I’ve always rejected the myth of the suits/creatives split. Have always maintained a common language between marketing, design and other media is important and empowering to everyone involved. Hopefully, I can introduce some useful concepts and break some myths.

(And in case it doesn’t come through: OMG!!!!1! I’m so bloody psyched about this!)

Brand strategy reconstructed
How marketing lost the plot and how it might find meaning again

Marketing is a discipline in crisis. For the last decades it has become evident to practitioners and scholars alike that many of the trusted old methods were just not cutting it any more. Worse, it now seems some of them weren’t valid in the first place. This series of contemplative talks brings together ideas from narrative studies, semiotics and cultural theory to drive design thinking in solving the challenges of postmodern marketing. Numerous examples will be given from actual projects, popular culture and recent marketing cases.

The first six talks:

1. Marketing, meaning & decadence: an introduction to the sophistication of marketing sign-systems and their tendency to degenerate.
2. Suspicious minds: the myth of “a consumer subject”.
3. On branding and meaning: can a simplified theoretical tool-box cut through buzzwords and hype?
4. Advanced narrative marketing: the untold story of brand stories.
5. Marketing plots: cultural pattern-recognition as a strategic tool.
6. Embracing the mess: how clients and agencies are changing their work culture and methods to encourage more sustainable marketing strategies.

Mondays@17:00, Starting May 18th, excluding 25/5 (bank holiday) and 8/6 (prior obligation).

To my non-UK readers: London College of Communication, formerly London College of Printing, is the largest constituent College of the University of the Arts London, Europe’s largest university dedicated to art, communication, design and related technologies.
Two graduates Israeli readers will know are David Tartakover & Alex Livak.

Recovery, Java, Latency, Change, Art, RSS, Socialism, Elvis, Economics, Rotis, Analog, Location, Design, Snackr, Diversity, Violence, Prishtina, Enterprise search, Music, Elvis (again!), Prishtina (again), Matter (duh), The Pentagon (shiver), Elvis (lives!), Evolution, Ingrid Michaelson (lucky lady), Wildlife, Firefox, Elvis (never underestimate him ever again), Corruption.

End of page three, but it stays interesting.

There’s a web art installation waiting to happen here somewhere.

In the meantime – happy holidays and a happy new year.

(good night and good luck)

This post is a "sound bite version" of a more elaborate piece, based on a talk titled "Emerging practices in Branding".

This blog has been dormant for a while, and I expect it will stay low frequency. I still hope this will get some attention, as it summarises so much of my work and thoughts of the last years. Not a very web-like time-scale, I guess…

Background:
On September 25th, I gave a talk at the Strategic Branding forum in Romania. I was asked to speak about "The Future of Branding". I used the opportunity to bring together some of Brandinstinct’s and my ideas about how branding should be practiced. This is stuff that has been dominant in the way my team(s) and me do things over the last couple of years. These are also trends I recognise increasingly among leading members of the creative industry.

The full article deals with 5 important aspects of branding work (methodology, relationship, culture, identity and engagement) and, "to put money where my mouth is", uses examples from some of the Brandinstinct projects I managed (From the projects used, the Sohar project is the only one I didn’t lead.). In this short version, I’ve left the examples out and focused on summarising the principles.

1. Methodology: Use an emergent theory approach to replace black box limbo
   The marketing of marketing has hijacked many agencies, companies and marketing endeavours. Beware an agency who has THE METHODOLOGY™. Methodological dogmas are more dangerous than ever.
   Reality is too messy, complex, sophisticated and unique to fit into black boxes and templates.
   Instead, take an emergent theory approach to discover the hidden meaning. Let the uniqueness of the situation direct what you’re picking out of your eclectic and proven tool-box.

2. Relationships: Let go of outdated "chain of command" structures and collaborate
   Old school / Big agencies have collected unnecessary etiquette protocols creating disconnection from clients and among themselves. Meaning is lost along the way.
   Instead, getting both client and the full team to work together and often directly, even if their agendas are conflicting, eliminates political tensions and increases the chance to produce breakthrough ideas.
3. Culture: Embrace local insights to make a bigger difference
   What works in some countries isn’t automatically right for others. This may sound redundant, but some consultants (and designers) are still marching into new cultures like conquistadors whose international-marketing-guru knowledge cannot fail .
   You can’t have enough respect for the delicate ecology created when local and global cultures interact. That’s why we try to combine our international experience with local insight. In my experience, it is usually the local parts which triggers true differentiation and relevancy, which pulls it all together and makes it work.
   (The above is not only true for geographical/ethnic cultural diversity but for any tribe/community)
4. Identity: Deal with the full range of business needs
   Branding has become the "prima donna" of marketing. Over time, it emerged more and more as a practice that handles the "higher needs" of marketing communications. Shying away from "the dirty work" and leaving it for sales and advertising is one of the main reasons many branding programmes do not achieve the ROI they should.
   Create brand identities as systems which support everyday business needs, not just the "aspirational" stuff.
5. Engagement: Engage the entire organisation
   Most branding failures happen on implementation because the organisation won’t get behind a programme people don’t believe in.
   Instead, we recommend engaging the entire organisation from day one of the programme and increasing this engagement after launch.

The common thread:
Embrace the messiness to find meaning, instead of trying to fight it. Life is messy. Markets and marketing are getting messier and messier. By recognising the messiness, you don’t give up meaning, but actually improve your chances of finding unique, authentic solutions.
Prefer to be systemic, not systematic . Instead of a purely analytical, "modernist", approach that claims to paint a full, rational, map of a situation and then attacks a single aspect, try to see the whole hidden in the parts, and create a state of flow that is in harmony with the basic interconnectedness of all things.

When you appreciate it’s all connected, you can create sustainable brands.

You can read a long(ish) post summarising the talk here, or download it as a PDF article.
Both have links to further project case studies and longer posts.

This is the presentation on SlideShare, with full picture credits and links on the last slide (visible in full screen mode).

An apologetic aside: I’m often told that when expressing my views about the state of marketing, I tend to sound a little negative. Indeed, even this blog’s central metaphor’s opening point looks first at the trouble we’re in. But this time, it’s about what I believe the alternative is. This is probably because when I work, I’m in a much more progressive/appreciative state of mind, which is crucial in order to be creative. If I tend to be critical, it is because, like many dreamers, I have a very clear view of the way things should be ; while the reality of our world, and what major effects of the marketing discipline inflict on it, is so far from it.

You can quickly flick through it on Slideshare, or if you want the fully annotated PPT file, get it from esnips.

Vincent’s photo by Calos Luis
This presentation was given as part of Tinylove’s distributor event in Koln (Cologne), Germany, September 2006.
It was not modified for the web or this blog. Only the annotations were made more elaborate so people can understand more or less how it went and what it tries to say.
The annotations is not the exact script. There isn’t one.

Some parts may seem obvious or too “educational” to some of you out there. If they are, I’m sorry, this was to help the audience follow the ideas.
Also, note that this is a “fun” presentation as the distributor event is largely an evening “recreational” event. To avoid being “the heavy bit”, I did my best to make this presentation light and engaging.
I still tried to bust some viral marketing myths along the way, which is a part some of you may wish to skip to.

Tinylove, are a client of mine who create meticulously designed developmental toys for babies. Their main target audience is parents, specifically “Generation-X parents”. The focus of my work with them was how to better reach this audience through the web. It covered their site, SEO/M, community marketing and more. The implementation of those recommendations is currently still a work in progress and is, obviously, much wider and deeper then the aspects mentioned in this presentation.
Their blog is here.If this presentation is absolutely useless to you, maybe it be can useful to someone you know. Or – at least you may enjoy the work of the talented flickr photographers used to make it.

Anyway – enjoy the show.

CC (on the textual content only) – some rights reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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