After inadvertently writing my first text message last week containing a hashtag (it was ‘#wetjeans’ since you ask), I was struck by the power of this simple device.

Chris Messina initially invented the hashtag (#subject) for use on Twitter to help users label the topic of their tweets. Seen this way, it seems like a simple update of the keywords that have been used to tag web pages since the early days of HTML coding.

Dig a little deeper however, and the differences are huge. Now adopted by other short messaging sites and search engines, these are tags that are not defined by marketers, created by programmers or hidden away in source code.

A truly social tool, hashtags belong to the people, since they can be created and used by anyone* – from celebrities to staff nurses. In terms of visibility they’re upfront and in your face, even appearing on print media – the increasingly stuffy-looking uncle of the web.

As a civilisation it’s the first time we’ve ever had the power to tap into the themes people are talking about right now (what’s ‘trending’), anywhere in the world with one click.  We can follow current events as they unfold, seek out like-minded individuals and join global conversations.

As a business owner you can instantly discover where you’re being praised—or panned—by real-life customers. Hashtags make it simpler than ever to share good feedback, or act to put things right.

Even the style, with its no-space, case insensitive syntax seems perfectly suited for today’s text and instant messaging generation. Immediate, infinitely-flexible and to the point: let’s hear it for the hashtag.

* This makes the hashtag system a ‘folksonomy’ apparently.

Image by rpbzand via flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/robzand/4661210969/

About the author
You can follow Richard Whitehouse on twitter using @ThatBrandGuy

Energy and environment, a difficult balance...

The steady rise in environmental awareness during the last two decades has meant that every business must now demonstrate green credentials in order to satisfy customers, regulators and an increasingly watchful public. Even the conservative and slow-to-change oil and gas industry has had to respond.

First off, no-one would claim the category is ‘environmentally friendly’. It is, after all, based on finite reserves, and consumes vast amounts of energy, materials and natural resources on a daily basis. Burning fossil fuels also represents the biggest single man-made contribution to greenhouse gases. Oh, and the implications of an environmental incident can be both wide-ranging and long-lasting.

Is being green always black and white?
‘Going green’ is not simply a case of pulling the plug on oil and gas. The shift away from the current ‘carbon economy’ has to be a gradual one. To safeguard our economies and our civilisation we have to find replacements not only for all of our fuel sources, but safe, affordable and effective alternatives to the petrochemical by-products that give us medicines, plastics, detergents etc. When you start to unpick this tangled web, you quickly realise there is no single quick-fix solution.

It all means that fossil fuels – and the oil and gas industry – will be with us for some time yet as we make the transition. In the meantime, the most successful companies will be those who can respond to public pressures and show they truly are as green as possible within their operating parameters.

While the term ‘environmentally friendly’ sits uneasily here, there are many innovations in the oil and gas sector that can legitimately claim to offer a more environmentally-responsible, environmentally-sensitive or environmentally-acceptable alternative to traditional methods.

In this space that being greener, rather than green, really matters. And this is where brands come in.

The greener revolution
We’re working with companies that are making some real tangible progress towards helping the oilfield clean up its act; Innovations that help operators to literally squeeze every last drop of oil out of their reservoir; Technologies that cut the huge volumes of fresh water consumed by shale gas operations by four-fifths; Systems that treat produced water offshore so that it meets zero-discharge regulations and can be safely returned to the marine environment.

Importantly in all of these instances being greener is not a compromise for operators. Whether it’s cutting the need to drill new wells, taking thousands of water transport trucks off the roads or avoiding the delay and expense of shipping waste to shore for treatment, it’s value added: a true win-win.

Promoting greener product and service brands helps oil and gas companies to demonstrate a response to environmental concerns in a more practical and realistic way. And it also avoids staking the whole business on the absolutes of a green brand promise: ‘Beyond Petroleum’ anyone?

After all in oil and gas, as in every area of business, there are many shades of green.

Footnote:
Here at One Brand Group we help develop well-rounded brands that aim to address the true spectrum of customer needs – whatever colour they may be.

About the Author

Rich Whitehouse has worked in B2B marketing and branding since 1996. In his current role as Creative Head at One Brand Group he has worked with a diverse range of energy brands including small-scale renewable, national nuclear and global oil and gas businesses. He is also solar powered, which may explain why he can’t relax on sun loungers.

A while back Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, suggested that to be successful in the digital age, businesses must relax control of their brands online. Let your customers become creators of content for your brand online, he argued, in the same way that has helped Wikipedia grow to become the fourth most visited website on the planet.

User-created content isn’t new. Wikipedia is, after all, a Wikimedia project; a non-profit foundation with the altruistic mission of bringing ‘free content to the world’. But it’s an ethos that seems to run counter to businesses looking for ROI from their online efforts, and still searching for ways to make social media pay.

Let customers tell your story
Yet Wales insists his advice is relevant for any brand concerned with their online perception. Rather than devoting time and effort to trying to manage a brand image online, companies should instead focus on ‘making good products and services’. The idea being that, with so many users quick to share their experiences with the world – be they good or bad – happy customers quickly become what Wales calls ‘hardcore super evangelists’. Quite.

In this model, the role of a brand online alters from the conventional one-way push of marketing messages to something quite different. Suddenly brands find themselves on the sidelines of other peoples’ conversations about them, having to respond to concerns or complaints in a very public way: 24-7, 365 days a year.

But while there are many advantages to this approach in consumer markets, can it work in the B2B arena?

There are fundamental differences. B2B products and services are seldom purchased by individuals; but by buying groups containing influencers and specifiers, procurement departments, and often through tender processes.

Because of this it’s hard to imagine business customers grouping together to create a ‘fan site’ to sing the praises of an industrial air conditioning system, for example.

So should B2B organisations ignore Wales’ advice, and leave customer-created content to consumer brands?

I don’t think it’s an option anymore. Customers are already telling your brand story somewhere online, whether you’ve given them the platform or not. (Remember the fake @BPglobalPR Twitter account following the Deepwater Horizon tragedy?)

The principles are sound enough. It’s simply a question of establishing a few ground rules.

1 Stay connected
The search engines are your friends. Assign someone in marketing, PR or even your admin department with a clear brief to keep an ear to the ground for online mentions of your brand – good and bad. For example: set up alerts on Twitter for relevant tweets. Then respond where appropriate.

2 Reach out
The web is the home of ‘organic’ phenomena such as viral ads, spoofs and mash-ups (bringing seemingly unrelated things together). Let’s face it, as well as being immensely popular, they’re also things that just wouldn’t get sanction inside a B2B company.

So if their work passes your test then give it your blessing, and link to them from your Twitter account or blog (with the appropriate disclaimer of course). As well as an instant way to reach a new audience, you’ll help show a different side of your business to existing customers – more open, less stuffy. And very now.

3 Be encouraging
There are some pretty smart people outside of your business too. They may see brand opportunities or issues you missed. Their ideas might ultimately be brought in-house to create brand extensions*, or even new service innovations. Letting them in might be as simple as encouraging them to blog for you, or setting up a whole development channel to show you’re open to their insights. Just make sure their efforts are rewarded.

4 And make it rewarding
Make sure there’s something in it for advocates who add value. Can you include them in product development? Could they get sneak previews, product demos or exclusive discounts?

Of course there are always potential pitfalls to letting customers get their hands on your brand. But it’s happening anyway, so now’s the time to get involved. The trick is to find ways to inspire and influence it; and then you can finally try relaxing the reigns a little…

* I always thought Thermos should make duvets (cool in the summer, warm in the winter). Maybe I’ll drop them a line

Battling it out

In The Great Name Drain we looked at how—right now—the English language seems to be running out of good candidates for brand names. While we covered a few different strategies for generating new names, the one I’d like to return to here is the one I call ‘BenefitThing’ – since it’s this approach that poses the biggest dilemma for brands that follow a single strategy.

So to quickly re-cap: BenefitThing is a simple approach that you can try yourself. Just take a positive quality (healthy, smart, fast etc), bolt it onto your physical product or service, and there you have it; another KwikFit, EasyJet or ProntoPrint is born.

So where’s the problem with that? I hear you ask.

Over the last decade One Brand Group has had the privilege of working with a company that employs some of the smartest people on the planet to accomplish incredible feats of engineering.

Now here’s their dilemma.

Acquiring new businesses as they grow leaves this company facing a conundrum of an altogether different kind: how do you continue to name products and services in the same category using the BenefitThing strategy? Especially when the customer benefits are, broadly speaking, always the same: efficiency, quality, and safety for example.

In this case of this company it’s a challenge that’s made more difficult on two fronts.

Firstly, all of the names the company has previously used (known as ‘legacy’ names) remain off-limits, even if the product hasn’t been sold for 30 years. This is because retired brand names are often referred to in publications that chart the development of their products.

The second slight spanner in the ointment is the fact that the company’s competitors are also gobbling up benefit words that occupy the same space. And once a rival has registered their RapidWidget, BestGizmo or SafeSystem, then it’s game over on the new name front.

Perhaps one of your competitors has already registered a BenefitThing name that perfectly sums up the qualities of your latest innovation? Then it’s time to look elsewhere for names. Aside from avoiding legal battles over sameness there’s another, more emotive reason.

No innovator wants to be seen launching something that sounds like a me-too product. A brand name is one of the few opportunities to really hammer home your difference. Milly and Molly could be twins for example, but Scarlet, by comparison, sounds like she must be someone entirely unique.

So what can you do to avoid this?

Well first of all, I’d avoid adopting one naming strategy and sticking to it religiously. Use a few. And alternate them. Be promiscuous, if you will.

But if you must use the BenefitThing strategy (it’s ok, your hands are tied, we understand) here are a few ways to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Use your customers’ language

Talk to the people likely to buy your product or service. It may be that, while everyone in your development team refers to your new software system as a ‘framework’, customers might call it a ‘platform’. Voila – you’re instantly transported to another space to explore names.

Brand a different ‘thing’ entirely

A few years back we worked on a project with a major Life Sciences company that made Laboratory Information Management Systems, technologies that (perhaps unsurprisingly) help bioscientists manage the complex flow of information between lab equipment and teams when conducting experiments; in the data-intensive field known as bioinformatics.

But rather than re-branding the existing LIMS (which they’d acquired), we instead came up with the concept of ‘data fluency’: a measure of how seamlessly data could flow between multiple instruments, users and applications. The name still communicated a benefit, but in a stroke it captured their difference, and gave us something we could create a story around for the brand.

So don’t lose hope. The process of getting to it may be tough, but the rewards of finding your unique name can be immediacy and memorability; the hallmarks of a great brand.

Creating emotional connections are key to forming memories – it’s just the way the brain works as part of our deepest survival instincts, i.e emotional pain to be avoided, elation to be repeatedly desired. So it is worth remembering that brands attempt to trigger our emotions, not just in that moment but to increase long-term memorability and attachment too.
I was struck by the uplifting emotion that this ad engendered in me. It reminded me that flying is still an innate human desire – to rise higher, to aspire, to transcend. A great example of a practical product (air travel) associated with an inspirational metaphor (reach the heights, the pinnacle). A point not lost on Red Bull either.
Business to business needs to explore the use of emotion too. It is a powerful – even essential – tool in the competitive marketing arena.

The first thing is that we should never miss an opportunity to brand things. In the case of the Magnum here, the product is branded and we literally become branded too when we eat it! Branding the wrapper is just not enough. Our advice – brand everything.
The second thing is that branding is a reductive process and in the context of icecream the M stands for Magnum. In brand mark terms – less is definately more.

Running out of words?

Now let’s not get all alarmist about this, but one of our richest natural resources is fast running out. I’m not talking about oil, natural gas, or even helium (it’s true, warns one Nobel laureate, global supplies are short. You can imagine the squeaky-voiced black market already…).

No, I speak of an altogether more conceptual resource. As a major source of memorable, relevant and trademark-able words for brand names, the rich supply that is the English language is proving itself to be a finite resource.

Although new words are added to the language at a rate of around 14.7 every day (‘slumdog’ or ‘chillax’ anyone?), few make suitable naming candidates. At the same time, some commentators suggest that every proper word in every major language has been already been trademarked somewhere. So how did we get here?

To the keen observer, the signs have been there for some time. First came the plundering of the classical worlds: Olympus, Athena, the Ford Orion. If a brand name wasn’t based on a Greek god, it had to be Latin for something or other. But often when customers need a history degree just to understand the relevance of a name, there’s a lot more work involved to build a brand they can love.

Next, the search for new names turned its appetite to a different part of the language, following a compound word strategy that I like to call ‘BenefitThing’. And it’s a simple approach that you can try yourself. Just take a positive quality (healthy, smart, fast etc), bolt it onto your physical product or service, and there you have it; another KwikFit, EasyJet or ProntoPrint is born.

Against a backdrop of high profile mergers and the rise of the international mega-corporation, these beneficial-sounding brands often seemed to bridge the gap between increasing faceless conglomerates and the real human needs of their customers. But for businesses following this approach caution is advised. People broadly desire the same things, so the scope for new names quickly becomes limited. And once a competitor has snapped up the benefit that you wanted to own (‘safe’ for example), you quickly run out of places to go. There’s ‘secure’ of course. But where then?
This one in particular is an issue our clients are increasingly experiencing, so I’ll cover it in more detail in a separate blog entry.

So the final step in the plundering of the language has been the use of ‘appropriated’ names – terms taken from another unrelated context: the Apples, eggs and Virgins of this world. The idea is that customers will associate the qualities of these familiar objects with the brand (in these examples read freshness and simplicity, nest-building and being new to a market).

Yet while this obtuseness has been the driving force behind some wildly creative brand names, this approach actually accelerates the consumption of the English language, since it ring-fences even the most mundane words and renders them inaccessible forever more.

So what’s the solution?
One answer has been the recent trend to create ‘new’ words – especially prominent in the digital realm. Techniques include building words from scratch (opodo, Bebo), throwing elements together to capture new ideas (YouTube, FaceBook, LastMinute) as well as slang and misspellings (Digg, Razr). Many of these names have been fuelled by the race for a distinct URL, since every brand naming brief stipulated that “all suggested names must be available as a dot com”.

It’s certainly a risk, but when you get this right, in special cases such as Google (which actually originated from a misspelling of the word googol, a huge number), you reverse the decline and your brand name enters everyday language.

Of course there are other naming strategies that don’t rely on claiming parts of the language at all: using IBM-style acronyms and initials for instance, or family names such as Kellogg’s or Dyson. While these approaches don’t eat up the language, they often need years of heritage to become established; something that’s not always possible for companies operating in today’s Twitter-paced world.

About the Author
Rich Whitehouse has worked in B2B marketing and branding since 1996. In his current role as Creative Head at One Brand Group he has named everything from newsletters to new start-ups. He has also helped to name one human child to date.

The emporium of middle class design is gone. In 1964 Conran classically positioned his Habitat stores as a counterpoint to poor design and lack of choice. A retort to the pragmatism and functionality associated with a country finally emerging from the long shadow of post war austerity. Habitat caught the wave of the swinging sixties.
The sixties gang are now not so swinging, they are looking for a deal like the rest of us. They have deserted the Habitat concept and the younger crowd don’t get what the fuss was about.
Ironic then that it was austerity that gave birth to the brand and it is austerity that brings its demise. Overwhelming choice and the desire for cheap, pragmatic and mass produced products have laid the brand to rest.
There is a moral to the tale. Brands must evolve to survive. For brands to thrive their ideas, must change. If you cannot say what is wrong, you cannot position to make it right and brand value retreats like a broken wave on a beach.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/05/24/uk-marksspencer-idUKTRE74M6X520110524