Trying to protect itself, our brain often switches off when it is presented with excessive information, especially related to brand promotions. And in fact, we are becoming increasingly inventive as to how to guard ourselves from information overload.

Information overload, image by michael_reuter on Flickr

However, some companies manage to get on our radar screen, and hide quietly in our heads until the right moment comes.

How do they do that? Maybe we remember some of the products we’ve seen advertised on TV. Or a company logo we’ve seen. But most of all, we store this information in the form of shapes, and images, especially if there’s an emotional charge associated with them.

Chances are, you remember a lot of brands by their brand mascots — cartoon-like characters which serve as a marketing communications tool that infuses brands with emotions and personality.

Ronald McDonald, the Michelin man, the Lacoste crocodile, Travelocity Roaming Gnome — these brand mascots have helped their “parent” companies become known and successful for many years and decades in a row. To replicate this successful marketing tool first introduced by some well-established companies in the 19th century (Michelin is believed to be one of the first companies to have adopted a mascot), now even start-ups increasingly use brand mascots to market their products. Brand mascots also exist in services, and the business-to-business context. For instance, an email marketing software company from NYC called MadMimi with an eccentric looking lady as its mascot.

Although many companies have tried to introduce mascots, not all of them have been as successful as the Michelin man. Most of them go unnoticed, and play absolutely no role in our purchasing decisions.

Why do some mascots end up on our brand radar screen, whereas others fail to do so? Besides rather apparent reasons (“I don’t like the product, so I don’t really care about how fantastic your mascot is”) — we often crowd out even good quality products promoted with fun brand mascots from our brains. The answer may lie in the kinds of mascots the companies choose.

It is not actually so easy to come up with a fun character that will be your brand’s ambassador. Whereas it may seem straightforward to do it for companies that already have a character as part of their company’s name, (such as a fox for my own company SCHMOOZY FOX, or a cucumber for Spicy Pickle, a chain of restaurants in Colorado), others often go through excruciating brainstorming sessions trying to come up with an attractive mascot. What we as consumers see as a result of this is often counterintuitive and at first sight doesn’t have anything to do with the business of the company in question. For instance, why is the French fashion brand Lacoste so strongly associated with the crocodile? And why exactly is it a gnome who does all the traveling on behalf of Travelocity.com?

Lindsay Gaskins, founder and CEO of Marbles – a chain of retail stores that sell games, puzzles and software to engage and develop the brain — says that given the nature of the business, “It was a no brainer to choose the brain as our mascot”. But within Marbles, there was a feeling that the Brain would be soulless without a name. To improve the situation, a Facebook campaign on the Marbles fan page generated customers’ competition for the best name, so now the mascot is called Albert the Brain (a clear allusion to Albert Einstein).

Many successful mascots are human-like characters. Travelocity PR Manager Joel Frey says, “The concept of the Roaming Gnome was pitched to us by ad agency McKinney in 2003. At the time, we felt an icon like Roaming Gnome would help us differentiate our brand from our competitors and it has. I believe that the idea borrows from the meme of a traveling gnome (OS: which involves stealing a gnome, traveling with it, taking photos of the gnome set against various locations, and then returning it to the owner along with the photos) that dates to the 80s in Australia.”

For Gary Levitt, founder and CEO of MadMimi, the process of choosing the right mascot was a matter of infusing his company with personality. He acknowledges that the mascot selection process was both planned, but also spontaneous, especially the “mad” part of the name. “I shared an office with a company called Madstone Productions, and because the mimi.com domain was already taken… I kinda just stuck “mad” at the beginning… making madmimi.com,” says Levitt. As a result, the graphic designer who created the personality of Mad Mimi, had to express this “madness” in Mimi’s eccentric look.

In all the examples above, the companies chose human-like characters as brand mascots. From the point of view of marketing, and psychology, this is an important observation.

A leading authority on brand mascots and anthropomorphic marketing, Stephen Brown, professor of marketing at the University of Ulster, says that the success of a brand mascot is related to how distant the mascot character is from the human. In his paper Where the wild brands are: some thoughts on anthropomorphic marketing,¹.

Brown concludes that fictional human characters are most popular brand mascots, followed by birds, domestic animals, and wild animals. Insects, aquatic creatures, vegetables and body parts (!) have much less popularity, although some insects such as bees and lady birds are often chosen as mascots. In these cases, they are made to look cute and friendly, with human-like faces.

Mascots are fascinating as they are present in our lives on so many levels. Although their main goal is to help sell products or services, they also entertain and inspire, and even motivate their parent companies to do something exemplary — for instance Lacoste committing to the protection of the crocodile.

So next time you see a friendly face peering out at you in a store, stop and think: what is it telling me about the product? And what is it telling me about me?

For more information on the topic of brand mascots, have a look at my previous articles:

Brand mascots

Beastly branding

Why meerkats help markets

Online brand mascots

Brand mascots in action: Travelocity Roaming Gnome (part of the Funky Brand Interview series™)

How Goodle keeps its Doodle funky

Kipling customizes its brand mascot

© 2012 SCHMOOZY FOX.  All material on this site may be freely cited provided the source is given. Please use the permalink of the article. If you would like to syndicate the full text of this article, please contact Olga Slavkina at olga (at) schmoozyfox (dot) com

1. Brown, Stephen., Marketing Review, Fall 2010, Vol. 10, issue 3, pp. 209-224

I discovered this video on the blog of Thomas Otter, VP for Research at Gartner. It summarizes a story of how Ikea went about hiring 280 staff for its new store in Australia, in a very original, and low-cost way.

From a purely creative and visually attractive point of you (which would make total sense to all of the visual learners), the brand partnership between Desigual and Cirque du Soleil is extremely successful, in my opinion.  If you know the outrageous character of Desigual clothes, you’d see that the clownesque fun flavor has been present in them for already quite some time, so the partnership with Cirque du Soleil is smack to the point.

But what does this partnership give to Cirque du Soleil?  My guess is that one of the main reasons for this brand partnership must be the target audience.   Desigual, well-known in Europe, gives the Canadian Cirque du Soleil better brand exposure in Europe.

Otherwise, there discourse in the video above is all about similarities betweent he two, whereas, for a brand partnership to be successful, it would need to focus on differences.   For more insights, read my aticle 3 co-branding rules for bigger profits.

Source: Brandchannel

I’ve written about product placement in movies and novels (!), in songs and on TV.

But how about fictional products becoming popular in movies first,  to be launched and gain market success in real life later on? This phenomenon is called reverse product placement, and there was a good post on the subject appearing on Brandchannel last week.  There’s a nice list of 5 reverse product placements for your perusal.  Whereas reverse product placement is certainly not the most common marketing phenomenon, it should surely be worthy of rememering by all funky brandsters.

Event and conference attendance, as well as corporate sponsorships of events, can benefit your brand. Continue reading on the iStrategy blog.

I’d like to share with you a video that I came across on the site thefinancialbrand.com. I think it is useful content for anyone who wants to understand what brand exactly means, or explain the concept to others.

These are the questions I often read in emails from people who are, on the one hand, attracted to the benefits of branding, but, on the other hand, hesitate that it’s something relevant to their business-to-business activities. Some of them are concerned that branding can make them appear as unprofessional, over the top, and even too glamorous.

Why do such questions arise?

One of the reasons why B2B companies hesitate about the benefits of branding is, ironically, due to the vague brand of…branding.  The very concept of branding is often perceived as an activity to do with marketing beer, sneakers or chocolate bars. Here, I have to take a step back and make a reference to my article about the difference between branding and marketing.  To summarize, branding is all about getting your value proposition right – it’s the WHAT of your business strategy. Marketing, on the other hand, is the HOW — it’s all about promoting the WHAT. Marketing tactics “become much more powerful when driven by brand strategy and aligned with business goals.” (see source)

And isn’t it of use to a law firm to get its value proposition right? The truth is, any B2B company can reap many rewards from applying the brand strategy framework to its business:

1) Your clear brand positioning will work as a form of shorthand to help you attract clients. Instead of spending hours searching, analyzing, comparing, and making decisions, people will be coming to your firm because they’ve already heard about it, and know in advance how you can help them.

2) Your strong brand will create barriers to competitors — this logically follows from point #1.

3) Don’t be afraid of infusing your brand identity with emotional associations. They work not only for consumer brands. The truth about B2B is that many collaboration and partnership decisions between companies are based not only on purely rational criteria. B2B is about forming relationships with people, and that’s when branding can greatly help.

4) A strong brand will also allow you to command a price premium. If you are known to be an expert in your field, people would be willing to pay you the fee commensurate with your experience, and your brand.

5) Finally, a strong brand will create opportunities for growth. When you want to introduce a new product or service, a strong brand will serve you well. Even if you are a small company with clear brand positioning that you’ve made known to your target audience, you will find it easier to expand your services portfolio.

Your strong brand will help you build trust — the essential ingredient of all good business transactions. If you are in B2B, go for smart branding — you deserve it.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. DKNY has recently revealed the real person behind its Twitter name. And it’s done it by producing very personable, and sticky web content. Watch this video about Aliza Licht, the PR director of DKNY:

That’s a pretty good way not only to gather more Twitter followers, but also to showcase, and build, your brand. Kudos to DKNY for this smart brand building activity.

I also recommend this article about real people behind companies’ Twitter names, published by The Read Write Web, and this LinkedIn discussion.

My question is, why be dry and boring when you can be a little more personal and funky? 

Most companies, even the ones making funky products, often adopt a corporate tone of voice as soon as they start tweeting or facebooking. Only to have their fans hide them in their news feed.

But some brands, like DKNY, are beginning to understand that what we, fans, want to know, is something much more personal than product-related corporate speak and self-congratulatory retweets of brand mentions. Social media is, well, s o c i a l, and our expectations for something social and authentic are simply natural. That’s why I expect to see more and more companies reveal the real people who tweet on behalf of their brands.

I must be one of those visual learners, and I am certainly not alone. Compared to verbal learners (they learn by listening) who constitute about 30% of the global population, and 5% of the so called experiential learners (people who learn through tactile experiences), visual learners are the biggest group, constituting roughly 65% of the global population.

Here’s something visual especially for you, the visual folks:

This explains why visual identity and product design are so important in branding and marketing.  It also explains why videos are crucial in making online content sticky.

And here’s something for all those visual learners, to illustrate the point — a video about videos. I saw it during a session on social video advertising, presented by Andrea Febbraio during the iStrategy conference in Amsterdam. Andrea, a pretty engaging and sticky guy himself , co-founded ebuzzing — a company which seeds the web with branded content.

From keynote speeches by Randi Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales, to workshops on topics such as social advertising and social media in the offline world, to name a few, for me iStrategy was a great opportunity to get some good insights into the web dynamics of brand building.

It would be a challenge to review the entire conference (if you want to get a feel for what was discussed, check #istrategy on Twitter, or read the istrategy blog), so I am going to mention only a small — but extremely interesting — part of iStrategy, the panel discussion How brands can work with startups.

Moderated by CMO of an online French retailer Vente Privee,  Julien Zakoian, the panel consisted of Thom Cummings from Soundclowd, Chris Maples from Spotify and Anders Sjoman from Voddler.

The discussion focused on partnerships between startups and established brands such as joint marketing campaigns and advertisement deals.

Chris Maples from Spotify gave an example of a brand partnership between Volkswagen and Spotify, which started off as an ad hoc collaboration, and ended up as a show on MTV. Involved in the ideation stage of this joint project, Spotify helped VW create a social media campaign whereby VW fans with profiles on Spotify contributed to the list of Driving Track Confessions — songs they would be embarrassed to admit they sang while driving.

Here’s more scoop on this campaign:

The panel on brands and startups was extremely interesting for me mainly because 1) I often work with startups helping them create and implement brand strategies for growth and profits early on, and 2) because brand partnerships is such a hot topic in branding and marketing in general. You might have noticed this from my previous posts.

Is it important for startups to think strategically about their partnerships with brands?

My short answer is YES. Whereas from my experience I can say that most startups don’t think in terms of medium or long-term brand strategy, and often tend to go after opportunities which will bring cash fast, thinking strategically can help them create long-term brand value.  Having a brand strategy is not a luxury, it’s an extremely useful and necessary framework for startups which enables them to decide upon each new partnership and select those which will enhance, not diminish, startup brands.

This is one of the main reasons I’ve intentionally changed the word order in the topic of this blog post. Whereas the discussion panel at iStrategy was called how brands can work with startups, I found it more logical to talk about how startups can work with brands. Big brands are in a good position to choose their partners, but as a startup, you also need to be perceived as an equal partner, and do what works for you in the long-term.

Here are some of my tips for startups which will help them consider brand partnerships that will work in their favor:

1) Keep in mind that each brand partnership with an established brand will signal something about your own brand and create brand associations for your consumers. To put it simply, their reputation will become part of yours.

2) Make a list of criteria for brands to partner with — they should fall nicely into your overall brand strategy (and please don’t tell me you don’t have one! )

3) Don’t concentrate only on the big and powerful brands with lots of cash. Someone on the panel said that every startup brand would probably like to partner with brands such as Coke, but this is really not the only approach you should concentrate on. Focus on the brand power, not only cash, that your partner can deliver to you.

4) Explore the unexplored — seek partnerships based on contrasts, not similarities.

5) Seek brand partners with different target audience than yours.

6) Finally, partner with authentic brands, leaders within their product categories. This is often easier said than done (the truth is, big brands like to partner with… other big brands, and in order for them to explore startups, the latter need to convince them of benefits), but you should set your goals high.

For more details on the last 3 points, check out my previous article 3 co-branding rules for bigger profits.

For more on co-branding, see my previous blog post 8 examples of co-branding and brand partnerships.

Although their positioning is quite different from each other, and they serve different types of customers,  Missoni and Target seem to go well together because they are part of the same industry — fashion. Some other examples you’ve encountered on my blog — for example a brand partnership between nail polish OPI and Dell laptops — might seem less logical at first sight — but they still work. Provided they have been formed in line with both parties’ brand strategies.

What are the main rules of good co-branding?  An excellent article on the subject that I can recommend to you was written by Marc Ritson for Marketing Week.

The main example discussed in the article is the already mentioned partnership between Missoni and Target in the USA. Ritson refers to it as an “impressive demonstration of the commercial and strategic advantages of co-branding.” He then proceeds to giving a set of co-branding rules, which I found important to summarize here for my readers:

Co-branding rule #1: Explore the yet unexplored

According to Ritson, for co-branding to work, it would need to be based on contrasts rather than similarities.

Photo by Nelson Cheen on Flickr

This indeed sounds like a no-brainer to me, although I’ve noticed that many companies have difficulties grasping this simple rule.  Many of them think that a win-win partnership is only possible  with brands similar to theirs.  Usually this kind of approach will waste you a lot of time with little return. Instead of reinforcing what you’ve already got anyway, why don’t you explore something totally different? Of course, exploring the unexplored needs to be already part of your brand strategy — co-branding is not good for experiments.

The way to go is to look for a brand partner whose strategic positioning will bring your brand to the area you haven’t explored yet.  In other words, a smart brand partnership will help you implement your brand strategy quickly and efficiently.  For instance, in the case of Missoni and Target, Missoni got access to a huge US market which it would have otherwise needed to reach by very expensive and possibly lengthy campaigns, whereas Target strengthened its brand attributes such as design and affordable luxury in no time.

Co-branding rule #2: your co-branding partner needs to have a target market different from yours

If you plan to generate brand awareness about your product within a totally new target market, then partnering with a brand which already has this reach could be a very smart move.  I don’t know the details of the agreement between Missoni and Target, but just imagine how big Missoni’s US marketing budget would have been if the brand had decided to reach US consumers all alone, without Target’s help — it would have been simply astronomically huge.

Co-branding rule #3: your brand has to have a “legitimate fit within a product range being offered.”

Your brand positioning within your product category needs to be well-known in order for you to start thinking about co-branding. This is why you usually see well-known brands entering into partnerships with each other, rather than one strong brand pulling along an unknown one. Exceptions to the latter could be partnerships between well-established brands and young artists and designers.  There are plenty of examples to prove this, and I invite you to have a look at the Kipling’s Monkey Mashup contest for artists and designers. Whereas I wouldn’t call it a long-lasting brand partnership, this kind of contest created a lot of buzz for the participating artists, and once again refreshed Kipling and its DNA of funky, innovative design.

Finally, on November 17th H&M is set to release a collection designed by Versace.  Do you think this will be a fruitful co-branding project for both brands?

Zazie. Image courtesy of Mais il est ou le soleil

You must have noticed that brand partnerships are one of my big interests, so today here’s another example I want to share with you. Mais il est où le soleil has chosen French singer Zazie as its brand ambassador.

Cooperation between Zazie and Mais il est ou le soleil can indeed be called a true partnership, as the choice has been made bilaterally, in a most serendipitous way. I talked to Val Pollet, art director of the brand. Here are some insights into this partnership that Ms Pollet has shared with me.

“It was actually a matter of chance,” says Val Pollet. “Zazie passed by our shop in Paris (Odeon), and really liked our skirts. In the evening of the same day, Zazie was performing in Brussels, dressed entirely in Mais il est où le soleil. Our partnership was onto a good start, without even having been formally concluded.”

After the concert, brand’s representatives got in touch with Zazie, and as a result, a mutual decision to co-operate was made.

However, it wasn’t all due to chance that the Belgian brand decided to approach Zazie. “She’s certainly a character,” says Val Pollet, “and I like to create collections for women with a lot of character. These are women for whom it’s natural to have their distinctive style. One day, a woman like this can be a princess, the next day she’s a mother, and then on the third day, she’s a working girl. Always feminine, she stays true to her personality. For me, Zazie is the embodiment of exactly this kind of woman, the woman who’s got a lot to say for herself, and who wants to succeed in life. This is why this partnership makes perfect sense.”

The partnership, which is initially set to last through to the Summer 2012, has only just begun, but the brand can already see some good results. “We’ve already heard from many of the multi-brand shops which carry our items,” says Val Pollet, “that Zazie had validated Mais il est où le soleil as a very creative brand with a strong identity. The singer — a woman of values, adored by her fans — a woman with a strong personal brand — is helping us to get into a whole new category of brands. Established and famous brands.”

Ms Pollet has also shared with me that the money that Zazie had received from this collaboration, was given to a charity organization.

Here is a link to the ongoing discussion on LinkedIn, please join in and participate.

Flickr image by Pink Sherbet Photography

My last two articles were dedicated to the subject of brand partnerships. I gave several examples of brands which enhanced their positioning by having established short or long-term partnerships with other brands.

Although good brand partnerships can give your product or service a lot ofbenefits, badly selected brand partnerships are a danger to any company.  Whilst associating your brand with another product or service brand can be considered relatively safe (provided you’ve done all the required steps to select your brand partner correctly), celebrity brand endorsements which involve people are a much more risky thing to do.

Before you decide to sign a sizable check to a celebrity who’ll be promoting your product publicly, make sure you have full trust in this person.  Are you confident that your chosen celebrity demonstrates the right mix of integrity, maturity and emotional intelligence necessary to represent your precious brand? If not, consider other options.  Here’s a list of brand endorsements gone bad. Study these examples and avoid these kinds of situations as much as you can:

1) Abercrombie & Fitch pays a reality show star for not wearing A&F clothes

2) Kellog drops Olympic star Michael Phelps for smoking marijuana

3) Wrigley stops a deal with singer Chris Brown for his assault against Rihanna

4) Walmart stops selling a clothing line endorsed by American TV host Kathy Lee Gifford after it’s discovered that the clothes are made by children in a Honduras sweatshop.

5) The brand of KMart never recovers after selling products by Martha Stewart

6) Chanel and Burberry drop Kate Moss for cocaine use

An example of brand partnership between Veuve Cliquot and DKNY

Another co-branding example: Missoni and Target

Veuve Cliquot and DKNY

Martini and D&G

Brand partnerships

Can laptops and nail polish complement each other? 

Naked Wines and Naked Chef

A  new kind of brand ambassadors: famous bloggers

A new kind of brand ambassadors: famous entrepreneurs