday cards. This year was no exception. Here below (we still think "herebelow" should be one word) is an assortment of holiday cards we've done for one of them. Enjoy, and happy holidays to each and every one of youse.

The top 10 subject lines of all time

Nah. Just trying to get your attention, that's all. But here's our theory: the very best email marketing is top 10 list stuff.  People love the top 10 lists. Or top 5 list. Or even, in this case, the top 1 list:

TOP EMAIL SUBJECT LINE OF ALL TIME.

You just read it.

Now, I think you get our point.

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

After a long, divisive race...

Someguy did this.

 AKA Brian Singer. The Coke/Pepsi analogy has been used a lot this election cycle by people disgruntled by this lousy two-party system of ours. "Someguy" went out and made it real. You can see his site here: http://www.iamsomeguy.com/

Viral schmiral redux

One thing we never promise to create for a client is a viral video.  Who the hell knows what is going to 'go viral' and what is not?  Not us - people find a crazy variety of things to be wildly fascinating, some of which we might not even find to be mildly fascinating.  

This beautifully executed video below has a paltry 20,000 hits on YouTube while the laughing farting cat has 1.7 million.  We love them both, of course, but might have put our money on the wrong horse in this race to engage the masses.  Don't get us wrong here: we're not saying that marketers shouldn't try to create a super contagious message, we're just saying that the best bet to make on going viral is to get a money back guarantee from anyone who promises they're gonna do it for you.

Constant okayness?

A slow(ish) day at the office allowed us a fun personal(ish) project -- art directing this interesting quotation from Pema Chödrön. (Just in case you're wondering is she really truly all that badass, yes, she has TWO umlauts in her last name.) Soon, we'll be taking our massive digital file to our new, hot-shit local analog letterpress people to have it printed/pressed/molded onto a piece of impossibly thick paper. Can't wait. Call us if you want one, we just might share. (click on the image to see it bigger.)

Pascal Baes

Way back in the day. Early 90's perhaps. This guy was making the coolest videos we'd ever seen. The Paramount Hotel used him in for a series of commercials, which can be seen on this page from the now defunct Yellow House production company, which is now part of or known as DogAndPony. Enjoy thsi short non-commercial film, "Come back to factory". It's what we used to call video art and it's still impossibly cool stuff:

http://www.yellowhouse.tv/friends/pascal_baes/factory.html

Send your email marketing between 8 and 9!

MarketingProfs.com recently reported on a study from email marketing company GetResponse.com. Here's what they found: The study found that 23.63% of all email opens occur within the first hour after delivery. Within the second hour after delivery, the results drop by half.

 The top engagement times for email are as follows: in the mornings, 8 AM to 9 AM both for opens and click-throughs; and in the afternoons, 3 PM to 8 PM for opens, and 3 PM and 4 PM for click-throughs.

Volunteer

One of the nice things about volunteer design work is that we usually (not always, mind you) get to do something that we think is cool. This year, the local elementary school's fall festival was adding a bunch of new games and a new attitude and wanted a poster to reflect it. The upside down leaf is a fine symbol for fall, simple and clean, so we adopted it as one of our two design constants that we used throughout a series of posters relating to the event. The other was the autumnal color bar on the left of each poster. 

One other art directorial note here: sometimes when we get a long list of items to include in a printed piece, we like to treat that list as a design element rather than a list with bullet points or dashes or what-have-you. That's what we did here with the list of activities one could play at the fall fest. We think it not only looks great, but also is actually more inviting to read than a plain old stack of stuff.

Woodstock Film Festival

Well, the film festival has left town and with it the last glance of the season of impossibly hip movie and city types gracing the sidewalks and eateries of Woodstock. This year, after the umpteenth person mentioned that we should really do the poster art, we decided to share the creation we made for the film fest a few years back. It still looks good: Overlook mountain adorned with the famous sign, slightly jiggered for our needs:

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.

Email creative case study

After the post below about email marketing, we were cajoled into sharing some of our creative in this arena.  All of the work went out through Constant Contact, unless otherwise noted and most of the CC templates included links to registration forms and donate now buttons and whatnot. As soon as we get the quantitative info from the client, we'll share that too.

Our simple rule for email creative, a great image (not too large) and fun copy. Click on this link to see a big batch of e-creative and let us know how we did: http://woodstockorganicconceptscasestudies.blogspot.com/2012/10/creative-case-study.html