Technology branding comes into its own as companies find the competitive edge has begun to matter.

Technology branding is coming into its own; (Above) A Wipro-branded bus in Davos, Switzerland

Business Line: IT’s all about branding

Archana Venkat

Every time someone from my team meets a prospective client, I ask him to avoid the ‘low cost-quality-efficiency’ talk. We have branded India enough and now it is time to focus on branding our company,” says Deepak Khosla, Senior Vic e-President and Head – APAC and Japan, Patni Computer Services.

Khosla’s statement reflects the change in the mindset of IT companies that until a few years ago were content toeing the ‘world’s IT hub’ line. Little wonder then that IT brand campaigns were full of ‘trust’, ‘confidence’ and ‘quality’. As clients began asking “what have you got that your competitor does not?” companies were forced to review their branding. The result — most companies today are evolving their unique brand identity and ways to market it to stakeholders.

Prior to 2004, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) did not see the need to build an external brand. Changes in the offshore landscape necessitated it. Not only did strong Indian players emerge, some global players too started emulating the TCS model. “Today if you don’t say who you are, somebody else will decide who you are and reposition you,” says Jayant Pendharkar, Vice-President and Head of Global Marketing, TCS.

A brand recall exercise on “who were the top international brands” held the answer. “After IBM and Accenture, there was no clarity on the third place. So we put ourselves to occupying that place,” says Pendharkar. After a few years of coming up with varied taglines, the company felt a single message was essential to promote itself. In came a Madison Avenue-based brand consulting firm, Siegel & Gale (USA), for brand positioning, and DraftFCB+Ulka for advertising. Last March, the company launched its global brand line ‘Experience certainty.’ The company now differentiates itself on its core competencies – business consulting, outsourcing and IT services – being delivered to clients in time.

(more…)

For a while now, I have been talking to clients and people in the interactive industry about preference-based advertising and preference-based entertainment and how the opt-in experience model could be the way of the future for content channels. The idea is out there, and a company called Blyk is creating a unique advertising model around user preferences.

Blyk is a free mobile network for the 16 to 24-year-old demographic (the hardest demo to market to). Blyk is only currently available in the UK and by invite only. Looks like they are taking cues from popular social networking communities.

Users fill out a form online and list their interests. It’s preference-based advertising, and it involves the end user, giving them more advertising choices within their cell/multimedia experience.

Users get 217 text messages, which in my opinion, will be used up in exactly 217 seconds, and 43 minutes free call time. Again, kids will blast through that with no problem. It’s pay as you play after that.

How do they get away with giving away free service? Blyk partners with advertisers who want to reach the 16-24 demographic and charges them for it. It’s similar to free newspapers paid by local advertisers except more targeted. Because kids in this demographic are already using short message service (SMS) as a real means of communication, it makes sense to develop an advertising strategy wrapped around messaging and images. The advertising also has a bit more depth to it as well, since the adverts involve users by asking questions and suggesting products that correspond with their answers. Nothing is really free in life, so Blyk sends targeted text and picture messages to your phone as advertisements.

Blyk also did a unique social branding experiment where they ran a competition with the London College of Communication and asked students to develop a Blyk brand based only on a few buzzwords. Finalists were posted online, and the winning mark was chosen online. There are no plans to turn Blyk into a social network or link to other social communities; for now it’s purely a distribution model.

http://www.blyk.co.uk

Irene Etzkorn runs the simplification practice at strategic branding company Siegel+Gale. She helps clients clarify and simplify their every interaction with customers – a powerful competitive advantage. Now she is calling for the political candidates to do the same thing. In fact, she states that clarity is an opportunity overlooked by each of the candidates, and it could provide a tremendous political advantage to the candidate who embraces it first.

“Despite the fact that each of the Presidential candidates is desperately seeking a point of distinction, they are all missing one relevant and appealing promise: making the government truly more accessible to its citizens. A call for clarity is a powerful message that would resonate with voters.

“It is particularly interesting that Obama, who has made ‘change’ the refrain of his campaign, and McCain, who travels on the Straight Talk Express, have both overlooked this rallying point.”

A trail of paper from cradle to grave
“As citizens, over our lifetimes, we must interact with certain government agencies – notably the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration – and often need to interact with others, whether Medicare, Medicaid or even FEMA. These interactions often occur at times of stress, anxiety or infirmity, and are confusing and frustrating beyond belief. New York Congressman Steve Israel summed it up when he said, ‘Seniors believe they need a Nobel Prize in mathematics to understand this program’ when describing the complexity of the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plan.

“Clarity, transparency and relevance are critical to engaging the hearts of the voters. Too often, citizens believe that federal agencies are hiding behind jargon, vicious cycles of paperwork and complicated procedures. This undermines citizens’ faith in government and sets up an unproductive ‘me versus them’ attitude. One of the candidates has an opportunity to distinguish himself or herself from the gobbledygook that pervades Washington by making Simplification a campaign plank.

(more…)

Creates Innovative, Inviting, Child-Friendly Online Information Source for
Patients, Families, and Healthcare Professionals

http://www.searchhope.org

Los Angeles – March 10, 2008 – Siegel+Gale, one of the world’s premier strategic branding companies, has created an innovative, inviting, child-friendly web-based portal that allows sick children and their families to easily find online resources about childhood cancer, blood disorders, and other rare diseases or conditions.

Launched in February, the HOPE Portal (www.searchhope.org ) was commissioned by Childrens Hospital Los Angeles to radically expand the breadth and accessibility of its Patient & Family Education Resource Center. Siegel+Gale created, designed, and developed the portal to combine comprehensive information access with a design using illustrated drawings reminiscent of children’s books.

“This site is talking about the toughest topics in the world – severe childhood illnesses – to the most vulnerable audiences in the world – the children themselves and their parents and families,” says Alan Siegel, Chairman and CEO of Siegel+Gale. “We had to strike a balance between not being scary and not backing away from reality. We found our answer in whimsy that appeals to both children and adults.

“We loved this assignment,” Mr. Siegel continues. “Very rarely do we get the opportunity to really help those in need – and the HOPE Portal is an authoritative online resource that truly benefits patients and the healthcare community.”

(more…)

Creating brands for politicians is always a work in progress: immediate, hyper-competitive, ever-evolving and ever-adapting to changes in the electorate and changes in the opposition’s brand strategy.

Until Tuesday, it looked as if Barack Obama was setting the gold standard, providing a lesson on how to create and execute a crystal-clear branding program in just over six months. Now it is time for a revision, without compromising all the winning aspects of the Obama brand.

What still works:

Brand Promise: Obama’s promise of change has rekindled America’s spirit and resonated with voters who are tired of the negativism and attack ads that have characterized recent political campaigns. While opponents have attacked his lofty language, credentials, and lack of experience, Obama steadfastly sticks to his theme of positive change.

Integrated Brand Communications: His brand campaign presents a model of integrated communications and stands in contrast to most of the leading brands in the market, which haven’t been able to coordinate their efforts.

Brand Response: His brand campaign is run with military efficiency. No attack is allowed to linger without an immediate, targeted, and articulate response.

Brand Voice: The most powerful quality of the Obama brand is the clarity of his messages, reinforced by his grasp of detail: his calm, measured responses and the elegance of his language, which is devoid of scare tactics. The Obama brand speaks to Americans in a language Americans can understand.

What needs revision:

While keeping his authenticity and brand voice, Obama must respond more effectively to Hillary Clinton’s promise of experience and a perceived readiness to serve as Commander-in-Chief that resonates with her core audiences. He must challenge those assumptions without going negative, without getting down in the dirt.

Obama basically needs to reposition Clinton by challenging the quality of her experience, but in a way that resonates with his brand voice.

Building and revising political brands is like building corporate brands on steroids. It is a laboratory for us all to watch how quickly, how efficiently, and how effectively the entire branding process can work – with clear winners and losers at the end of the day.

NYTimes.com
Sears Joins With Hearst for a Multimedia Blitz
By STUART ELLIOTT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/media/03adcol.html

TWO decades ago, shoppers were told “there’s more for your life at Sears.” An ambitious campaign that begins this week — the result of an unusual retailer-media partnership between Sears and Hearst — may help determine whether there is more life for Sears.

Sears, Roebuck & Company, a division of the Sears Holdings Corporation, is struggling with slumping sales, falling profits and mounting complaints about store conditions. Revenue in the quarter that ended on Feb. 2 for stores open more than a year — a closely watched yardstick in the retail industry — dropped 4 percent from a year earlier.

The wobbly economy is exacerbating Sears’s woes as consumers slow their spending and worry about rising prices, falling home values and the gyrating stock market. And while its competitors have been stepping up efforts to woo skittish shoppers, Sears Holdings has been cutting the marketing budgets for both Sears and its sibling, Kmart.

“We already invest a significant amount of capital and expenses” in areas like marketing, Edward S. Lampert, the chairman of Sears Holdings, wrote to shareholders in a letter last week. “The key is to improve the productivity of these investments.”

(more…)

Salon.com
Global marketing execs agree — America’s image is in the toilet. The cure? One presidential candidate has what it takes, they say, to save Brand USA.
By Jeff Yang
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/03/03/candidates_branding/

Mar. 03, 2008 | There’s no way to put this delicately, so I won’t: America’s global image is in the crapper. Last year, the BBC World Service conducted a poll of over 26,000 individuals in the world’s 25 largest countries and found that more than 52 percent thought the U.S. had a “mostly negative” influence on the world. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs felt America could “not be trusted.”

Which means that, on top of everything else it represents, the current presidential election is something like an ad agency review — a chance to put a set of potential stewards for “Brand America” through their paces, to see the creative and strategic directions in which they’d take our product.

What’s at stake is more than just popularity. As Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of the globe’s second-largest ad agency, DDB Worldwide, notes, “How we’re perceived in the world has profound implications. We rely on human intelligence to alert us to threats: We need friends willing to whisper in our ear that someone’s planning to blow up jetliners … Economically, the Commerce Department estimated that we’ve lost over $100 billion in tourism revenues since 2001. For every share point we lose in that sector, you’re talking about $12.3 billion and 150,000 jobs, gone! The bottom line is that we need a world that likes America.”

Candidate	Slogan	Unifying Theme	Underlying Values	If He/She Were a Brand…
Hillary Clinton	The Strength and Experience to Bring Real Change	“I’ve been there”	Competence; experience; professionalism
John McCain	Straight Talk Express	“I’ll go there”	Resilience; candor; courage
Barack Obama	Change We Can Believe In	“I’ll take you there”	Inspiration; inclusion; iconoclasm
Mike Huckabee	Faith. Family. Freedom	“Let’s go back”	Earthiness; populism; humility

(more…)