brandcross’ point of view
a few things communicationLogo Misapplication or what the logo says about your company!
I believe that the logo is the most abused, misapplied, misconceived, wrongfully distracting element of design and business today. I encounter too many people in business who believe that their logo should define them. The reality is that they should define their logo. For some reason it seems that this business fundamental is lost on most business owners.
I find it rather ironic and frustrating that while so many owners, executives and managers have absolutely no idea what design can do for their business, they have entirely unrealistic expectations for what a logo can do for their business. A logo’s purpose, as imagined by far too many, amounts to the very definition of putting the cart before the horse. In such cases it would be far better to send the horse off to the glue factory.Seriously, the logo is just the simple mnemonic that can be used to mark (brand like a cow) products and marketing materials so that people know who made them or who is trying to say something to them. The logo itself only articulates what the brand already broadcasts. That’s it.
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No, this new logo will not fix your crappy companyRegrettably, more than a few clients I’ve worked with want their logo and their website to say things about them that are entirely inaccurate – as if doing so will fix their shortcomings. Small companies want the logo or website to make them seem big. Stodgy, stuck-in-the-mud companies want their logo to say that they’re cutting edge and energetic. Unhealthy companies want their website to say that they’re vibrant and thriving. If you’re a designer, I’ll bet you’ve been in this meeting:
client: We want the new logo to say something really powerful about us. We want it to show people that we’re a big company. We want it to say that we’re energetic and capable.
you: How big a company are you?
client: Well, there’s me, …and Tom there handles sales. Oh, and my wife works 2 days a week in the office on books and answering phones. But we want the logo to say that we’re different.
you: What sets you apart from your competitors?
client: We’re customer-focused.
you: I see.
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It is hard to look across the table at these business owners and explain to them that building an identity that supports an ideal counter to their practice or ability is the wrong move. It is hard to tell them that their best move would be to repair their company and actually create the reality they want portrayed to the public and then make good use of marketing to get the word out – at which point their logo will say all these great things about them. It’s hard to say this because in just about every case they refuse to believe this advice. I’m the designer – what’s the designer know about their business. Well, it’s the designer’s job to know enough about their business to see things they cannot see. And yet…The reason a business owner jumps into making this mistake is that he believes that his company’s problems will be fixed by visually redefining the company (in other words, putting lipstick on a pig). He believes that this redefinition is easily accomplished by spending fifteen to forty thousand dollars on a new website and new logo. He believes that it’s the logo and website that speaks for the company rather than he and his company who speak for the logo. Sadly, he’s wrong and he’s seldom going to be convinced otherwise.We designers know that few things in life are as rough and uninspiring as trying to conceive and execute great design for an unhealthy, uninspired, myopic company. Add “deceptive” to that list and that’s when designers start bickering with the sales team and project managers over which clients we can and cannot afford to pass up. Oh, it’s possible to do good work in these situations and professionalism demands that we be able to do it, but that doesn’t make it any more palatable. It begs the question of a cook’s ethics: when the man you’re cooking for spits in the soup while you’re cooking, do you also salt his tea for good measure? I’m not saying it’s the thing to do, but a designer can fantasize.So for all you designers reading this who have encountered the same sort of idiocy here’s a little caveat you can copy and print out in a bold and highly legible font, laminate and/or frame and present to your clients before you undertake their identity redesign project:
Dear business owner:A logo refers to a story (your brand). It says very little in and of itself. It is meant to refer to an already understood idea (your brand). A LOGO DOES NOT TELL A STORY (a logo is not a brand). If there is no story, at best the logo can only serve to create a recognizable reference that might have meaning and context later – months or years from now.
The care and feeding of logosThink of your logo as your child. A newborn child is helpless at first. You have to nurture and care for it rigorously, as it cannot fend for itself. Others who meet the newborn know of it only what they know of its family. Later, the child learns to use its legs and its ability to communicate – what the family models – improves and its acquaintance broadens. If things go well, in time the child is capable of expressing ideas succinctly on its own. Much later, the child may even be capable of helping to support its parents when they encounter hardship. That’s how formidable logos are made. They’re raised over time, not created in a design laboratory and unleashed, fully self-sufficient. So when you’re presented with the newly designed logo do not look at it and try to see the story. Instead, look at it and make sure it does not visually offend or suggest something counter to your company’s brand. Trust the designer to utilize what he/she has learned about your company and your ideals to account for the rest.
P.S. Your Logo is not your brand
No, really. Your brand is that whole quality product + promise of value + value perception + public reputation + company culture thing. You know; the stuff that amounts to the hard part of business that you actually have to work hard at (as opposed to merely pay for). So no, the logo cannot create that brand image. It can only refer to it. You and your employees have to build the reputation, flesh out the story and establish the brand that your logo will represent. That story then has to be told to others through marketing. You write the story, marketing tells the story and the logo refers to it. No successful company in the history of the world has ever had a logo that told a story by itself. And neither will you.
Conclusion
Okay, you can’t really give this to a client, but perhaps a more softly presented bit of advice along these lines at the start of your project might ease things just a bit. At the very least, print this letter out and present it with due gravity to your sales team and project managers. Let them find the appropriate method for conveying these ideas to potential clients. Might just save you some small measure of project-related pain.Of course the best course of action for most of these clients would be to build a healthy, honest, formidable company. Having done that, their current logo will likely work just fine.
Andy Rutledge, 06/26/2006
How Babel Fish almost caused a diplomatic incident
Amazing, the internet. You can feed a phrase in one of the major world languages into a translation site like Babel Fish (babelfish.yahoo.com), and out it will come another. Type, for example, “internet translation sites like Babel Fish are more trouble than they’re worth”, click the “English-to-French” button, and you get “les emplacements de traduction d’internet comme des poissons de Babel sont plus d’ennui que la valeur de they’re”. Put back into English, that yields “the sites of d’internet translation as of fish of Babel are more d’ennui that the value of they’re”, which, you will agree, is about as close to the original as to make no meaningful difference.
So when indignant officials at the Dutch foreign ministry received an email from a group of Israeli journalists that began, “Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian,” they might perhaps have guessed what had happened.Sadly, they did not. Nor did the follow-up questions (“Why we did not heard on mutual visits of main the states of Israel and Holland, this is in the country of this” and “What in your opinion needs to do opposite the awful the Iranian of Israel”) enlighten them. And now, according to the Jerusalem Post, the aforementioned journalists’ planned fact-finding trip to the Netherlands as guests of the Dutch government is in jeopardy. “How could this email possibly have been sent?” an anguished Israeli diplomat asked the paper. “These journalists have sparked a major, major incident.”
Blame Babel Fish, bud: it mistakes the Hebrew word for “if” (ha’im) for the Hebrew word for “mother” (ha’ima), and reckons “the Dome of the Rock” can reasonably be rendered in English as “bandages of the knitted domes”. So let that be a lesson to you. Or, as Babel Fish would have it in German, “Lassen Sie so einfach, daß eine Lektion zu Ihnen seien Sie.” Which apparently means: “Leave so simple that a lesson to you are you.” Amazing, the internet.
Jon Henley
Wednesday November 7, 2007
The Guardian
Don’t blame Shrek for your child’s obesity
Manufacturers of sweets and fizzy drinks cannot be held responsible for dictating the diet of our children Tony the Tiger; the Cresta Bear; the Honey Monster: they’re icons from our childhood, replete with warm, happy memories of another era. Now their 21st century descendants stand accused of harming the very children they appeal to.
The consumers’ body Which? has published a report attacking some of our best-loved cartoon characters for luring children into a gut-busting diet of too much sugar, salt and fat. The report – titled Cartoon Heroes and Villains for maximum PR-ability – has generated the hoped-for screaming headlines this week. It claims that food manufacturers are exploiting children’s fondness for characters such as Spider-Man and Shrek by using them to market unhealthy foods.Back in the days of the Cresta Bear I suspect this sort of superficial report would have drawn very little attention. Apart from anything else, it’s hopelessly out of date: there’s been a ban on the use of licensed characters in ads targeting children since July.But these days marketing to children – and especially marketing food and drink to children – is a phenomenally sensitive subject. The state of our youngsters’ waist-lines has become not just a serious health issue but a political issue, too. So Which? has touched a raw nerve.The statistics suggest we’re in danger of rearing a generation of overweight children who are likely to grow into obese adults. A recent ministerial report warned that up to half of all primary school boys and one in five girls will be clinically obese by 2050 if the current trend persists.But of all the things that must be done, from educating the nation about healthy eating and the need for exercise to providing healthier school meals and more playing fields in urban areas, advertising and marketing surely sit some way down the list.The trouble is that advertising has become the soft target, and pressure groups such as Which? have located the industry’s weak points and are gouging away relentlessly. It doesn’t help that the Tories and the Labour Party appear to see restricting advertising and marketing as a potential vote-winner.And it’s fair to say that for a long time many marketers did not act particularly responsibly when it came to targeting children. Back in the days of the Cresta Bear (when we were all shouting “It’s frothy man!” in the playground), the industry didn’t worry much about how it sold its brands to kids. Yet obesity was not the problem it is today.Now, marketers are acutely aware of issues such as food additives and fat and sugar content. They are also acutely aware of their responsibilities as advertisers targeting young consumers. The industry has a fine track record of self-regulation under the careful eye of the Advertising Standards Authority, the industry’s own watchdog. Yes, the industry’s preventative measures are not 100 per cent perfect, but when abuses are found the ASA acts swiftly to ban ads. And together, the whole mechanism is possibly one of the most effective operating in any free-market economy.Despite all this, the pressure groups keep the pressure on. Since the beginning of the summer there’s been a full ban on the advertising of all “unhealthy” food and drink on television when high proportions of children are likely to be viewing. And barely a week passes without one vocal group representing a minority view launching a salvo at the marketing industry. The onslaught is deeply frustrating for anyone who believes in the freedom to advertise those products that it is legal to sell. And it’s deeply frustrating for a marketing industry that has made great strides to act responsibly.Yet, yet. Which? does have a point. It cannot be denied that, while advertising to children is more sensitive and free from abuse than ever before, there are other areas of the marketer’s commercial armoury where such self-restraint is less obvious. An awful lot of the packaging our children’s food comes in does still carry lovely pictures of the sort of characters that are now banned from TV ads targeting children. And there’s no discernible let-up in promotional marketing like Burger King’s Spider-Man toy promotion.Amid all the emotion and the wanton accusation, though, the real issue seems to have got lost. Do sweets and biscuits and drinks that carry images of Shrek or Winnie the Pooh or the Pink Panther actually make our children fat?The dispassionate answer has to be: no. Pictures of cartoon characters on chocolate bars do not make a child obese. True, they might encourage a child to nag its parents for the chocolate. But one bar does not make a child obese. Too many chocolate bars bought by parents who can’t (or won’t) say no quite probably will make a child obese, if that child does not otherwise eat a healthy diet and take enough exercise. But manufacturers of sweets and biscuits and fizzy drinks cannot be held responsible for dictating the diet and lifestyle of our children. That’s what parents are for.The fundamental truth is that children want sweets and biscuits and fizzy drinks not because they’re marketed to them using an evil ploy in the guise of a friendly bear or a superhero. Children want sweets and biscuits and fizzy drinks because they taste nice. They’d taste nice even if they came in plain brown paper. And no marketing ban in the world is going to change that. Unless you ban sweets and biscuits and fizzy drinks altogether. And who’d want to live in a world like that? The Which? people, perhaps.
Claire Beale, The Independent, August 22, 2007
B2B Portales Buys Brazilian Publisher
B2B markets in Latin America are growing rapidly. More importantly, perhaps, these markets are also becoming more integrated. Carvajal just purchased Grupo Lund adding to its large publishing holdings.
The Carvajal Organization, a Latin American multinational that operates in 18 countries, has just completed negotiations to acquire a majority shareholding in the Grupo Lund de Editoras Asociadas (Lund Publishing Group) of Brazil. The association will take place through the B2Bportales Company, which is part of the Grupo Editorial Norma, a member of the Carvajal Organization.
http://www.b2bportales.com/english/noticias.htm
Super material
There is something of the Jekyll and Hyde in current consumer perceptions of packaging materials, particularly plastics. In some people’s eyes rigid plastic makes convenient and safe packaging, while others think it is wasteful and polluting.
But it is not just in consumers’ minds that plastic has a poor reputation; some parts of the packaging industry still see it as a ‘bad’ material, even while it continues to win ground in new markets and formats.
Plastic has been successfully competing against other materials on a range of fronts, and barrier polypropylene (PP) has been a particular success story. By incorporating an ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) layer into clear PP, converters such as RPC have helped to transform the long-life fruit sector, despite some real performance disadvantages. The pack used by sector giants such as Dole is a great example of logic-defying marketing. Despite price premiums of 50% and over, compared with the longer-life tinplate alternative, use of these plastic packs has been directly credited for the recent 3-4% growth in this sector.
Vince Dean, sales and marketing manager at RPC Corby, asks: “Why would people buy a plastic jar rather than a can, when it costs more and is more difficult to process and recycle?” He might have added that the shelf-life is shorter too, since even barrier PP is unlikely to stretch to more than two years.
The answer lies in the fact that many consumers see plastic packaging as a safe and convenient format, and associate it more closely with fresh, healthy food. They like to be able to see the product through the pack without having to worry about the fragility of glass.
As health concerns continue to threaten parts of the children’s soft drinks market, Dean even sees potential for plastic-packed fruit products in the vending sector. And the same type of barrier structure already has its foot firmly in the door of the ambient protein-based salads and snacks sector.
Significant challenges
In the beverages sector, plastic is doing battle with glass and metal, the established materials for beer packaging, but cost and performance, rather than environmental concerns, are the sticking points.
Advocates of glass and metal point to the problems that PET has with light and oxygen degradation, arguing that the problem of oxygen ingress worsens as unit sizes come down. This means the small bottle sizes favoured in Western Europe will either have to have a short shelf-life or will require prohibitively expensive barrier solutions.
Naturally, no one in the industry can discount the possibility that more effective and affordable barrier solutions will be developed, but bottle and can manufacturers are not panicking just yet. John Hayes, president of Ball Packaging Europe, predicts: “Among those discriminating consumers who understand their beer, PET is unlikely to be of great significance.”
Peter Davis, director general of the British Plastics Federation, disagrees. He says the “long-awaited beer bottle revolution”, where rigid plastic replaces glass, still hasn’t happened in the UK, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. For sporting events, festivals and outdoor drinking, he says the police and waste authorities would prefer plastic to be used to bottle alcohol.
Other countries are already doing it, he says. In Denmark, Carlsberg has established a reusable beer bottle chain where customers receive credits for returning bottles to be industrially cleaned and refilled.
In many ways, retailers have followed consumers in their often violently conflicting views of plastic packaging. Adam Barnett, marketing manager at Linpac Plastics, points out one specific clash between the environment and profitability: the current publicity given to stores selling loose fruit and vegetables. “There’s always going to be a requirement for loose fruit,” he admits. “But if you choose not to package premium fruit, then it won’t stay premium for long.”
He believes the market for punnets and trays that offer protection for fresh produce will continue to grow, but using packaging and materials which are seen to be sustainable.
Like other converters of rigid plastics, Linpac has felt the need to offer biodegradable polymer options to customers. But as Barnett is quick to admit, as a recycler, the company also recognises some of the potential pitfalls with this new generation of materials. “We can supply polylactide (PLA), but our own recycling division would be seriously damaged by the emergence of PLA in the waste stream,” he explains.
Linpac’s own preference would probably be for options such as its R-Fresh range, PET that incorporates food-grade recyclate. By combining virgin polymer and post-consumer recyclate (PCR) in primary and secondary packaging, says Barnett, converters, brands and retailers can create “a true closed loop”.
Niche growth
There are other examples of growth for rigid plastics, many of them in niche rather than volume applications. For instance, a few months ago Linpac introduced its Linfreeze blended polymer range for categories, such as parts of the baked goods industry, which require blast freezing. The blend, originally developed for a UK frozen food customer, can withstand temperatures down to -40°C.
In a very different sector, Surlyn serves as a prime example of the way in which specialist plastics are transforming the cosmetics and personal care markets. This particular material offers the aesthetics of glass with none of the disadvantages. But RPC Beauté France points out that it also lends itself to several types of special effects and finishes, from multicolour co-injection moulding to overmoulding and electroplating.
However, once plastic stops being packaging and becomes waste, consumers find it harder to see it as a super-hero.
Consumer acceptance
If there is slightly less doom and gloom today about plastic packaging waste in the UK, it is down to battles being waged by the likes of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) and its supply chain partners. Separate projects for PET and HDPE recycling are well advanced, with capacity in both polymers promised for the first half of next year.
Wrap has also collected research which shows that consumers have no objection to recycled content, says plastics technical manager Paul Davidson. For instance, only a negligible proportion of consumers were concerned about PCR content in baby food packaging.
Perhaps most importantly, Wrap reports evidence that recycled content in plastics packaging is likely to have a cumulative impact on the level of participation in further recycling.
Davidson takes a longer-term view: “Glass containers have been seen as environmentally friendly because they are easily recycled. But plastics could challenge that and win.”
Measured against any criterion, whether performance-based or aesthetic, plastics continue to prove that they can challenge traditional materials. But increasingly, and importantly, in many cases sustainability is being added to that list of criteria.
CARTON-FREE CARTONS
Board-orientated purists may prefer the term ‘boxes’ to ‘cartons’, but applications for clear plastics – particularly polypropylene (PP) – in this format are increasing, largely due to a combination of improved material clarity and higher quality in print and other converting processes.
Simon Lewis, marketing director at Arjo Wiggins company Priplak, says there was little enthusiasm a decade ago for using offset litho printing on clear PP. “Even five years ago, it would have been considered a difficult substrate. But since then, the polymer itself, press technology and inks have all improved.”
Lewis says that developments with large-format presses have been particularly impressive. In fact, these materials will run on most offset presses equipped with UV drying. “Having a corona treatment option at the front end of the press will help with ink key, depending on the age of the material,” he says. “A lot of the big packaging houses are gluing PP, and corona treatment can help to prepare the surface for that, too.”
Neal Whipp, an experienced converter and consultant to the British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) carton group, believes that volumes of plastics for cartons may have increased in recent times. But he says: “A number of carton converters have found the printing stage to be the least contentious part of the process with plastics. But all of them have underestimated the issues of cutting and creasing the material.”
Applications have come in both food and non-food areas. In recent years, Tesco has been among those using a rigid, clear PP sleeve to differentiate its products in the ready-meals sector. Wines and spirits have also benefited, from French Champagne to Johnnie Walker whisky.
High-profile non-food uses of printed, clear PP cartons have included GlaxoSmithKline toothpaste brands, and others where the ability to incorporate a Euroslot has been an important consideration. A high concentration of this distinctive format is to be found, for instance, in any Marks & Spencer (M&S) underwear department.
Having made a very public commitment to sustainability, in packaging as elsewhere, M&S may have other reasons for appreciating the polymer, not least its relative lightness. “After all, for chains intent on reducing the overall weight of their packaging, being able to use up to 35% less PP than alternative polymers for a given pack can make a huge difference,” says Lewis.
In the sustainability stakes, oil-derived polymers also face competition from bioplastics. Mead Westvaco company AGI/Klearfold has its NatureSource PLA folding cartons. The format has been available for over a year.
Paul Gander, Packaging News, 01 August 2007
Is Organic food vs the environment?
Is Organic and locally-grown food really better for the environment than conventional products?
A government report tells the truth about organics.
Milk, tomatoes and chicken produced to organic standards can be more polluting than their intensively-farmed equivalents, said researchers from the Manchester Business School in a study for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
The energy needed to grow organic tomatoes is 1.9 times that of conventional methods, the study found. Organic milk requires 80 per cent more land to produce than conventional milk and creates 20 per cent more carbon dioxide, it says. The use of manure to fertilise land can lead to acidification of soil and the pollution of water courses.
Organic chickens require 25 per cent more energy to rear and produce more carbon dioxide than conventional battery or barn hens, according to the report.
However, the study points out that there are many organic foods with lower ecological impacts than conventional produce. It suggests there is no clear-cut answer as to whether an organic or a conventional trolley of goods has more or less impact.
The report adds: “Organic agriculture poses its own environmental problems in the production of some foods, either in terms of nutrient release to water or in terms of climate change burdens.
“Similarly there is little evidence that the consumption of locally sourced food products generally has a lower environmental impact than those from further afield.”
It points out, for example, that organic tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses in Britain generate 100 times more carbon dioxide per kilogram than tomatoes from unheated greenhouses in Spain.
The Soil Association said the report was “not a comprehensive analysis” and did not cover biological diversity. For example, organic farms have been shown to be better for declining farmland birds such as skylarks and partridges.
A spokesman said it recognised that in some areas, such as poultry and growing vegetables out of season, organic was less energy efficient. But that was outweighed by other factors the Defra study had not considered such as animal welfare, soil condition and water usage.
The association is unhappy with the model used for the study which, it says, amplified the amount of nitrous oxide emissions – a greenhouse gas – and increased the land area used by half.
• Illegal genetically-modified rice may still be on sale months after the Food Standards Agency said it had been withdrawn, Friends of the Earth will tell the High Court today.
A judicial review of whether the agency took adequate steps to protect consumers will hear that a strain of GM rice contaminated supplies last year.
Clare Oxborrow, of Friends of the Earth, claimed: “Instead of acting to make sure the public were not exposed to illegal GM rice, the agency sat back and waited for contaminated products to be sold and eaten.”
Source: Telegraph, by Charles Clover in February 2007
However, it’s good that people, media and suppliers talk that and in any case the organic trend will turn into a daily reality – but just for people who can afford.
Online PR II: “Recipient Relations Managers”
As mentioned in my previous post, the media relations management is a big part of PR agency’s value. A lot of PR agencies are already doing a lot of online PR and this includes also relations to multipliers and opinion leader. But what’s the difference? Most of these multiplier target audiences have their own “publication”. This includes websites, blogs, bulletin boards etc. Also, the major trend in community or social network building is affecting this business. An example from B2B: Scientists or engineer tend to build their own network or platform to communicate or rather to exchange information. The question is Where? Do they have hidden websites, No! Do they meet in Second Life? May be. Anyway, the “Recipient Relations Managers” task is to find out where they are and how PR agencies can contribute the appropriate messaging.
It will change pretty soon. Probably the big network agencies changed their internal structure and policy already.
Online PR I: Brand message support thru online placements – but how and where?
Extensive and solid media relations are an important asset of good PR agencies. Certainly, good writing skills and strategic commmunication consultancy are basis for professional work. The process is easy: there’s an idea, you sell it to the client, you write, you pitch and track it. Fine, that works for print publications. But how is that online? Is it still the same?
I don’t think so. Maybe for now, but not in the future. The major change will be that PR agencies generate their own content. Following exactly that what the whole web 2.0 thing is all about: user generated content. The usual pitch process will change into an active publishing process. In general, the placements will get shorter, around 150 – 400 words. Also, agencies have to convince editors and media to subscribe the RSS feeds. This will be certainly the easiest and fastest way to get client messages across.
Finally we will have 3 ways to get the message out: 1. create own content (Blog), 2. editor RSS and 3. the common way, that what we did and do since Gutenberg.
One thing that will also change is the so called media relations management. Usually PR professionals deal with publishers, editors, freelance writers and journalists to get the message out. Ok, sometimes they deal with associations, unions or “opinion leaders”.
… to be continued: the new media realtions manager will become a “recipient relations manager”.
