'The whole thing is like a piece of equipment in a playground, or a big toy. To play with that idea, not as a store, but as a place for experiencing space, and a time, where people get excited and can return to a childlike state. That's what I wanted to express.' says Masamichi Katayama, architect of the flagship store.
A great example of a powerful Brand Experience where an intention to be provocative and take a branded content approach to everything, i.e. everything communicates, can turn a retail experience into something to talk about whilst selling product at the same time. And then of course every product bought there becomes itself another start point for an enthusiastic brand story, and the wave goes on, and the brand enigma builds.
Like other great things (people, places, ideas, products, brands, businesses), it seems brands like Nike set themselves apart from the normal by living (thinking and doing) the Jerry Garcia quote, 'You don't want to be known as the best of the best, you want to be known as the only one who does what you do.'
Interesting too that this film was sponsored by Nike but shown on and made by coolhunting.com's usual film team.
A brilliant collection of playful and inspiring inventiveness - mostly with a client attached. A timeless and enduring truth comes through for me here is that inspiring people is the key thing to achieve to makes something stand out.
The owner of Magma bookstores, Marc Valli, has created a new magazine called Elephant aimed at people he describes as being 'enthusiastic and curious'. This is a link to an article in Creative Review about it.
He says in the article that he wanted to create, 'the kind of magazine a group of beat friends would have done in the 50s, before the art world became the art world, and the creative industries took over, a time when artists didn’t measure the worth of their work according to auction prices, but by the opinion of their peers.'
The content and design looks interesting. It replaces a previous magazine, Graphic, that was themed based. Colors, made by Benetton and edited in the 90s by Tibor Kalman, used to be a good theme based magazine. It was a good source of interesting facts and figures and great images and was a design studio must have.
Elephant looks like another good aggregator of interesting things in culture, like Monocle and Wallpaper, set to do well. Valli says that while books sales are down, magazines seem to be thriving. Elephant will have global distribution in stores and newsagents.
This is an old Colors cover. The magazine was printed in French and English which gave it both a graphically interesting and continental feel at the same time. It was a fascinating read and a great example of a very subtly branded content.
These are printed inside Maharishi clothes on the inside of pockets. A good point of view and a great way to let people know what you think and align with your views in a quiet way.
Good to see more corporate giving in these times of economic stress. Well done Starbucks. I'm not sure what the deal is exactly with the contributions to good causes, but at least they've signed up. Signposting good intentions is a positive thing that may inspire others to get involved, so that's a definite win.
Also good to see this once trailblazing brand, flying a flag of philanthropy. Cynics might accuse them of going for a soft CSR sympathy dollar bandwagon but, I'm more optimistic there's a Warren Buffett-esque acting on a socially aware desire to have change for the good, happening here. The battle of good America v. crap America is hotting up perhaps - the popular hope has got to be that good America gets stronger, early Obama signs suggest it might, and that from here on, we all get to help in whatever way we can, to make crap America history.
Many would say the best film of the Olympics ever made is Kon Ichikawa's 1965 documentary, 'Tokyo Olympiad'. I'd agree with that.
Comedic, respectful of elite athleticism and dedication, tragic, beautiful, charming, disturbing, lonely, very human, weirdly not as uplifting as you might expect, something for the time capsule, something to show every new generation, arguably something for everyone. Here are two clips from YouTube.
This is a direct link to the work above Psyop did for the Converse campaign by Anomaly NYC on Psyop's site. Great energy, edginess and authenticity. Also good to see are the interviews with Pharrell Williams and Santogold on YouTube.
I saw these Converse shoes in a Hype shop window in Bondi Junction, in Sydney the other night. The brand is owned by Nike and it was one of the founder brands of Bono's (PRODUCT) RED initiative launched a few years ago in the US and UK.
The original brands in at the start of (PRODUCT) RED were Gap, American Express, Motorola, Armani and Converse. Gap did some t-shirts - INSPI(RED), was one design I saw pictures of David Beckham and Elle MacPherson wearing in a couple of different issues of mX the free Sydney commuter paper - American Express did a red card for use in UK and USA, Motorola did a red RAZR phone, Armani did some red sunglasses and Converse started their PRODUCT (RED) product line with some mud decorated Chuck Taylors. Apple have joined too offering (PRODUCT) RED bits of the iPod family, but Converse has, it seems, been the only brand to fairly consistently support the effort in Australia with a number of outings to market with new products.
A brand that innovates and gets to market fast and fairly easily might appear to be an ideal partner for a cause brand looking to have a lot of consistent market presence over a long time, with the message being kept relatively fresh. Though Apple may have had their (PRODUCT) RED Nano out for some time, it feels like Converse have been more active in their raising of the charity's profile.
What really caught my attention was the bright and optimistic nature of Converse's brand behaviour in this particular cause minded effort. Given the brand's stereotypical emo associations, the latest red effort could have been a whole lot heavier. It definitely isn't gloomy. It's very positive, rallying almost. It made me think about social efforts that are made, or could be made, by the commercial world again too, so thanks Converse and (PRODUCT) RED for bringing that very worthy but necessary point back into my head.
I saw this today in Sydney's George Street. I had a fleeting thought that it would be interesting if there was nothing actually behind the big blue poster awning covering the supposed new shop construction, and that one morning it suddenly wasn't there - a sort of pop-up pretend-to-construct-a-store.
It also struck me that such a vast piece of surface could have been put to some more interesting marketing use other than just being a great big coming soon poster.
People could have interacted with it in some way - perhaps a giant scratch card surface like the one in the post below about the Royal Festival Hall's 'Hidden Love Song' programme. Or a projection site of some kind, or a simple spilling on to the pavement or interacting with the buildings around it in some way.
Like the £106 million architectural wonder, the Eden Project cleverly did in Cornwall, UK, people might have been encouraged to come and watch the build progress. Eden Project sold tickets to come and see 'the big build' from a platform high above the disused China Clay pit as the vast biome structures took shape.
Perhaps it's a testament to Apple that something special is expected to be their business as usual. Once an expectation of innovation is set, there's no turning back to doing the normal kind of things other less innovative brands would do unnoticed.
This is a film called 'Trembled Blossoms' made by Prada to launch their Spring/Summer 2008 collection. The illustrator James Jean also worked on designs for the collection and the catwalk shows.
Apparently, the more alien a model looks, the more likely it is they will achieve super-model status. This takes that to the extreme to a parallel universe of some kind of place of perpetual and beautiful cycles of metamorphosis, much like how some would describe Prada is, as a brand.
Typical of the Prada sensibility and brand ethos, the film is not confrontational, but provocative and inviting, and as irrelevant as it might appear to be, I think the film is a good pointer for brands when they try to break out of traditional ways of communicating. Simple, universal, positively inspiring.
I saw this on Howies' t-shirt of the week link. A comment that goes with it on their site suggests people should be out doing something more interesting instead.
This is a link to a piece of work that involves a love song hidden behind a sixty foot scratch card type surface, used as part of an interactive exhibit in London, created by Melissa Mongiat and others. I found it about a year ago via a Wallpaper magazine featuring the designer. A bit of googling, and my curiousity being grabbed by both the exhibit title, and the website being called milkandtales.com, took me to find something quite enchanting, childlike and fantastically wonderful.
The title of the exhibit is called 'Hidden Love Song'. It was done as part of the Royal Festival Hall's 'Keeping In Touch' project. It's a great bit of people engaging with creativity, to create something quite special and unique. It would be great to see more of this kind of thing from brands applying sensitivity and art in their communications.
In a world where mentos mints and diet coke bottles get to be performance art ads by whim of an imaginative mind or two, surely more invention and original thinking is not only called for, but actually very necessary for brands to be more interesting in their conversations with consumers.
I've categorized this under 'not enough time to be bland' because for me it is a big watch out for brands. The opportunity for brands to step up to the plate on having a big idea and being imaginative about how they bring it to life, will always be there - the Royal Festival Hall could have spent the money on a poster campaign, or maybe a tv ad about what was on there, but they did a sixty foot, old tech, interactive, music playing, scratch card instead. This was an ad people had to touch, feel and be moved by, it delivered intrigue and provoked stories and wonder. Importantly, it was a metaphor letting people make their own meaning from it, and not a lesson, and it had an idea to be true to, not a demographic to connect with, in mind.
If it were branded, it would have conferred a great deal of joy and optimism on the brand associated with it. It would probably have made the brand feel like a positive thing to listen to, probably giving the brand thought leadership kudos, challenger brand and innovative thinking points too. I suspect it would have made people a little more interested in finding out what was on at the Royal festival Hall as a result too.
The power of a sticky, innovative and inspiring idea arguably makes the RFH's direct marketing or the Sunday papers' listings ad's job a lot easier, and it probably makes those, and all other channels in play, marketing their offer, more effective too. But of course this chaotic synergy of brand behaviour is not something traditional marketing approaches are used to measuring, so a 'too hard to do' or 'not what we do' attitude often means support for the non-traditional is kicked into touch. Great. That means bravery still wins, and the imaginative few agency/client partnerships are the ones that will be the leaders. But, not so great, in that the bar doesn't get raised higher very quickly, and mush in the middle bland brandedness continues to be what most of us get.
These sorts of magical things get to happen where there is a belief that doing interesting things in culture is innately a good thing to do, and those that excel at it are those who believe that inspiring and innovating is mission critical for their business success.
There's a great quote by organisational ecologist Michael Hannan which says, 'Natural selection only works on available diversity'. Technology is making product functionality advantages pretty small and short lived, and people are putting more value on innovation and inspiration from brands as both badges of belonging, and beacons of clarity in confusion. This means the iconic success stories will be more likely to be found in the brands who are most obsessive about being interesting, genuine, innovative and inspiring in their thinking and doing.
In another post, I've mentioned P&G going for inspiration and emotion, rather than functional and rational messaging and marketing approaches, for sound business reasons and making a success of it. That and this piece of art-meets-communication is the stuff marketers need to be inspired by to rethink and enliven models and processes to produce magic of their own for their consumers. If they are not amongst the leaders in shaping and pioneering marketing behaviour, in the current cultural appetite for genius, brands better be in the early adopters group at least, following inspired bits of public engagement like this. Staying in the mass middle ground of the herd of usual marketing behaviour, or getting too late to the game, will mean having to shout loud and compete on price in the blur of sameness - end result is a low margin, high risk game.
For most it's 'do what we know' high measurability, low risk, high traditionality. For some it's 'heck we'll try stuff, and we must, otherwise we'll be as boring as them'. I suspect both sides will be adamant about their way being the best way, and have numbers to prove it. Perhaps its more about faith.
Melissa Mongiat was one of Wallpaper's breakthrough designers for 2007.
I've a lot of time for the Howies brand. They do interesting and sound things, which is a good thing to have around in a 'buy-me' world saturated with self-interested sales messages. It's also good to have in a society that increasingly looks to brands to signpost, and hold our hopes for, a better world - a world with better corporate social responsibility.
Howies is an active life clothing brand from Wales (skate and bikes with lots of mud, concrete and the great outdoors), that is arguably fast becoming an icon of world class corporate social responsibility. They have grown from tiny to highly influential amongst a growing and committed group of consumers, to become an exemplar of innovative behaviour and ideas.
It feels like momentum on green issues is about to go through an inertia barrier. In Australia, Earth Hour is getting lots of media attention and intentions to do good by a big idea from the media industry itself. In Monterey, California this talk by John Doerr (filmed in March 07 and posted in May 07) on TED.com, is powerfully cogent and emotional. He talks about how companies are making money from greentech, and it is one of the most moving talks I have seen on this issue.
Meanwhile on the more populist end of the scale, videos like this one I got sent the other day are getting passed around on facebook funwalls, simplistically putting the case for doing something about global warming.
Howies may already be a world class case study of 'innovation and creativity, meets sustainable and substantial revenue generation, from networked communities with a conscience'. They have recently opened their first shop in London's Carnaby Street and they are making corporate social responsibility work for their business.
This brand is about as integrity as integrity gets. A visit to their site is a breath of corporate social responsibility freshness that is modern, entirely optimistic and extremely authentic. I think if there was an epitome of 'Slow branding', like the slow food movement, this brand would be pretty much the standard. Howies has over a number of years been a patient and great grower of a brand. An ideas company that says it's a clothing company.
From a marketer's point of view, they are interesting too. The founders, Clare and David, are both from the creative industries in London, Clare was a writer at brand experience company, Imagination, and David was a creative at the ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and the people that work for them are classic Pro-ams, as Charles Leadbeater would describe them (amateur enthusiasts who are serious about a pursuit like the enthusiastic consumer groups that made 'clunkers' the forerunners to mountain bikes of California).
An activity they did recently involving a blackboard paint covered van is a typically engaging and inspiring Howies piece of brand behaviour that combines corporate social responsibility with marketing ingenuity. They asked for ten cheap ideas to promote the brand and this was one. A skate tour in a white van, painted grey with blackboard paint (cost 120 pounds), with a question on the front about Nuclear Power. One side of the bus was the 'Is it green?' side, and on the other, 'Is it dumb?' and they toured the bus around skate parks where people wrote their views on the bus .
From a marketing point of view again, this is high brand engagement, non-traditional, brilliant blog fodder, no media budget, highly imaginative, hopeful and fresh - completely 'let's do something interesting and positive' thinking. It was a good idea, from an idea led challenger brand, a cause brand, not consumer insight driven, but high ideal driven. Not done before, not part of a campaign with a strapline, no key visual, no functional rtb emphasis, but a definite signature tone of the Howies brand throughout, a rapid low-cost prototype activity that wonderfully exemplifies a 'try stuff often, and always be true to ourselves' culture that has faith in the idea that good business comes from positive and ambitious thinking and doing.
In more product oriented behaviour they are equally as innovative. Good examples being a collaboration with Honda to use metal from old Honda cars to make rivets in Howies jeans. Also Howies sells certain items of clothing where they keep separate bits of the clothing items in stock, so that consumers can replace the bits that wear out as and when they need to, without having to buy a whole new garment. If your jacket has a hole in its elbow, you send it back and get the arm replaced.
In his moving talk, John Doerr talks about his fifteen year old daughter turning to him and blaming his generation for the mess we are in on global warming. Howies embodies a sense of hope that consumers of the solution seeking generation, like John's daughter, might relate to> I think corporations interested in making money whilst doing the right things might learn a lot from this small brand with a big, and very timely, point of view.
If there is a core trait that enables it to trailblaze a fresh way of doing things, I think its their appetite for doing something special and being very open to ambitious and big thinking collaborations with like minded partners. Other brands that have created cultural phenomena and step changes in their competitive sets have also been compulsive big thinking collaborators. Nike+ is a good example of collaboration raising the game.
Like the blackboard paint van with Tom Seymour, and the rivets with Honda UK, other brands that do CSR and social comment well are often at their best when they are in coalitions of high principles and like-mindedness. I think the power of good collaboration is underated by most brands - the constructing a partnerships of rapid prototyping, to coin Michael Schrage, is highly risky, difficult to measure and so it gets the too hard to do tag in more traditional marketer and agency company cultures.
Successful collaborators like Howies though, show that having an appetite for chancing frequent connections with people, who are in sync with your point of view, in the spirit of doing something special, can be inspiring, good for society, and good for business. They embrace the open-endedness of things because it is their very nature to pioneer and explore, which is perhaps why the brand works well in the CSR context as a great brand people can believe in for the long haul, and when times get tough or uncertain.
The fascination with branded content is intriguing.
If it means that the mediocre can be filtered out by the consumer, or the curator/editor doing the filtering or compiling of content on behalf of a subscribing consumer set, then fantastic. And if it means that the pressure is on to engage, in what's been termed the age of engagement, then again, all good.
Great creativity will love the new imperative to create branded content. The skill will be to orchestrate and measure its effect so that marketers will support doing it. It's clearly going to have elements of a long tail argument at times, and at least it will be a very complicated ecosystem argument that econometrics may have real problems quantifying, but the lack of precision just makes the onus on intuition, agility and creativity bigger. There should be a lot of prototyping and risk taking, like Droga5's Honeyshed.
I think intuition, agility and creativity are key things to have because a brand that has a highly tuned intuition to what it's about, what matters to the people it cares for, and the culture it is in, is likely to respond more on target and more inspiringly, more rapidly and with greater efficiency than its competitors.
If a business or brand truly understands that content is king then, being agile enough to act on finely tuned and nuanced intuition and information is a great first mover and innovator's advantage, and having the best and most imaginative minds to hand to concept and create new things that inspire, is the final piece in the capabilities of a game shifting organisation.
Nike + is a phenomenon because user generated content has been catalysed into life by a service created through an imaginative application of technology. Innocent Juices's 'Fruitstock' music festival in the UK is also a service set up as a thank you to devoted consumers that becomes a great big piece of branded content through the experience people have there and what people hear about it.
Ultimately I think the fascination with the 'branded content' phrase is unhelpful. I'd suggest those agencies who are trying to figure out what it means are those well behind those already doing it, those organisations who are completely happy with the idea that everything communicates.
I'm a big fan of Crispin, Porter and Bogusky because they have that view and they have done great game shifting things in marketing brands that have been tagged breakthrough and non-traditional. They've been great at the traditional stuff too. Fundamentally though, they have shown a determination to engage. Media choice has been largely irrelevant, but the driving pursuit of cultural phenomenon creation has seemed to be an aim, by whatever media means necessary.
Everything a brand creates or does is branded content, and the new clamouring for depth and engagement at every moment of encounter is a good thing and a wake up call to those who have been satisfied with not engaging and inspiring people outside the usual opportunities. Traditional media channels clearly aren't dead, but arguably, traditional mindedness certainly is.
