‘Obvious’ Branding Secrets

What comes to mind when we think about Apple, Nike, or Fedex?

I am not sure about you, but the first thing that comes to my mind is “successful brand”. These are lasting brands that have successfully etched their position in our long-term memory. How then does a business or practice get to be highly successful? Well, its easier than you think.

Lets start by understanding what we mean by a brand. A brand can be defined as a unique combination of promises (on the company’s side) and expectations that reside in the mind of stakeholders (on the client/employee’s side) about a product, service or company. Its very easy for any company to make promises (quality product, on-time delivery, streamlined process etc). The challenge is with ensuring that those promises match expectations. Successful brands have very little disparity between their promises and expectations for delivery.

Simple Steps to Getting A Brand on the Success Track

1. Understand the Base of your brand:

 What are your mission, vision and values? Do they represent you well? What kind of corporate/company culture do you have? Is that culture reflected in your product and delivery? When we consider Disney as an example, we see their corporate culture written all over their product and its delivery – their intense focus and optimism (sticktoitivity as coined by Walt Disney himself), commitment to family entertainment and passion for what they do. What about your processes for delivery and management styles? Make sure you ask yourself these questions in order to better understand the base of your brand. Projecting a false image is unethical and the best way to project the right image is to better understand it.

2. Fix any communication gaps.

Why doesn’t your brand promise match expectations? what can we do to ensure that it does? A communication gap is the disparity between leadership’s perspectives and those of its employees & customers. Understanding and fixing communication gaps is a very important component of successful brand building. The table below shows the difference between internal and external communications.

Understanding communication gaps is imperative to revitalizing a brand

3. Create, maintain, and continuously improve your brand’s face.

 A brand identity (logo and slogan) should be revisited every 5 years. You should always ensure that your organization builds consistency in the presentation of its face (brand identity, advertising (print/web/mobile), website, packaging, public relations, promotions, direct mail design and delivery etc). Consistency builds recognition.

Dimeji Onafuwa is the owner and creative director of Casajulie, Inc. He’s also a visual artist.

Signs from Paris France

Good design is everywhere you look.

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The Importance of Breaking Serve

Faith – Focus – Resilience – Consistency – Discipline.

A three-time Wimbledon finalist, Andy Roddick surprisingly lost yesterday to a Taiwanese player named Yen-Hsun Lu. Lu’s ranking is 82nd in the world (compared to Roddick’s 7th). What makes this such a monumental loss is that Roddick had a total of 38 aces in the game. So what happened? He (Roddick) failed to convert on most of the 8 break point opportunities he had. He always served well, but lacked the discipline to win when it counted the most.

There’s a lesson to be learned in this: No matter how hard we push or even how well we begin, we need the faith, focus, resilience, consistency and discipline to finish. Our attitude towards the challenges we face and the way with which we conduct our counter-offensive are two very important ingredients in our recipe to success. Our success is never measured by our beginning – the prize always goes to those that run every race diligently to the finish. Remember, your life’s story is not written until your death.

‘I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.’ – Ecc 9:11

Setting Marketing Goals

It is very important for any organization to have marketing goals. At Casajulie, we are working on reevaluating our goals for the rest of the year. My time at MBA school reminds me that all marketing goals need to be SMART i.e. specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. It is also important for us as a firm to believe that we can achieve our goals. FOCUS and DEDICATION are tantamount to successfully meeting marketing goals.

TIP: ALWAYS MAKE SURE YOU RECORD YOUR GOALS.

Q: What is preventing my firm from achieving its goals? How can I remove that stumbling block.

Q: How can I prioritize my efforts to ensure success in achieving my marketing goals.

Q: What are the resources we need to achieve our marketing goals

Q: What accountability mechanisms do you have in place

Catalysts

God is a Catalyst. He inspires things in to being. 
I compare that same Creative Spirit to the artist’s. He/she broods over a blank canvas and then commands things to life with line. The word catalyst is derivative of the Greek word katalyein which means ‘to untie’. We (artists) are in essence mere conduits that just ‘release’ creativity. An inhibitor slows down a catalytic reaction. One way they do this is by selective poisoning. Q: What slows you down? What poisons your creativity? What is your inhibitor?

Week 1: Changing our thinking

Ok, here we go.

We will be measuring our marketing effectiveness by looking at the following points:

– Website traffic via google analytics

– Blog visits

– Follow increase/decrease in client relationships

– How many active clients do we have? 

– How many active projects do we have?

Someone once mentioned that 90% of success is determined by one’s attitude. Having a marketing mindset seems to be a crucial part of the equation. It is important to change our mindset to reflect marketing as a necessary function of our business and not just a department or an expense (which almost always gets eliminated when things get dicey). We will put this idea of positive thinking to to test. For the several days, we will always speak positively about our outlook on the business climate. We will combine optimism with positivity and passion.

Here are important things that make up a marketing mindset:

– continuous improvement – weekly lunch-and-learns at Casajulie to learn the newest technologies and also find out what our competitors are doing to expand their market.

– Make sure our business is defined in clear terms

– Meet people. Network like crazy, and keep track of who we meet.

– Focus on our clients and their needs (also on how Casajulie can better satisfy those needs).

Test(ing) Marketing

Change is inevitable. As JFK is quoted to have said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” In essence, the best way we can embrace change is to anticipate it through action and carefully measure its results.

Here’s the idea: over the next six months, Casajulie will attempt to prove that marketing works by proving that marketing works for us. We will do this by going through marketing processes detailed in a few popular books and record our results for you to review.

We are starting with “Guerrilla Marketing in 3o Days.” Please check out our blog periodically to see how it is (or isn’t) working for us.

Africa to America :: Bridging the Cultural Design Divide

As a designer of Yoruba origin, my work has been strongly influenced by both Western and West African cultures. These influences have led me to conclude that design, like music, is a universal language. Experiences and cultural influences always enhance the dialogue of design, especially in terms of its philosophy and execution. Reason also dictates good design. From time immemorial, sub-Saharan Africa has been the bedrock of reason in graphical representation. Reason is however most effective when it is used in its appropriate context. In recent times, African design aesthetics have been misconstrued by the rest of the world – narrowly labeled by the West to represent only the naïve or the archaic or even just the mysterious, minimizing it to ritualistic masks, staffs and scenes narrative of a rural environment. Contemporary African design has been left out of the general design dialogue, just as the overall African population has been left out of the socio-economic dialogue that has consumed the modern world. The message seems to be that the contemporary African designer has nothing of aesthetic value to offer to the overall design community. The truth cannot be further from this. The principles of design (movement, texture, scale etc) are timeless and universal. The West African (especially Yoruba) designer combines these principles with other culturally relevant ones like yiye (appropriateness), pipe (completeness), tutu (coolness), ere (improvisation) and oju ona (design consciousness). His/her work is a hybrid – a blend of old and new, the West and the East. These principles are equally timeless and universal.

AIGA and similar design associations have a unique opportunity and responsibility to reach out and bridge the cultural divide and to promote design as an ideal that is as timeless and essential as freedom & equality. AIGA Charlotte has a part to play. We can start by building partnerships with designers & design associations in West Africa. We can also seek to understand design in developing and under developed nations, and also further involve ourselves in design that promotes peacemaking in a global environment. In the words of the advertising great Leo Burnett, “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” When we attempt to reach out and understand design beyond our localized culture, the advantages to us will be limitless.

Casajulie Cookout: April 25th 2008!

Casajulie had a friends and family cookout last Friday the 25th. Dimeji and India barbecued hotdogs, chicken and burgers. We also had chips, soda, brownies, mashed potatoes, baked beans, and other snacks. Thank you to everyone that came! Hope everyone else can join us next time. We have lots of fun stuff planned for the summer!

About a Brand

What is a Brand?
A brand can be defined as a name, item or sign that is used to distinguish or identify a certain product or service and encourage the consumer to an action. The goal of branding (or brand strategy) from an institution’s perspective is to build recognition and recall of their product or service in order to consistently increase market share. This is achieved largely due to the ability of a brand to impact consumer behavior by appealing to the physical, social and psychological needs of the individual at the stage in which such need is identified and when the need is classified in the Evoked Set of his or her mind. An evoked set is a group of choices from which a consumer makes a purchase decision or the like. This group of choices is stored in the consumer’s short-term memory and is distinguishable from a broader set of choices (including an inert set which includes the choices the buyer is disinterested in, and an inept set which includes those choices the buyer is not very interested in). For example, there are thousands of shoe brands online, but only about five (plus or minus two) can be easily remembered by the buyer.

Building an Effective Brand
David Ogilvy (one of the fore-fathers of brand strategy), in his book “Ogilvy on Advertising” says that the brand image is the ‘personality’ of a product or service”. In order for a brand to be successful, it must not only distinguish itself with the consumer, but it must also have an associated visual representation that is tangible enough for the consumer to relate to. For example, the Nike check image is a global identifier that is associated with the company and is recognized worldwide without having to mention the name of the company or the product or service that is being offered.

Here are some helpful hints:
1. Select a specialist to help with the process
2. Understand what value you would want to add to the consumer. What are your competencies?
3. Outline your strategy
4. Be consistent with communicating the new brand (good for reinforcement)
5. Always go back and measure the effectiveness. Communicate with your target audience. Use benchmarks.
6. Ensure that you deliver on the promises you make with your new brand.