Healthcare has traditionally been the industry where recommendations are used. Most consumers don’t question a product that has the seal of approval by medical professionals. Think Colgate. It advertises as being the #1 toothpaste recommended by dentists, and that alone is enough to convince more than a few buyers. Incidentally healthcare is also the industry with the strictest regulations when it comes to advertising and packaging design. But this has not deterred creative brands from using recommendations to build trust through relevant perceptions. With their “created by a school teacher” tagline, Airborne, an immune support supplement brand, saw a way to stand out in the sea of over the counter vitamins. Who is going to argue about staying germ-free with someone surrounded by millions of germs at any given moment?

It comes down to trust, authenticity and the influence of those with status. Could your company benefit by packaging with explicit or implicit recommendations? Contact us today to discuss your options.

There are typically 4 types of names – Descriptive, Suggestive, Arbitrary, and Fanciful.

Descriptive names have the advantage of being just that – descriptive. Without much advertising, the consumer can make out the type of product or service it is just by looking at the name. Take Wall Street Journal – you know it is a newspaper. British Airways is an airline company and Head & Shoulders something for your head and shoulders.

The disadvantage of Descriptive names is their legal availability. Since they’re made up of generic or existing names, chances they are already registered are high.

Suggestive names come relatively close to Descriptive names. They’re made of existing names or combination of existing names. They’re a little bit easier to register but the real advantage is that they tend to be emotional. They convey a benefit, an experience, or even a particular imagery. Vogue is a magazine about fashion while EasyJet suggests easy traveling and Always is something that you can always trust.

We then have Arbitrary names. They are words that have no relation whatsoever with the type of product or service. Sprite, for example, in English, describes a little elf or fairy. Nothing to do with lemon soda. And same with Apple, nothing to do with selling apples.

Founders’ names or acronyms – think IBM, BMW, Kellogg’s – also fall in this category. Here you will need a larger advertising budget to inform your target what the product is since no correlation can be made with the name itself. The plus side of Arbitrary names is that they are generally available in the appropriate trademark classes.

And finally, Fanciful names. Those are completely made up names you will not find in a dictionary. Like Kodak, Oreo or Skype. While they require a big advertising budget, they have the best odds of being legally available.

Nomenclature is of utmost importance for positioning a product or service. Contact us today to find out more about our name development capabilities.

(Image: fashion-angel.co.uk)

The main reason brand guidelines exist is to keep consistency in check. Consistency is key, especially for brands that extend across multiple touch points. Imagine your favorite bottled water brand featuring volcanoes in a TV commercial but fairytale castles in print. Or Easyjet aircrafts painted in an apple green livery because it’s the new brand manager’s favorite color. At best you’d be confused. At worst the brand would go unnoticed, having missed out on an opportunity to refresh memory structures to get your attention. It is only through consistency that brands become familiar, trusted – and grow.

But to work effectively, brand guidelines don’t have to be a set of rigid rules and regulations. In fact they should allow for flexibility. Or else you might soon have to answer to stale, uninspired creative that locks your brand at idle.

A few years ago, McDonald's bent the rules with a series of outdoors billboards featuring food pictures. No copy, no logo. Just close-ups of BigMacs and McFlurries. A bold move given McDonalds’ guidelines most probably don’t point out logos are optional.

Good brand guidelines manage to guard a brand from getting too far from its focus, all while giving it enough room for emotional engagement. Contact us today to see how we can help you design effective brand standards.

(Image: McDonald's)

Emojis have already proven to be powerful marketing tools in brand communication. Not only do they build engagement in social media and other digital conversations, they also shape new brand experiences. Take Domino’s Pizza for example, they’ve pushed the emoji sensation so far to let customers place their order with a simple text containing the pizza pictogram. No doubt this will give the brand both relevance and differentiation in a traditionally low-involvement category.

Don’t think emojis are confined to online use only – there’s an emoji musical and a full-length movie premiering this summer. Soda drinkers may also want to check out Pepsi’s emoji packaging designs and merchandising items, deployed globally as part of a campaign to celebrate the little yellow guys across the brand’s portfolio – a fun way to show that human, personal touch consumers are now increasingly looking for.

Be careful, though, as emoji marketing is not for every brand. If you’re debating whether to feature pictograms in your messaging strategy, make sure this approach reflects your brand identity and aligns with your target audience. Contact us today to find out how we can help you design a distinctive brand your consumers will relate to.

(Image: Shirish Sen)

A recent study even suggests that nostalgia makes people value money less, which in turn makes them less resistant to spending. When M&Ms ran their 75^th anniversary campaign, it turned out consumers had no reluctance paying more for their favorite candies if wrapped in a retro packaging design.

Nostalgia is used to sell everything from foods to beverages to toys. But there are categories for which the retro theme should not be the way to go. Think pharmaceutical and healthcare products – no one would pick up a box of aspirin if it looked like the expiration was past due by a decade.

To find out more about how throwback packaging can help your brand tap into consumer emotions, contact us today.

(Picture: Mars, Inc)

It’s important to distinguish between offbeat yet viable name proposals and genuine red flags. Think of Poison, Dior’s most iconic perfume. In the weeks following its launch in the mid-1980s, it was reported that one bottle was sold every 50 seconds – in the Galeries Lafayette alone. Its popularity reached such heights it prompted some restaurants to hang “No Smoking. No Poison” signs at the door – speak of great brand awareness for a name that evokes a lethal substance! And thirty years in, Poison still symbolizes that certain attitude, that willingness to stand out and challenge convention.

There are two main variables to account for when considering names with shock value – audience and context. For lifestyle products in cosmetics, fashion, or beverage categories, audiences will tend to be more open and appreciative of such names while business audiences in traditional industries, not so much. “Lucifer” would definitely have a better chance making it as a vodka brand than an insurance company. The context a name is used in will also play an important role. Consider the word “death”. Not exactly something you’d feel at ease for a new brand of rock climbing equipment. But in the context of coffee drinking, its meaning can be reinterpreted to highlight product features like flavor and caffeine blends – perfect for an edgy brand like the Death Wish Coffee Company who proclaims their coffee is the strongest in the world.

Although meaning is somewhat malleable, there are some names so overwhelmingly associated with one negative meaning that they should never be used in name creation. Take “Hitler”, the name of an Indian men’s clothing store. That’s a name blooper by any standard. Click here for other epic naming fails.

When used wisely and in alignment with a brand’s positioning, an edgy name can provide just the attention you need to compete in a crowded category. Contact us today to find out more about our name development capabilities.

(Picture: Albany Business Review)

A host of product categories have come to be strongly associated with a particular country. Think watches, for example, where a connotation to Switzerland is almost immediate. It’s not really a watch unless it has that “Swiss Made” small print on the quadrant. That same psychological effect applies to high performance cars being from Germany and the best fashion coming from Italy or France – in this case, even permeating down to cities with Milan and Paris.

Somewhere in our minds, a product or service correlates with a particular country and its legacy, culture, or lifestyle, which leads us to perceive that product or service as more credible, authentic, and ultimately, superior. Some brands have even been given foreign names in order to create that perceived country of origin effect -- Häagen-Dazs is a good example. Founded in the United States in the early 1960s, this ice cream company was given a Scandinavian-sounding name to evoke old-world traditions and artisanship.

There are other cases where referencing a country of origin might not always be a good idea, especially if it is a developing country. Products “Made in China” are generally perceived as inferior and don’t exactly conjure up positive emotions – other than affordability. Other times, country of origin is dismissed because it might not support a brand’s strategy. Nespresso, headquartered in Switzerland, is a good example of a brand that chose not to point to its country of origin -- most likely because Switzerland doesn’t exactly ring up ‘coffee nation’.

Contact us today and find out how you can give your brand more credibility and authenticity using the country of origin effect.

(Picture: Häagen-Dazs)

That’s the challenge brand managers in pharmaceutical companies have to deal with. And they have their industry’s strict regulatory compliance requirements to thank.

It’s no secret branding doesn’t feature much in pharma, and outside of projecting bigger logos on larger screens at seminars and conferences, there’s not much unchartered opportunity to build a drug’s brand awareness. Or is there?

1. Expanding the frame of reference

Thinking beyond the branded product itself can give pharma marketers more leverage in the long run. A physician who has prescribed a drug that has shown to work well with patients will equate that quality and trustworthiness with the manufacturer. The recent rebranding of large pharmaceutical companies like Biogen Idec and Sanofi Aventis signals that new focus on a more prominent corporate identity drives sales and product portfolio exposure.

2. Packaging it right

That’s tried and tested – the way a product looks influences customer recall and perception. And there’s no better way to make a product stand out than with packaging design. While the spectrum of creativity in pharma packaging design won’t allow much of a contribution to this objective, there are still opportunities worth giving thought to. When AstraZeneca orchestrated an OTC launch of its acid reflux prescription drug Prilosec, it built an image around the physical characteristic the Rx formulation had come to be recognized for - its purple color. The brand is now so closely associated with that distinctive hue AstraZeneca recently went to court to protect it from copy-cat competitors.

3. Going for consistency

With heavier caseloads and longer workdays, physicians tend to turn down meetings with pharmaceutical representatives. Instead they’ve increased their reliance on the Internet as a source for health and medical information. Pfizer is one of many to have rolled out video detailing while both GSK and Merck have launched their own e-sampling programs to enable physicians to order and manage prescription samples online. This calls for new approaches to get and compete for a doctor’s limited attention. And the ability to cut through the clutter starts with a consistent use of visual systems to drive an emotional connection and favor brand value and distinctiveness – not just online but across all channels and touch points.

Contact us today to discuss how our experience developing top drugs with Sanofi, Roche, Novartis or Spirig HealthCare, can help your product grow into a healthy brand.

(Picture: Reuters)

So what does that mean for your business? While there are other categories of trademarks that can help you protect your intellectual property rights – logos, names, colors, etc. –, shapes shouldn’t stop at product shapes alone.

Think packaging shapes.

The potential it holds to give your brand that sought-after distinctiveness is worth exploring, considering every one of your consumers will come in contact with packaging at some point. Check out our extensive experience remodeling Kit Kat’s packages all while keeping the brand recognizable and true to its promise.

As I write this article, I’m drinking from my red holiday Starbucks cup, the one that caused such a massive social media outrage due to its plain, no-frill look. Some people linked it to a deconstruction of Christmas, others called it nothing less than an attack on Christianity. All because one company decided to no longer adorn its cups with holiday patterns.

This proves once again that packaging has never been so powerful.

Surely mega-chain Starbucks must have considered that their cups’ design -- or lack thereof -- wasn’t going to go unnoticed. Maybe it was orchestrated in an effort to differentiate from the mawkish and ubiquitous snowflakes, candles, and gingerbread men designs out there. Maybe it just does a better job relaying the brand’s premium pricing to an exclusive target market. Or maybe Starbucks is really going minimalist – like their most recent logo redesign may suggest. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that Santa’s already given the company its Christmas present with all that free publicity.

Coffee drinking brand managers click here to see the evolution of Starbucks’ red cups over the years.

The Kellogg’s Company is one of those companies everyone owns a bit of in their kitchen cabinet. When it announced a major branding overhaul in 2012 following a few years of poor performance, we wondered if their first step would be to consolidate their 100+ varieties of ready-to-eat cereal brands. While a large product portfolio could mean broader reach and more options to consumers, it also means heavier advertising costs and less focus overall. 

The most obvious way to eliminate a brand fast and cheap is to kill it at once and forget about it altogether. But Kellogg’s shows us there’s a smarter way to do this by transitioning that brand over to another one. This strategy is called brand migration and conceding the time and efforts necessary to phase out a brand are more consequent than with an abrupt kill-off, the perk is that you don’t lose your customers to competitors. 

Take Chocos, for example. This brand is quietly being outplaced by another chocolate-flavored brand, Choco Krispies. First Chocos endorses the Choco Krispies name and mascot. This is then flipped around for a while until Coco the monkey sends Chocos the bear to its hibernating spot permanently. 

With this commending brand migration, Kellogg’s manages to discontinue a brand, decrease costs, improve focus, and drive up profitability while maintaining the same customer base. Something to raise your cereal bowl to.

For a brand to have a chance to make it on the marketplace, most marketers will agree that it needs to stand out from the competition, that it needs to be differentiated. Think of UPS, the shipping company. Their entire branding strategy is built on what many would consider a dull, unsexy color: brown. Everything from their trucks to their drivers’ uniforms, even their advertising slogan «What can Brown do for You?», gravitates around that color. Similarly, when the Swiss postal services spun off in the late 1990s, the new entity got a new logo and a new slogan but chose to retain its predecessor’s yellow corporate color. Color made so much sense, the company even tried to trademark it.

Color is also a great strategy for brands operating in categories where advertising is highly regulated. Take pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca for example. By referring to Nexium as the ‘Purple Pill’, the company not only found a way to promote its acid reflux drug in markets where the mention of brand names is prohibited, it also managed to create awareness of both the brand and the condition. Although it was released almost 15 years ago, hearburn sufferers still ask their doctors and pharmacists about the ‘Purple Pill’. Talk about effective color branding!

We all know some colors are best fit to trigger certain emotions. While this is influenced culturally, in Europe blue is calming and does a better job conveying the qualities of an insurance company like Zurich than red, a color often associated with danger. Orange conveys something cheap while burgundy says expensive. When Chiquita Brands International asked us to rethink their visual identity to add a notion of freshness and naturalness, we had their logo’s blue and yellow to work off from. See how we did it here.

I can’t tell Evian water from Henniez, Cristalp, or just about any tap waters out there. Even after years of partnership and sampling with our client Nestlé Waters. However it’s fascinating that a seemingly undifferentiated product like H2O can be perceived so differently from one consumer to the next.

So how exactly do you go about branding such undifferentiated, commodity products – be it water, wood, soap, sugar or bananas?

It is all about differentiation. And there are just as many ways to differentiate a commodity than there are bubbles in a glass of San Pellegrino.

Origin is probably the most notable proposition. The mere associations of that origin can carry enough weight to give the product value. This is what makes Canadian wood “safe and modern”, Swiss electricity “reliable and clean”, and allows Czech artist Kirill Rudenko to sell canned air from cities around the world for $10.

With enough time and resources, re-naming is also a strategy worth considering. Go back a few years ago and think the “Dove is not soap” advertising campaign. While Dove possesses its own attributes, it managed to build a distinct positioning for itself, not just from other soaps, but from the entire soap category. You no longer wash your face with soap, you wash it with Dove!

Then there is packaging, a high-impact differentiator. Daddy, a French sugar brand recently introduced new biodegradable packaging derived from plant materials. Although the container costs more than what’s in it, the company hopes to appeal to a generation of conscious consumers and be recognized for that.

But what if there’s nothing different to bank on?

We recommend you make it up!

You drink Contrex to maintain – or achieve – a slim figure, while Perrier is the freshest water around and Badoit quenches the sophisticated. Or to my colleague, Evian is what helps you stay and feel young.

It all comes down to having a good creative communication campaign. Add a mascot or celebrity spokesperson to the mix and you’ve got the potential to turn the most undifferentiated commodity product into a relevant, durable, and unique brand. Ask us how we can give your product more value and how our team helped Chiquita Brands sell more bananas.

In many markets, Coca-Cola markets its ‘Diet’ variety as ‘Light’. And yes, ‘Light’ and ‘Life’ are dangerously similar in pronunciation. Try ordering a ‘Life’ in a noisy concert venue, chances are you will get a ‘Light’. At least the packaging clearly sets the green ‘Life’ apart from the gray ‘Light’. You might have better luck getting what you want if you order the ‘green Coke’!

While some will argue that drastic repositioning actions may jeopardize brand strength over time, it remains a notable move to drive a brand’s relevance beyond its original market. For example, Heineken recently introduced a new brand of cider – a traditional male drink – to a female audience. Jillz is sparkling, fresh, fruity, and contains less alcohol than regular ciders.

Exotic Flavors

In Europe and North America, the most popular beverage flavor launched in 2012 were mango, pomegranate, and pineapple. While women tend to favor sweeter tastes, they also tend to monitor their calorie intake.

Premium is Key

On average, women interact with high-end products more often than men. Think perfumes, jewelry, and cosmetics. Women will be quicker to rate a product’s exclusiveness by its visual codes.

Smaller bottle – or bigger

Smaller servings are a favorite among women – they mean fewer calories and fewer trips to the bathroom. Wine, champagne and cocktails help exemplify this preference. Contrastingly, 13 percent of women say beer would not be a first choice because it cannot be readily shared with one’s friends (2014).

New category?

Back in the 1950s, European and North American demand for a fruit called “Chinese gooseberry” was virtually nil. A smart importer blamed the negative Cold War associations the name conveyed. Thus the fruit was renamed “kiwi”. It was a sound success: global demand soared ever since.

According to a 2012 research, 79% of UK women rarely or never drink beer. Even if it is fruity and visually appealing, it's still a beer . Could the category name have something to do with this indifference? Women may elect not to purchasing beer because of the intrinsic and latent associations that “beer is a man’s drink.” Stripping off all beer connotations for instance helped the brand Eve to position itself as a woman’s new drink of choice!