aspire to enquire

Innocent Prize

I sent a picture to @innocentdrinks the other week which resulted in my getting a small prize. It was a picture of the Age Concern Hats which had just started going out in Sainsburys Central on Queen Street. 

I've started getting into a bit more of this kind of thing - it's fun, and also interesting seeing how these kinds of things run. Hopefully it will give me more idea of digital campaign stuff without me really noticing. I'm going to have a go at Live Guy on Tuesday too.

My picture was rubbish though, definitely not up to Innocent standards.

And it got featured on the Innocent Blog, which is always fun times.

And look what (I'm presuming) Mr Dan Germain sent in return! ...

Thanks Innocent! The brand book will actually be really useful for my dissertation, which WILL be at first draft stage by the end of this week, so muchly appreciated.

I'll try harder on the picture next time.

Expect to be bored

There's an advert I've been seeing quite a lot of here recently, for the 2008 Kia Borrego . I'm kind of glad it's come out because I've been meaning to write a similar post since I first arrived in the US and watched TV. 

If you don't want to click the links, the basic premise of the ad is that you'd expect to see certain things in a car ad, but not that it was an ad for a Kia. Kind of similar message, I guess, to the UK Kia ads, a little bit. Maybe. 

The sad truth of the spot is that yes, you do expect those things here. I don't think I've seen a single car 'commercial' here yet that hasn't featured at least one cliche - a slow motion pan around the car, a shot of it driving round some country bends against a dramatic woodland/desert/mountain backdrop, or any of the other things mentioned by Kia (who, incidentally, do a very good job).

I wanted to bring a few together for this post, but they're not on YouTube, which shouldn't be a surprise considering the adverts are stuck in the 80s. No one's told them about the internet yet.

Even Honda seem to be letting the side down with some animated bloke telling you about their sales events.

I guess my point in this post is how sad the whole situation is. Is the state of advertising in the US so bad that even if a new brand wants to stand out, the only way it can really do it is by copying everyone else but adding a disclaimer? By saying "Yep, this brand is just like everyone else, we just have a different name" ?

I'm not saying that UK car adverts never have shots of the car. But if you even dreamt of making a car out of cake here, or animated flying engines, you certainly wouldn't be looking forward to a career in US automotive advertising, if the current evidence is anything to go by.

Grande opening

A few weeks ago a new drive through opened in Cardiff; on a really busy intersection between Ikea, 3 supermarkets, a retail park, an Olympic size swimming pool, and a main artery road from the West into Cardiff Bay and the industrial South East of Cardiff.

Usually I wouldn't be too bothered about this kind of news, there's already a McDonalds there, as well as a Pizza Hut and Frankie and Benny's, and Asda and Morrison's have their own cafes. But this particular drive through is the first of its kind in Europe, and it's a Starbucks drive-thru

 

Sarah, one of the ball organisers, and I, popped through whilst we were on an errand, I'm not a massive Starbucks drinker, although I like coffee, this was mainly out of curiosity. 

That was pretty much the whole process, and it was probably as quick as looking at those pictures. I was pretty impressed considering how long it usually takes in a real store, but that wasn't really why I was so intrigued by the place.

I don't know a lot about the Starbucks Brand, but I know they're very into something along the lines of 'the best most consistent coffee on the highstreet' or something like that. Everyone likes to bash the place, but they're usually pretty good at the consistency part, at least. Try getting the same coffee two days in a row from Ha Ha or the Hayes Island Snack Bar. 

While you're getting your consistent coffee drink, you're able to sit Friends-style in some comfy seating, listen to some Jazz, and read the Times. These days, you can even buy the music from their own record label. If you're in the States, in some stores you can download the music that's currently playing to your iPhone. So I always thought it was not just about the coffee, but the store experience. That's why they're all the same - no? If it was just the coffee, they could franchise it and let it end up like a Burger King with all sorts of shape and size stores, with sticky floors and smelly toilets to boot. I really thought their strength was their stores. The 'Brand Experience' that everyone's so keen on providing these days.

But the drive-thru kind of does away with that and says no, it's just coffee. Apparently in the states they do 50% of their revenue this way. 

I wasn't sure about this at all. For starters, if it's just coffee, it needs to be pretty damn good. And I don't really like their coffee, they just offer you the option of throwing so much shit in it that it tastes bearable. And with McDonalds going all rainforest alliance recently, surely they're better placed to offer people a coffee drive-thru? 

It just didn't feel right. 

But I guess, on balance, if their store experiences have come to this, then I know which I'd prefer.

More forwards

Readers of The Guardian last Thursday might have noticed this article on page three about a robot conducting a symphony orchestra. The headline's a bit misleading; One of the quotes from a musician criticises ASIMO, 'Advance Step in Innovative MOvement', for not acknowledging a rallentando (or a 'retard' as he called it - I thought he was just talking about the percussionists! sorry bad joke. Percussioning is pretty hard, I know).

Bit misleading aside, it's a full page article on how the robot has been being developed since 1986 by a group of engineers and programmers, and how it's the first time a robot has conducted a human orchestra. I say conduct, but everyone in the picture is heads down in their music. It's a pretty sympathetic article with quotes from luminaries and a lot of time for the creators of the robot, who hope to one day use them to assist in homes of people with mobility impairments.

Who are the creators? Honda.

I already love the UK work for Honda, which is put out by Wieden + Kennedy, and in fact they have used ASIMO in a TV ad before now. But I'm assuming that this event wasn't done by W+K, probably some PR agency somewhere, or maybe a genuine experiment by the scientists. The fact that they performed 'The Impossible Dream' suggests not.

What this firms up for me though, is 'the importance of story'. Honda's ad work is brilliant and it gives a distinguishable identity and mantra to the brand: The power of dreams. Honda is pushing boundaries. Innovation, and so on. But unlike a lot of this kind of thing (step forward Ford), it's actually genuine. Honda have been working on ASIMO since 1986. It's taken them 22 years to really start to promote that work to the general public, but now it's paying off. I'm guessing It's a PR dream - a genuine piece of news that seamlessly fits with established advertising campaigns in international territories and helps consumers really understand the brand a bit more.

I'm pretty sure a lot of what makes brands like Howies and Innocent such liberal favourites is their stories; the tone of their voice that makes you feel a part of them, that they are a company you can relate with. But they are pretty small fish when you compare with a global manufacturer like Honda. Levi's have a story too, but I don't see many people relating to them. Adidas recently reminded people of Adi Dassler, but personally I don't feel any warmth to them other than 'nice shoes'.

So the message I'm taking away is that organisations (and I guess it applies to us future graduates) need to be true to their stories, even if they're not working out in the short term. Change up, fine, but be sure why you're doing it, and that it's for the same reasons that you started out in the first place, maybe in 22 years time, you'll be able to get where you want to be and keep growing, by sharing that story again.

long post about nightclub branding

I have a part time job in club promotions for a cardiff nightclub and generally work friday nights, saturday nights, and sunday lunchtime.

Earlier today I came across a stack of maybe 20 driving licenses that had presumably been found around the venue, just sitting on the reception desk in one of those clear plastic business card holders.

One interesting statistic is that out of that sizeable number of cards, only one person was older than me, and generally the dates of birth were 86-89. If you like statistics.

Remembering when I lost my wallet once and someone rang my house to tell me they had it, I looked up a few of the addresses and was able to get through to some parents and tell them their daughter's brand-new driving license was at the venue next time they were passing.

One address, though, on the crispest of those new look cards, was local and I couldn't find a land-line number. So since I was driving home, I decided to drop it in.

The girl who answered wasn't the owner of the lost item but she seemed pretty chuffed on their behalf.

This is the kind of customer service I personally like, when everyone is able to tell a story about a good thing that connects them to a brand. Stories and connections. Good.

What's niggling me though is the fact that the cards had been sitting right under the noses of a number of full-time staff, who had done nothing about them. There are about 12,000 managers there too, but none of them had done anything with them.

I'm just the flyer guy. It's not down to me to make marketing decisions, other than where to stand and to generally look approachable and trustworthy etc. But now I've gone and given these people the impression that my employer actually cares about its customers and thinks it owes them a little bit of something back after it's financially raped them for the last three years.

To be honest though, I can't think of a venue in Cardiff that has built any kind of relationship with its customers. So now I'm wondering if I'm just being naive. Is it too much to ask for an 'innocent' bar, or a 'howies' one? What would it be like? The market is so saturated here right now that anything's got to be worth a try, right? Perhaps if you did go that way, would people be more ok about the price point?

Maybe it's not really possible when you're dealing with a minibus load of valley girls in pink ladies fancy dress. But in that case the least you can do is get their lost property back to them.