I just came back from Paris, where I attended the show of a talented Belgian designer Tim Van Steenbergen and discovered some up-and-coming funky fashion brands.

While experiencing the Paris Fashion Week first-hand, I thought of the importance of such an event which has a very distinctive brand. It is in fact what one could call a meta-brand. In other words, it’ s an overarching, superior concept that adds usually positive associations to other brands that want to relate to it.

Think of the Oscars. Taking part in the Oscar ceremony, being nominated for the main prize, and of course, winning the Oscar gives huge credibility to those movie industry participants who are lucky to be part of this event. The Oscars nomination ceremony is a meta brand for all those that can and want to benefit from it.

In a similar way, Paris Fashion Week is another such meta brand that helps participating brands propel to the fame and greater brand awareness. Paris Fashion Week is the fourth in a series of other major semiannual fashion weeks. The “big four” take place in New York, London, Milan and Paris.  Fashion collections are shown several seasons in advance so that fashion buyers have a chance to prepare their stock in a timely manner. For instance, right now in Paris designers are already presenting their Autumn-Winter collection for 2011.

After catwalks are over, designers and their teams quickly prepare show rooms that are visited by fashion buyers from the world’s leading boutiques and luxury department stores. Some successful fashion brands manage to ensure their annual turnover just in a matter of a few days, with all of their stock being ordered by a handful of leading fashion boutiques.

In this sense, there are many immediate and tangible benefits from taking part in fashion weeks, as they are a great way to ensure sales for participating brands.

It’s only the world’s leading fashion houses that present their collections during Paris Fashion Week. But curiously, the spill-over effects of this meta brand can also be beneficial for some much smaller brands and fashion start-ups. It seems that many rent small show rooms and promote this fact within the framework of Paris Fashion Week, even without being able to afford higher level participation in catwalk shows. In this sense,  even without a guarantee of large-scale sales, such small brands can benefit from intangible spill-over effects on their brand awareness from the Paris Fashion Week meta brand.

In the next blog posts, I will shed more light on two fashion labels that have participated during Paris Fashion Show. One of them is a famous designer, and another one a very new start-up. Watch this space.

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Last year, I attended the Plugg conference in Brussels for the first time, and I am happy I’ll be going again this year. I found Plugg to be a great way to discover some promising web start-ups from around the world, and listen to venture capitalists and technology gurus talk about business opportunities on the web.

Given SCHMOOZY FOX’S brand and marketing strategy work for web start-ups, an event like Plugg is great chance to check out the fresh web talent out there. I guess this time around, Plugg will be a showcase of advanced technology and web apps. Will the participating start-ups be able to convince us of their commercial and marketing know-how as well? We’ll find that out next week.

For those who are not familiar with this annual event, Plugg is a conference that brings together European web and technology start-ups and gives them a chance to pitch their business ideas to a panel of venture capitalists. It’s also an annual celebration of web entrepreneurship in Europe.

Check out the list of all the participating start-ups by visiting the Plugg site.

In order to get a sneak peak at this year’s Plugg, I asked Robin Wauters (Plugg organizer, TechCrunch editor, serial

Robin Wauters, organizer of Plugg 2010

entrepreneur and simply an avid user of the web), to talk about the event.

SCHMOOZY FOX: Robin, is it still possible to register for Plugg 2010?

Robin Wauters: Yes, you can register until the day before the event, even. Readers of your blog can register with a 25% discount using the code plugg-25percent here: http://mijnevent.be/en/event/101/plugg-2010.

Robin Wauters: To be honest, it will be much of the same as last year. We think the formula works well, and we’re really excited about the line-up of speakers and startups for this year. But always happy to receive suggestions from anyone who attends to see how we can improve the conference for next years.

Robin Wauters: Likewise

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In Belgium, the chain of Carrefour supermarkets is in trouble.  Fourteen out of fifty six supermarkets are to be closed down due to miserable financial results (if you read French, check out this article in Le Soir) which will result in major layoffs of staff.

The mentioned article in Le Soir, as well as this very insightful blog post, suggest that one of the main reasons for the problems Carrefour is experiencing on the Belgian market is unclear brand positioning.

I fully agree with this. According to the blog post on Caelum Novum, the Carrefour brand has lost (or perhaps never even had from the beginning) the “French spirit” behind it. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that Carrefour has entered the Belgian market by acquiring a Belgian chain GB, and didn’t tap into the French gastronomic tradition at all. It is possible that in the minds of consumers, it still has the “aura” of GB — not even the rather unglamorous interior has changed that much since the name changed to Carrefour.

Some international brands choose the so called “glocal” (global but local) strategy when they launch their presence in new markets. But there should always be the right balance between how much of the “local” needs to be infused into the brand and how much of the original heritage should remain alive. It seems like Carrefour should at least bring in some more of the French gastronomic heritage into its brand, among a long list of other things, to make its revival possible on the Belgian market.

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I was very happy to hear that my Alma Mater, Tufts University in Boston (I went to the Fletcher School at Tufts back in 2001), has been exploring the power of social media in order to identify best applicants for its top-ranked undergraduate education.

As part of their application package (which includes academic test results, essays and other quite elaborate  things that require a lot of effort and preparation), Tufts candidates are now encouraged to submit videos that shed light on their personalities.  Since a decision was made to allow YouTube video submissions as part of the application package, Tufts has received 1000 videos. Interestingly, 60% were female, and two thirds of the applicants submitting videos were seeking financial aid. As already mentioned in my previous blog post, Digital Anthropology, women are most active users of social media, and the Tufts University applicant videos suggest the same.

When I was a student at Tufts back in 1999-2001, I was frequently amazed at a large number of very strong and individual personalities there. My feeling is that this will improve even further! Equipped with the encouragement of the Tufts Admissions team, bright candidates will be given an additional incentive to demonstrate their unique skills, interests and passions. In the SCHMOOZY FOX language, these students will have a great opportunity to make their personal brand stand out from the crowd. And by the way, it’s not only unique and original products and services that can be funky brands, it’s also people!

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Today I want to share with you a very useful and informative recent post on Mashable about the main types and characteristics of social media users. It is actually a summary of Forrester’s recent research entitled The New Social Technographics and it reveals quite some interesting info for marketers and entrepreneurs. The summary is presented in the graph below.

This summary will come in handy for any brand that is exploring online channels in order to connect to its consumers and spot business growth opportunities. Interestingly, the most active group on the web, referred to as “creators” (bloggers, podcasters and other proactive digital folk such as yours truly) is actually relatively large: 24% of all web users in the US.

Another sizable group are the so called “conversationalists”, or those who update their Facebook status or send a tweet at least once a week. Some characteristics that described them are as follows,

56% are female — the highest concentration of women in any of the groupings. Seventy percent are 30 years of age or older, and 24% are older than 44. According to the report, conversationalists also have household incomes “slightly above average, and they’re more likely than any other social classification to have college degrees.”

There’s a large number of ways how an innovative brand could use this information to raise awareness on the web, explore it, and make your brands funky!

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Photo by Mykl Roventine on Flickr

I’d like to bring your attention to a recent post by Chad Levitt published on the Personal Branding blog (where I have also previously featured with this guest post). In his article, Chad focuses on companies that still think that they are in full control of their corporate brands. Eloquently, he calls them dinosaurs.

But what’s wrong about controlling your brand, you may ask?  Is it really so bad to have a clear idea of what you want your corporate brand to represent? Once defined, your employees will be asked to support your corporate brand vision, as simple as that.

The truth is, things simply do not work like that any more. Your employees, just like your customers, are not there simply to restate the bullet points your corporate marketing department has put together to define your brand. Just like your customers, your employees shape your brand. They are your brand. And they are for sure the ones who own your brand. This loss of control is pretty sad news for dinosaurs!

Photo by .faramarz on Flickr

Although you might think that dinosaur brands have to be old-fashioned, old and big corporations, it’s not always so. In fact, even a freshly baked start-up can fall into the trap of becoming a dinosaur brand. I don’t think that anybody would pro-actively wish to become a dinosaur brand, but sometimes all it takes is to get disconnected from your customers and their passions. Ignore personal lives of your employees. Imagine that you are in full control of your brand and know better what your customers and employees need.

But brands can be coached away from the dinosaur mentality!

After all, a bit of more free thinking, and allowing your employees to access their Facebook accounts during the day gives you a good chance to fall into a very attractive, and by the way also lucrative category, funky brands.

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Lately, I’ve been busy interviewing founders of funky brands, sharing tips with you on various subjects of brand and marketing strategy, and hey, doing work for my clients. So,  I haven’t as a result written a plain vanilla funky brand review in a while.

Time to correct this bad gal’s behavior!

Although, wait a minute, the brand in question is actually a perfect fit for any bad gal’. They even have a product called Bad Gal Mascara.

The brand in question is called Benefit Cosmetics, and its place of birth is San Francisco, which happens to be one of my favorite cities.

I guess it was the mention of San Francisco (written somewhere on the product display in a shopping mall) that caught my attention right from the start. To give this phenomenon a proper name, let’s say that San Francisco was my first brand entry point for the Benefit brand.

In other words, it generated enough curiosity in order for me to continue exploring Benefit products.

And what did I find out?

Well, first of all, very funky product design. It was a true eye-catcher. A bit of a retro look combined with vibrant colors looked candy-like.  The shape of packaging also somehow felt right. I picked up a small bottle of perfume and just enjoyed holding it in my hands.

Second of all, there’re funky product names. Check it out: “smokin’ eyes”, “some kind-a gorgeous”, “my place or yours”.

Product quality? It seemed fine, although I can’t be an authority on this subject — I was in a hurry and thought I’d experience first instead of buying right away. So, I simply don’t have an opinion on how long-lasting these products are, if their texture and scent are pleasant, etc. But I have a feeling that this stuff is nice.

Benefit Cosmetics was founded by twin sisters, Jean and Jane Ford, formerly models in NYC. After earning enough cash during their modeling career, Jean and Jane decided to invest it into something they knew very well — make-up. And so Benefit was born.

Right now both sisters own a minority stake in Benefit, having sold the controlling stake to LVMH back in 1999.

As you can imagine, the business of cosmetics and make-up is extremely competitive. Dominated by huge powerhouses such as L’Oréal and the like (and this is just one market segment!), cosmetics brands have to struggle very hard in order to break through a huge level of competition. Therefore, it’s important to stand out from the crowd.

Benefit for sure did it quite well through its packaging, product names (and the brand name itself which is pretty successful!) and its ability to tap into the city brand of San Francisco.

And, importantly, it is highly profitable, one of the important characteristics of all funky brands.

Does this mean that there’s no need for any brand strategy and positioning work any more for Benefit to do?

Not at all. Benefit’s consumers and their interests are evolving. New creative and funky-to-be competitors are coming to the market. There are indeed a lot of things to take care of if one’s funky brand is to stay funky!

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Last week, I attended a business development conference in Brussels. Although not exclusively, the majority of the conferences and mini-talks were about e-marketing and online channels in general. The main focus was on tips and tricks of using online tools in order to achieve results.

DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE BEFORE GOING ONLINE

What results? This, of course, depends on each individual company, but you’d be amazed to know that only very few companies know what they want to achieve before establishing online presence. Often, they gotta be online just for the sake of it, because it’s en vogue, or because hey, all of their competitors are already jumping on the bandwagon of all things web.

FIRST, THINK BUSINESS STRATEGY

Indeed, tapping into social media for brand-building purposes should be for sure on any brand’s radar screen these days. But it’s how you use it, and how you link it to your overall business strategy, that’s important. If you haven’t figured out your brand’s DNA yet, and have a vague idea of what your customers love (or hate!) your brand for, it’s not yet time to engage in high-intensity Twittering!

On many occasions at the afore-mentioned event, several people came to me asking how to use Twitter or Facebook, and were not able to explain why they wanted to do that. One guy gave me a fancy answer, “To show that we know how to do that”.  Show to whom? He wasn’t so sure.

DEFINITION OF BRAND STRATEGY

Unfortunately, a holistic strategy approach towards online brand building — the kind that involves thinking through the basics of one’s overall business strategy before starting a Facebook fan page — is still very rare.  In this sense, a smart brand strategy, which is essentially your company’s business strategy that focuses on building a strong brand on all levels of your company, from logistics to customer service to web design, can definitely be the way to go.

SOME TIPS BEFORE YOU GO ONLINE

To give you some tips on what should be kept in mind before launching your brand’s presence on the web, here is a short presentation that I had prepared for last week’s business development conference.   These slides are pretty general, but if applied in the right way to YOUR company, they can create amazing results.

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Some of you have already noticed that www.schmoozyfox.com has changed its look! I am happy to be running the site of SCHMOOZY FOX brand and marketing strategy consulting, www.schmoozyfox.com as well as the blog about funky brands, on this new WP theme!

Many thanks to  Cristian Eslava, a WordPress wizard from Seville, for helping me to set up this theme and make sure that everything is up and running correctly! Also thanks to my friend Ellie Zachariadou (who’s by the way the author of the cool fox logo) for her tweaks and advice about graphic layout.

Working with Cristian motivated me to re-activate my  Spanish: it was a lot of fun exchanging emails about widgets, plug-ins and cascading style sheets en español! It’s been also coincidentally fun to realize that Cristian’s last name, Eslava, which means “Slavic” in Spanish, somehow resembles my own last name, Slavkina.

For his great help, I want to give my link love to Cristian!

Cristian’s site, http://justtellmewhy.com (the Spanish version is available on http://pqpq.es/) is a mix between a blog and a discussion forum. One could call it a Web 2.0 platform for debates.

One of its interesting features is that visitors of the site can post questions to which they cannot find answers in “real life”, and wait for crowdsourced solutions. The good news is that one does not need to register in order to ask an answer or leave a comment. The anonymous character of debates can encourage wider participation.

To show you how the site works, here is an example of what I posted on justtellmewhy. Check it out and submit your opinions. Let’s get the debate going! You can also use it for starting opinion polls and sharing them with your friends through various online channels.

And meanwhile, enjoy the new look of SCHMOOZY FOX.

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Photo by eperales on Flickr

When you start a new business, one of the first things on your very long to-do list will be choosing a good brand name for your product or service. Deciding on a brand name often ends up being a very painful process. It’s almost as hard as choosing the right name for your newborn, but in some cases, even more complicated than that!

This is especially true if you plan to build your brand internationally.

But first, what is, anyway, a good brand name?

The basic rule of thumb is that your consumers, not just yourself, have to find it pleasant (or, shocking, surprising, attention catching) to the ear and as a result, m-e-m-o-r-a-b-l-e. But  what if your present or future consumers are in France, Australia and Japan? Which ears will the name have to appeal to?  And how to make sure that a brand launched on the French and Japanese markets doesn’t have any hidden “surprises” in either of them?

A good rule of thumb is to invest some time and rigor into the choice of your international brand name right from the start. Often, simply being aware of potential differences between how your brand name might be perceived in different countries is a good start. If you keep this in mind, you are likely to avoid a situation of finding out that your brand name has undesirable associations in a language different from your own.

For instance, a German brand of home accessories called Koziol sounds quite remarkable in Russian! Although a direct meaning of “koziol” is “goat”, in familiar Russian this word is often used to refer to someone who is a bit of a … loser. I already mentioned this example in my previous article on brand names, Baboushka Branding or a bit of Russianness in Marketing.

Here are some considerations that might help you navigate through complicated issues of international brand building:

• First, choose a temporary brand name that sounds good to you. It’s easier to think through your business strategy when you have at least some sort of name in place! Don’t order any logos or buy URLs associated with this name before you have more clarity about your overall business strategy. I often deal with situations when a company that makes great products with a lot of potential, comes to me for brand strategy advice after already having selected a dubious name, and done all the graphic work around it.

• Prepare a business plan:  A business plan is an excellent framework that allows you to think through many aspects of your business, including overall business strategy, marketing, financial forecasts, risk scenarios, as well as your company values. Once you have the values clear, they might trigger further ideas for a good name!

• Think internationally: It’s good to have an idea about the international scope of your business from the start. This is especially important to remember for a company that originates in a relatively small market. For European companies which often trade across borders, the question of choosing a brand name that is easily understood across the whole of Europe is essential. The same goes to any e-commerce business that plans to sell goods across many geographies.

• Build a multilingual team: Once you’ve established the geographical scope of your main markets, get some help from people who can speak the corresponding languages. You can use the Questions and Answers in LinkedIn, or even experiment with language teaching sites such as busuu.com or myngle.com in order to identify such people and ask their opinions. The aim is simply to get some flavor of how your brand name will sound in the language of your customers across the world!

• Develop cultural awareness: A somewhat more challenging  task that should nevertheless be on your radar screen is thinking through the cultural associations that your brand name might have in your target markets. Even if you try to introduce your US brand in the UK or Australia, check whether the existing name will be perceived the way you initially intended, even if the language spoken across these countries is the same. Hire good people who have highly developed cultural sensitivity skills — this investment will be extremely important in your international business development.

This list is not exhaustive, and selecting a good name for your international brand that would sound equally successful in different geographies is a very complex issue. If you want to navigate through this complexity gracefully, don’t hesitate to contact SCHMOOZY FOX for advice, and make sure you implement that new year’s resolution to learn a new language soon enough!

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