Author: Dennis Van Staalduinen

Favourite branding posts of 2009: August & September

In which the world actually seems to start listening…

These were heady and humbling months for Beg to Differ and included three of our most popular posts (below) – including 25 meaningless tag lines (first post to clear 100 views a day – which seemed like a big deal to us), healing the Princess Bride post (shameless “link bait”? Perhaps… but it cleared 1000 views over a week.) , information pills and of course the break-up letter to Intel (which peaked at 620 views / day with more than 3250 unique visitors to date).

But though the stats are fun to throw around, price more importantly, the conversation got deeper, and we started hearing from Fortune 500 branders and important thinkers in various fields. And we started to feel like this project could actually make a Differ… ence.
Fitting and Feeling - w

25 meaningless taglines

August 13, 2009

Taglines & positioning: This one by Lauren Hughes still gets a lot of hits, because a) it’s really funny, and b) seeing this list makes almost everyone who reads it think about their own tag line – and realize just how empty most of them are.

Other posts on tags & positioning: tag lines have to help humans; 13 more meaningless tag lines; that guy in the kilt

Fezik et al

10 brand strategy lessons from “The Princess Bride”

August 24, 2009
Branding lessons: this was our first viral “mini-hit”  and still has more Re-Tweets on Twitter than any other post. Why? Well because it’s based on one of the greatest movies of all time of course.

More humourous lessons: 5 more from Princess Bride; modest proposal for GM; protect your crown jewels; skateboards & stripping poles;

050420_newcoke_toast_with caption

New Coke 25 years later: was it all just a brilliant conspiracy?

September 2, 2009

Consumer branding: this is a reflection by Dennis Van Staalduinen on what he – and all of us – can learn from the New Coke debacle in the mid-eighties, and the monumental arrogance behind Coke’s faulty assumption that they owned their brand…

More on consumer branding: weird breakfast brands; Crunchberries; Nutella; Trident loses intensity.

Steve

Return of Sir Steve: 6 ways Steve Jobs taught me to be human

September 11, 2009

Humanity in branding: this theme has been picking up steam in the last couple of months, and you can expect to hear much more on it in the future. But this post reflects on all the ways Steve Jobs brings humanity and emotion to branding.
More on the human side of brands:be human in 5 easy steps;  “Personal Branding” an oxymoron?; branding is about cowboys, not cows

Romance Pic - with words

Dear Intel, you had me at “Intel Inside”. Now enough already!

September 30, 2009

Clarity in technology brands: Based in Ottawa, Brandvelope spends a lot of time dealing with technology branding issues. But this post became our biggest hit ever for a surprising reason: because thousands of Intel employees sent it to each other, and dozens of current and former employees let us know we were right on the money with our critique.

Thoughts on tech branding: more on brand architecture & Intel;  Geek-speak and Google; Google assimilates Microsoft.

More in this series:

    Oh, and another reminder: please sign up for e-mail updates (on the right) or our RSS feed, so you keep track of our future posts.

    Favourite branding posts of 2009: June & July

    3- part series of “greatest hits” from Beg to Differ.

    Beg to Differ has been going in a serious way for 6 months now. And in that short time, pilule we’ve gone from just a few hits a day to our peak last month of over 5, symptoms 000 unique visitors. So we owe a huge shout out to all who have helped make this project a success: thank you for your links, cheap your comments, and your ReTweets on Twitter.

    But with so many new readers joining us, most have missed some great posts from the early days.  So we thought we’d collect our favourite posts for you – beginning with a few we loved from June and July 2009.

    Jabba-Reacts-med2[1]

    1. Pizza Hut drops the pizza… again

    June 19, 2009

    Rebranding blunders: The pizza hit the fan in June when Pizza Hut began the roll-out of a new abbreviated version of its brand: “The Hut”.  We, of course, Begged to Differ, but we also wondered what Jabba and the pan-galactic Hutt Cartel might think of all this…

    Other posts on this topic: Radio Shack as “The Shack” and SciFi becomes SyFy.

    Swiss header

    2. I’m so mad at Switzerland!

    June 29, 2009

    Place branding: this theme has been buzzing for a while, and the Swiss have come up a few times, as has the Interbrand Top 100 global brands. The sub-text has always been toward the brand of my own big place, Canada. And you’ll hear more about my thoughts on that in the near future.

    More on the theme: Swiss Secrets; Lethal generosity in WelliWest; and Highlights from 2009 Interbrand Global Brands

    Sign in front of shop

    3.Starbucks: beer, bands, & baristas

    July 20, 2009

    Coffee-shops: Sad to say, we drink a lot of coffee at Beg to Differ, so it comes up a lot. In July, rumours reached Beg to Differ that Big Coffee poster child Starbucks  Inc. was going to be experimenting with launching an “unbranded” line of alcohol-serving coffeehouses.

    More on coffee: Lessons from Ottawa’s Bridgehead; Tim Hortons returns home; and Starbucks VIA and brand civil war.

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    4.NOMO: The 25 worst acronyms in the world

    July 31, 2009

    Acronyms & abbreviations: In July, we broached the topic of abbreviations, acronyms, initialisms, or “NOMOnyms” as we call the lot of them. This post by Lauren Hughes was pretty funny stuff, but the point comes across clearly.

    Other posts on abbreviated names: government acronyms (NOMO!); abbreviation hurts brand equity; and Dragon’s Den & EDC.

    More in this series:

      Oh, and if you haven’t already, please sign up for e-mail updates (on the right) or our RSS feed, so you can get 2-3 fresh posts a week.

      Twitterloo! How to send Twitter on a hasty RT.

      Soldiers at attention: awright Twitter conscript, approved you’ve probably heard that Twitter has finally enabled a feature it calls “Retweet”. Well, after years of hacking together manual ReTweets – cutting and pasting, editing, shortening, and workarounds by Twitter partner applications like TweetDeck, you’d think this would be cause for great rejoicing among the weary soldiers of Twitterland…

      We Beg to Differ.

      BegtoDiffer-Napoleon invents the RT
      The invention of the ReTweet: Napoleon at Waterloo

      What’s an RT?

      For those new to Twitter (or with no patience for it), basically “RT” is a convention that arose among Twitter users as a way of sharing and amplifying content from other people that they agree with, find interesting or funny, or that adds to a discussion they’re having in some way. Here’s an extreme example of one message from last night:

      Tweets from zchamu

      Here’s a translation of the post:

      • @brianlj read a blog post by Twitter CEO Evan Williams @eV, and wanted to share the link and to let others  know  he disagreed with it.
      • He added the hashtag #Save ReTweet which made it part of a public discussion.
      • I wanted to share his thought with my followers (I’m @DenVan). So, I copied it and pasted it, and added “RT ” at the beginning, then added a comment at the end “Ditto”.
      • Then, my friend @zchamu did the same, crediting me and adding her comment “Me three!”

      Think about how incredible that is. Four people’s thoughts are contained in the tiny, tiny space of just 140 Characters. That’s the power of the RT.

      The revolution is ugly, but it works

      Now granted, to the untrained eye, it looks a bit messy – okay really messy – so we’ve been hoping for some clean-up from the good people at Twitter for a long time. You know, a few simple tools that would respect the power and intent of the RT but would make it easier to use and scan.

      But what happened instead? RT activist Dan Zarella puts it well when he says:

      In a stunningly disappointing move, Twitter has threatened to completely eviscerate most of the value out of ReTweets by “formalizing” a feeble version of a format that was already well understood and functional for all users involved.

      The leader on a high horse

      On Tuesday, Twitter head Evan Williams wrote his first blog post since March, “Why Retweet works the way it does”, with these ominous words:

      I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that’s gone into it…

      Uh-oh. Bad sign. When a CEO runs to the battlements so early in a communications piece, you can just smell the restlessness in the troops – and not just in the Twitterati, but among the people working at Twitter as well.

      He goes on to describe RT as cool, before listing off a number of “problems” that currently exist with the RT convention that, as he puts it, “emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information”.

      The problems Evan Williams lists (in brief):

      1. Attribution confusion – hard to tell who the “owner” of the originally tweeted content was.
      2. Mangled and Messy – formatting makes message hard to read and author’s intent may be lost.
      3. Redundancy – lots of “RePeets”.
      4. Noisiness – RT @sycophant RT @wanker Blah blah blah
      5. Untrackable – hard to collect RTs of a person or post in one place.

      The solution from Twitter :

      CEO profile

      Let’s say that in the new Twitter RT universe, I wanted to share the incredible insight that Evan Williams actually posted last night (at right), with my followers.

      • A single “Retweet” button would appear under his tweet.
      • By clicking this, I would instantly create an exact verbatim copy of the original. My followers would see this exactly as @ev had written it, and what’s more, his name and avatar would appear beside them – even if my follower wasn’t following him.
      • As the Retweeter, my name would appear in a small footnote on the bottom of Ev’s tweet, but not in the actual Tweet.
      • Without any opportunity for editing or commentary, I couldn’t add context for my followers like “Can you believe this?” or “Me too!” or “What is this dude smoking?”.
      • No “RT” or other prefix will indicate that the is a ReTweet. Only that small footnote will make it appear different from any other tweet….

      Our take: the new ReTweet “feature” needs Re-bwanding

      Sorry Evan.

      You’re a genius, and we all owe you a tremendous debt for creating this Twitter thing, but this new feature you’ve created is not ReTweet. I’ve called it “RePeet”. Or maybe it’s “Copy” or “Clone”, or as one wag called it “Exact Tweet” (ET – and it phones home to Twitter).

      Whatever it is, it’s broken.

      And we’re not alone in saying so.
      (this list is growing, so please send us more!)

      To the battlements! What you can do soldier:

      1. Don’t use the new button! Just keep doing what you’ve always done.
      2. Use the hashtag #SaveReTweets to register your displeasure.
      3. Inundate @ev and @twitter with negative traffic.
      4. Sign the petition Dan Zarella has put together.

      Brand builders: how to be human in five easy steps

      Humans beat dinosaurs every time.

      Yesterday, rx our post about how American Airlines fired Mr. X – an employee who had the gall to (gasp) engage with a customer – generated a fair bit of engagement of its own. We were also shocked and pleased that our accompanying PowerPoint deck was chosen as one of the features on the SlideShare home page, cure with more than 950 views and climbing. “Wow, for sale ” we thought: “People are actually paying attention! Crap!”

      Dino
      How not to do it: the American Airlines approach to humanzing communications (image from www.dinosaurlive.com)

      Why I said “Crap”

      Because even though I’d spent an hour and a half yesterday morning putting the deck together, there were a few things I left off at the end – some important stuff about the difference between a) treating people and social media like a lumbering corporate dinosaur (American Airlines, that’s you), or b) like human beings (the un-American Airlines approach).

      So we added a few thoughts to the deck, along with 5 simple steps you can follow to make your brand more friendly to humans. Please read on.

      Surprised when corporations don’t act human? Don’t be!

      Sadly, rumours of mass extinction have been greatly exaggerated: American Airlines isn’t the last dinosaur.

      Thousands of others are lurking out there, hiding in hierarchical “Lost Valleys” around the corporate landscape. They’re scary, and they still have big teeth if you get close to them. And they roar, stomp, intimidate, and generally pretend with their pea-sized brains that they can throttle and control communications the same way they did (or thought they could) in the Jurassic era.

      But the world has changed.

      The new boss has arrived (and it’s us).

      And the new masters of the planet have opposable thumbs. And emotions. And big brains. They talk to each other; they form families and tribes.

      And they don’t even try to control the message.

      Instead, they listen, and build the conversation in ways that are real, helpful, and yes human. Want evidence? You’re reading this aren’t you?

      How to humanize your brand in five easy steps:

      1) Don’t pretend to be perfect.

      You’re lying. We know, because we’re human too. So don’t even bother faking it.

      2) Listen (critically) to critics.

      They usually see you better than you do. Then conscript the helpful critics as team-mates, or call them out if they’re just snipers.

      3) Speak Human.

      Because here’s a secret: nobody ever understood “Corporate-ese” in the first place. Just use normal people-friendly words, a helpful tone, and don’t brag about your big accomplishments / hard drives / pointy teeth. If it’s true, other people will say it. If it’s not, you’re just a roaring fossil.

      4) Encourage your people to speak Human

      But remember that many of your employees think that roaring and stomping is the only way to behave. Gently work with them to show a better way. Give them access to the right tools to speak to customers, and teach them to find the opportunities and boundaries for themselves (oh, and share that learning with everyone).

      5) To clobber your competitors, be more human

      And this is the great part: all this touchy-feely human stuff is the best way to win in the battle of the brands! So go on big guy: listen harder; be more lethally generous (thanks again Shel Israel); earn some Whuffie (thanks Tara Hunt) and build real human relationships with your customers, influencers, staff, and yes, even the competition.

      And if you’re an airline but you’re not American Airlines, congratulations: you’re already ahead!

      Click here to see the whole PowerPoint deck on SlideShare

      American Airlines meets Mr. X – a tragic tale of brand failure

      And you thought breaking guitars was bad? How about careers?

      I won’t go into a long spiel today, order since almost everything I want to say is in the PowerPoint deck on SlideShare embedded below. But if you agree that this kind of narrow-minded corporate foot-stabbing is insanity, I want to hear about it!

      Fail Plane

      The story in brief

      1. Blogger has bad experience with American Airlines online,
      2. Blogger blogs about it,
      3. Blogger is contacted by helpful American Airlines employee,
      4. Blogger writes how impressed he is with this employee’s candor,
      5. Happy ending! There is much rejoicing in the executive offices of American Airlines…

      Sadly, only the first 4 points above are true. The ending isn’t happy at all.

      Visit my SlideShare deck to find out what really happened:

      Click here if the SlideShare deck doesn’t appear below.

      View more presentations from Dennis Van Staalduinen.

      Props: Thanks to friend and writer Alison Gresik for alerting me to this. And of course, props to Dustin Curtis and Mr. X for courage under fire.