Category: Company Branding

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Company Branding Creativity

Branding can make anything look good.

via reflectionof.me

The wonders of branding. How many can you recognise? .

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Company Branding Creativity Video

A pop up that I didn’t instantly close..

So here’s a pop up that I didn’t automatically close. Guinness just have that knack of doing stuff which catches your eye and this was no exception.

A video and a call to action. That was it. But it did the trick.

Funnily enough when I actually went to click through to see where it would take me, it went nowhere.

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Company Branding Cool Mobile

The Vodafone Head Office – Portugal

via thecoolhunter.co.uk

One of the coolest corporate offices I’ve seen.

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Advertising Case Studies Company Branding

Identity and Branding from Noisy Decent Graphics

A while back Creative Review featured Mr Chicken. He’s the chap who designs all the Fried Chicken logos in London. Amazing stuff.Mrchicken-386x500

Coke continued their branding resurgence with these great summer special edition cans. Big corporations listen up: THIS IS HOW YOU DO BRANDING.

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Michael Bierut tweaked the Guitar Hero logo. There’s an element of ‘you couldn’t make that up’ isn’t there? Looks great though.

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Another example of ‘how to do branding’ from a designer at the top of his game. I could easily have mentioned The Oak Room or continued work for MAD.

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London went a bit logo mad including the dreadful experience of trying to create a Brand for London. When will they learn, the city doesn’t want or need a logo. Michael Johnson has a good round up here.

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Of much more importance to London, the Olympic icons were launched. Just as I really like the 2012 logo (sorry David) I really like these icons. Actually, I don’t really like the black and white ones, but I love the colour ones and I really like the way it links in with the tube lines thing. Colourful, interesting, different. Exciting. Well done Someone.

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I designed the Newspaper Club logo which you all hated and the Noticings logo which you all loved. (Actually lots of people love that one, not just you lot.)

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And then right at the end of the year, because we all know heavy metal bands have the best logos we asked Christophe Szpajdel to design the new logo for RIG.

The all new RIG logo

via noisydecentgraphics.typepad.com
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Company Branding Cool Tech

Astonishing Samsung stand at CES 2010

It was hilarious. People kept staring up at it and then ran into each other. Samsung definitely has the biggest balls in consumer electronics

via ashleynorris.posterous.com

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Case Studies Company Branding Social Media

New Social Media Policy from Coca Cola..

Firstly, here’s an interview with Adam Brown, Head of Social Media @ Coca-Cola.

About that social media policy, it’s only 3 pages. It doesn’t have to be 100 pages long and cover every last point under the sun. It should be an addition to existing company policy–you don’t need to start from scratch.

As Coca-Cola introduce their Social Media Policy:

Every day, people discuss, debate and embrace The Coca‐Cola Company and their brands in thousands of online conversations. Coca-Cola recognizes the vital importance of participating in these online conversations and are committed to ensuring that they participate in online social media the right way. These Online Social Media Principles have been developed to help empower the Coca-Cola associates to participate in this new frontier of marketing and communications, represent our Company, and share the optimistic and positive spirits of our brands.

Interesting to see are the 10 “Principles for Online Spokespeople” Coca-Cola has created:

  1. Be Certified in the Social Media Certification Program.
  2. Follow our Code of Business Conduct and all other Company policies.
  3. Be mindful that you are representing the Company.
  4. Fully disclose your affiliation with the Company.
  5. Keep records.
  6. When in doubt, do not post.
  7. Give credit where credit is due and don’t violate others’ rights.
  8. Be responsible to your work.
  9. Remember that your local posts can have global significance.
  10. Know that the Internet is permanent.

All in all Adam Brown has set a nice standard within one of the most loved companies in the world

Download the full policy here: Coca-Cola Online Social Media Principles

Source

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Advertising Company Branding Cool

Pepsi changes to Pecsi in Argentina..

A typical case of overcoming a seemingly impossible problem with a brilliant solution here from BBDO Argentina.

The problem being that for argentines the ‘PS’ sound is hard to pronounce. The solution? Change it. Sounds simple enough right? Well, in doing so, they created the first democratic pronunciation for a brand (which in itself guaranteed coverage..)

The results were almost instant and people have been found to be asking for a Pecsi all over Argentina and beyond!

Pecsi Case from BBDO argentina on Vimeo.

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Analysis Company Branding Cool

Brands 2.0: Branding in a digital world

Brands and Branding below is the book, the ‘offline’ version if you will, but here, you can download the PDF extract of Andy’s Brands&Brandingchapter which is Brands 2.0 – Brands in a digital world.

Don’t say I’m not good to you.

Click me to download.

The book in it’s entirety looks to be well worth checking out and is divided in to three parts:

1. Examining the case for brands,

2. Best practice in branding

3. The future for brands.

It’s a collaborative effort, written by 19 experts, and when I use the term ‘experts’ I actually mean it. The writers are the very cream of the crop.

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Company Branding Cool Funny

That futuristic Coke vending machine..

Coca Cola vending machines as you know them will beCoca Cola Freestyle changed forever should the following be rolled out globally in the coming years. This summer, over in the US, they are rolling out what they are calling the Coca-Cola Freestyle, which is actually pretty cool. It has a touch screen to make your drinks choice through and 100 flavours, some of which have never been commercially available before like Orange Coke, Peach Fanta and Strawberry Sprite. It’s currently only being tested in their corporate HQ’s at San Diego and Atlanta but beginning this month they will be trialling 20 in live restaurants including Subway.

It sounds cliched but when some head honcho of a division of Coke said “It’s like the iPod of drink machines. We’re essentially reinventing the dispensed beverage business.” He could be right.

According to reports, it’s taken 4 years to produce and over $100m in R&D, when you’ve spent that much money purely on developing an idea, you know they’re going to put everything behind it to make it work.

They wanted to make it fun and easy to use, without reminding people of a cash machine or a computer. To do this, they recruited Vince Voron, now senior director of industrial design, from Apple to work on the project. Behind it all, it transmits data over night about what was sold and at what time that day. Already, they’ve found out that after 3pm Caffeine-Free Diet Coke spikes. Interesting.

Here’s the corporate introduction, and to follow is the ‘in the wild’ public reaction. The latter is a bit more animated..

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Company Branding

What do your brand colours say about you?

Is there an art or a science to choosing the ‘right’ brand colours? Well, it’s generally not just something that is based on guess work.  More often than not, expert consultation would have been sought and an incomprehensible amount of hours spent on choosing the right identity for a brand.

Colour is massively important but each has a different feel, identity and number of associations. There are also cultural differences when using colours, something that will always need to be thought about when doing global campaigns transcending different regions.

For example, a lesser known fact may be that in China, red is the colour of happiness and central to the wedding theme, signifying joy, love and prosperity. However, interestingly enough, the very same colour should never be used for text as when written it signifies death.

Let’s take the colour orange. It’s famously used by easyJet, Orange and… the dutch.

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Orange

Dutch

A few years ago now, Orange objected to easyMobile (easyJet’s attempt at dominating the mobile market, and failing) Stelios’s answer to that was, “I’ll see you in court.” and “It is our right to use our own corporate colour for which we have become famous during the last 10 years. We have nothing to be afraid of in this court case. They are clearly worried about the competition.” At the time, they also planned to add a disclaimer on the website saying that EasyMobile is not connected to Orange Personal Communications, arguing that the colour is an essential part of their iconic brand. More here.

How did it get to that stage? Who owns the colour? Is that even possible? Here’s a great article on the topic from back in 2005. Can you own a colour?

Then you’ve got T-Mobile who thought they ‘owned’ the colour magenta.

T-Mobile

Engadget, the brilliant consumer tech site, launched a mobile arm, imaginatively titled Engadget Mobile and used a colour similar to what T-Mobile use in their brand messaging. They weren’t too happy about this and T-Mobile “requested the prompt discontinuation of the use of the color magenta on Engadget Mobile.”

Engadget Mobile

Hilarious. They had no idea the backlash that was going to follow soon after, here, here, here and here. Not to mention the the 549 comments on Engadget’s post on the topic. The word I’m probably looking for is FAIL.

None of this would have happened if they used the rather superb Cymbolism. I lied, it probably would have, but check it out, such a brilliant website. It’s “the ultimate tool a designer has at his or her disposal to communicate feeling and mood. It’s a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”

Cymbolism

Using Cymbolism, Dmitry over at Usabilitypost worked through a series of colours, provided real life examples and the words that Cymbolism came up with linked to the colours. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is awesome.

At work, the branding is largely red. According to Cymbolism, this means that at Consolidated PR we’re passionate, powerful, bold, radical and excited. I’d say that’s entirely accurate too.

What do your brand colours say about you?

Brand Colours