Would you want this place on your Visa bill?

Over the next weeks, Beg to Differ will be presenting some examples of brand names that are just bad – for a number of reasons. Today’s example is something we spotted over the weekend…

The Hav-A-Nap Motel

This bad brand – which, yes, also has a web site – is one that a friend pointed out to me in the Eastern part of metro Toronto, and it’s a classic. It’s one of those unintentional landmarks that everyone seems to know about (but no one will admit being a customer of).

And actually, while I usually criticize brand names that are un-helpful, this bad name is actually a customer service because it’s so bad. That is, because the name is so tone-deaf and slimy sounding, most respectable consumers will know better than to stay there.

This review from an Italian visitor on Trip Advisor pretty well  sums up the experience I’d expect to have from any motel called the “Hav A Nap”:

Sorry for my english… It was a very terrible experience… the room was very dirty, the bedsheets were full of spots (I think there were spots of previous sexual performances…), the bedcover had holes by cigarette… I left my cup of coffee in the room and when I came back I have found also mouse’s excrements… It was very very cheap, but I slept all dressed because of the disgust…

Funny, but when you don’t have enough energy to spell “HAVE” correctly, it’s not surprising that you don’t sweat little details like laundry, customer satisfaction, or human health for that matter.

Enough said.

I’d love to get more of your favourite bad brand names, so please leave them in the comments!

With an involuntary guest appearance from Chris Brogan (thanks Chris!)

In Monday’s post, I  critiqued the term “Personal Branding” which generated a fairly lively discussion – including input from the patron saint of “Personal Brand Experts” Dan Schawbel. But it got me thinking about some basic terminology I use all the time – in particular the difference between “Identity” (Andrew Mueller called me out on this one)  ”Branding” (David Sandusky thinks we should abandon the term), and “Brand” (Rob Frankel doesn’t think this word ever belongs with “personal”).

Then I got to thinking about how these things could be expressed using the Twitter universe as a metaphor.

Here's my first attempt. Does it make sense to you?

Why Chris Brogan? Well, duh…

Originally, I was going to use my own Twitter account as an example, but who am I kidding? There just aren’t enough people out there talking about me to make my own little corner of the Twittiverse a very good example.

So who could I use that has great Twitter karma, a well-known identity, is widely discussed, re-tweeted faithfully, and generally respected as a decent fellow? Why, social media rock star and überblogger  Chris Brogan of course. And if you don’t know who he is, immediately check out his blog Chrisbrogan.com, his Twitter account, and his latest book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.

It ain’t perfect, but I’m looking for help here

I know that it’s not the perfect metaphor, particularly since in corporate branding terminology, “identity” means name+logo+design standards – all of which overlap with the “branding” category above. But it’s working for me for now.

How about you? Is there a way I can make this stronger?

At last week’s Beg to DIFFER Boot Camp, we discussed the history of the word “branding” – as in the ancient practice of marking a cow with a red hot iron. But if the idea of cattle-marking seems trivial and simplistic to you, that’s only because you’re not a cowboy. So listen up cowpoke: here’s the cow-dirt on branding: it’s not about the cows.

The slide I'm talking about in the video below

Branding: lots of heat; but how much light?

The word “brand” has always taken a lot of heat. But especially in the last decade, it seems like the word has become a target for heat as much as a tool for channeling it. 

Click here to buy a copy from Amazon.com

Critic Naomi Klein in her classic book No Logo and branding industry iconoclast Jonathon Salem Baskin in his recent book Branding Only Works on Catttle are just two  examples of how the term the term “branding” has been attacked in recent years. The latter in particular poses an incendiary thesis right in the title of his book. Now, full disclosure, I’ve only just ordered a copy of the book, but from reviews (like these from The Economist or by uberblogger Chris Brogan), from the writer’s own blog Dimbulb, and from a chapter posted online I get the sense his title is just playfully singeing the brand that feeds him, but I’ll let you know after I’ve read it (please feel free to comment if you have).

Now back to the range

But as discussed in the video below, the term has never been just about the tool, or about the cow that is its involuntary recipient. It’s not even about the mechanics of applying the mark (heat brand, restrain cow, burn cow, repeat) - although those are all important nuances. 

Like all human tools, you can only understand the brand if you understand the human need that it serves. So you need to understand the context, in this case the branding system that the tool operates within.

So what’s a brand for?

Branding is about helping human beings (cowboys and ranch-owners) do three things:

1. Track down things that are relevant to them (Eg. their cows);
2. Sort them out from all the similar-looking stuff (Eg. find their cows in a mixed herd); and  
3. Maintain and enrich relationships between people (Eg. not getting shot or needing to shoot anyone else)

And guess what? Those are the same things your brand is supposed to be doing.

So think about it sherriff: are you focusing on the branding iron or the relationships it is supposed to foster?

This morning’s Twitter outage, is only one of the many problems facing brand Twittter. Back in June, early in my Twitter career (yes, the Twitterverse is turning quickly my friends) I blogged about this – No Twitter Brand, what are YOU doing? But now that I’ve had time to think about this some more (thanks for the outage Twitter!), I’ve got some more thoughts – all of which require more than 140 characters.

Aquatic superstar rising (falling?)... Just one of the great fanart images at www.failwhale.com.

Over the next week or two, I’ll deal with 3 major brand credibility problems Twitter is facing, followed by a set of solutions I’ll modestly put forward. 

The Jumping the Failwhale series: Twitter’s biggest problems

• Problem 1: Brand Promise: (in this post – see below) the free ride will have to end, and the real owners of the Twitter brand will not be pleased.
• Problem 2: Brand Character: (coming soon) Twitter feels more “Social” and less like serious “Media”. Basically, the boss ain’t buying it, and unless something changes, he may be right.
• Problem 3: Brand Personality: (coming soon)Despite the fresh, breezy cartoon-graphics, the kids aren’t twittering. Twitter is fast becoming an old people’s brand and the problem is hard-wired into the product.
• Solutions:  (coming soon) My 10 Recommendations to save Twitter.

Problem 1: Brand Promise. The free ride will end.

A Brand Promise is the implicit set of expectations a brand builds up in the mind of its customers over time. And just like a real-world promise, the owner of the promise (and indeed the brand itself) is the person to whom the promise is made: the customer.

The promise of Twitter 

Twitter users have come to value, and expect, a free, open online community accessible to all with 1) an Internet connection and 2) enough time to cultivate a Twitter brand of your own.

The problem with this is that of course, the party can’t go on like this forever. There are real world implications to the scale of Twitter’s success. Yup, I mean big crashes like this morning. But more to the point: money / revenue / filthy lucre / a basic business model. This is of course a no-brainer, because it’s a problem with all Social Media. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and a thousand other online communities and services have built their huge audiences fast on the same implicit promise.

Try it, use it forever, and pay nothing – with no ads – all of these are very attractive hooks to get people in. But having set those expectations in customers’ minds, no one should be surprised if they feel betrayed if you suddenly try to “monetize” their “eyeballs”. Oh, they’ll understand. But this isn’t about rational thought; it’s about a broken promise.

I can hear the objection: “but we never said it would be free forever”. Doesn’t matter. Your actions led them to expect it would be free forever, which in their mind is the same thing.

A summer-friendly analogy

Imagine that one day I mow my neighbour’s lawn, then laugh off any payment he might offer by saying “that’s what neighbours do”. Don’t you think it would make him happy and strengthen our neighbourly bond? Probably. As long as he didn’t suspect my motives.

Which leads me to the following week, when I tell him “I’ve decided that the price of gas being what it is, you either have to pay me a dollar to do it again, or listen to a 5 minute pitch for my business.” 

He’ll understand. He might even recognize that it’s a really good deal I’m offering. But do you think he’d be happy about it?

An example from my practice

We dealt with this issue last year while I was acting Vice President of Marketing at CoursePark.com – an online learning management network. We played around with a number of options, from totally free access (like Facebook or Twitter), to pay-per-use, or just a low-cost subscription. Our solution in the end: give users a free-forever option, but a) be very clear what the limits were, b) set clear prices on the commercial e-learning content we sold through our library, c) give them an expanded range of capabilities for free in exchange for sharing their content with the rest of CoursePark, and d) make it easy and transparent to allow them to upgrade to the “enterprise” version for larger programs / more support / more member controls.

The bottom line

Be careful what you promise (even implicitly); your customers will hold you too it.
If you’re building a business, people are cool with that – if they know your motives in advance.
If you have built expectations that you can’t sustain, don’t assume that you can change the rules at will. You will pay for it.

Check it out! Microsoft with an advertisement that I might actually WANT to watch?! Sounds crazy, no? Sure, it doesn’t have Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates (not sure what was going on there) but it is current, edgy, and even goes so far as to poke fun at the ‘Soft! Whether you’re a Microsoft junkie, or just a casual Word user, this ad is for you.

BUT – this drifts so far from Microsoft’s current lineup that I wonder if it is able to add equity to the brand, or whether it confuses an already crowded space. The ad DIFFERS for sure – it differs greatly from the competition, but also from Microsoft’s other advertising campaigns.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? Is Microsoft turning over a new leaf? Increasing the brand’s reach and value? Will it remain online, or will Microsoft take the campaign to cable TV as well? Will it matter?

http://www.office2010themovie.com/

First off, happy Canada Day to everyone!  And to Timmies, welcome back!

There couldn’t be a more fitting time for such an iconic Canadian brand to return to its roots in the Great White North.  Sure, you’ve stated that your move back to Canada is for tax reasons alone, but I know the real reason, Tim.  You missed us!  You’ve always been Canadian.  Never truly left.  Three years you spent in your surrogate home of Delaware, and how awfully lonely they must have been.  No one knew your name, and I bet they don’t even play hockey on the street or order double-doubles.

I know that expansion is a necessary evil, and there are so many Americans that have never tasted your wonderfully consistent blend of coffee and doughnuts (excuse me – donuts).  I know that Times Square is slightly flashier than Hamilton or Oakville, and I get what you’re trying to do down there.  I just ask that as you expand, please remember your roots, and don’t leave us again.  Once you’ve surpassed Starbucks and are taking on McDonalds head-to-head, continue to tell the world: “We’re Canadian! We make doughnuts and we support Timbits minor sports!”

I hope that a slight tax break or a convenient partnership will not cause you to jump ship in the future.  I hope that Tim Hortons is here to stay.

So, this Canada Day, enjoy your double-double with pride.  Tim Hortons in coming home.

The Globe and Mail: http://bit.ly/8pe94
The National Post: http://bit.ly/P4G3o
Reuters: http://bit.ly/Pvs7Q
Forbes: http://bit.ly/i6PnO
Bloomberg: http://bit.ly/14lDE3

It’s very seldom I come across a new tool on the Web that jumps straight to the top of my bookmark lists, but it happened this morning. I got a tip from Charles Hodgson’s latest post on podicitonary.com on a funky new site called Wordnik.com that had my fast-twitch bookmarking reflexes firing almost instantly.

How does it DIFFER?

What’s so impressive, and how is it better than – or at least different from – any of the excellent reference tools out there? UrbanDictionary.com for example has become an indispensible reference for new slang and jargon. Don’t know what a “beauty booger” is? You’re in luck!

But in particular, how does wordnik compare to the granddaddy of them all: Dictionary.com? I have to admit that as a long-time word nerd (Scrabble, reading the OED for fun, the whole works) and professional brand namer, I’m a big fan of Dictionary.com. It has evolved over the past few years from providing a single set of standard dictionary definitions to providing a huge laundry list of definitions from a cross section different dictionaries, including specialized financial and medical searches, as well as etymology, suggested related searches, and cross references to encyclopedia and thesauri.

Oh and advertising. Loads and loads of advertising. Just scroll down through this definition of the word “brand” to see how exhaustive and exhausting this approach can become. So what could be missing? Well, the simplicity and focus of the early days for one. But more importantly, with this “stream of noise” approach, what gets lost is context – a sense of how the word works in the real world.

That’s where Wordnik comes in.

Screenshot of the wordnik results I got for the word "brand"

Check out this search on the word “brand” and compare it to the Dictionary.com approach. The first thing you’ll notice is the clean layout, with everything in clearly marked containers. You’ll also see that the first item is not the definition, but examples of the word in the context of an actual sentence. And quite often from unconventional sources like Twitter.

Wordnik claims to have a growing database of more than 130 million examples to go with its 1.7 million words. This actually gets closer to one intent of the first, and still one of the easiest to read dictionaries, Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language which promises: “a faithful record of the language people used”.

Check out the Wordnik approach to the phrase “beauty booger” – which doesn’t have a formal definition, and which sends Dictionary.com into a fishtail. But which Wordnik allows you to piece together from Twitter usage.

Or try Wordnik for the word fishtail. You’ll see that they also search Flickr tags, and a quick scan shows me that the term “fishtail” can refer to a kind of braided ponytail, something motorcycle-related, and the name of a peak in Nepal – none of which appear at Dictionary.com.

Where Wordnik needs work.

Okay, it ain’t perfect. That’s why they’ve stamped “Beta” all over it – or as they put it in their welcome e-mail “Because we are still in beta, there are almost certainly hiccups and other infelicities.”  In particular, the dictionary definitions themselve quite often fall flat in capturing the whole range of senses for a word.

For example, when you search “branding” the only definition that comes up is “the act of stigmatizing” – which totally misses the sense of the term that I’ve built my business on. On the plus side, there is a bit of Wiki-ness to the Wordnik site, so even if I wasn’t able to add a definition myself, I was able to submit the following comment:

What’s missing here is the modern business sense of branding, which I define as “the process of organizing a company’s products, messages, and corporate identity to help consumers understand who they are and what they do.”

Will this help? Hard to say. It will depend on whether a real human on the other side sees it and does soemthing about it (which is going to be a lot harder when more than 23 people have looked up the word). I’d love to see an open wiki environment moderated by fellow wordgeeks, but that requires a critical mass of users to filter out the type of self-serving editing that I’d love to do on the “branding” entry.

A quick word on the name and logo

Very quick actually: great. Nicely understated on both. It will be interesting to see if the noun-weighted name ever becomes a verb like “Google” – as in “ Wait a moment while I Wordnik that”. Or to use the Twitter / Tweet model: “let me Wordneek that.” Or perhaps I overstretch my point (for the first time ever).

So to sum up: Wordnik is cool for word nerds, and very useful for us in our branding work. With some more tuning and opening the door to deeper user contributions, it could become a killer app for everyone else too.

Signage and store design nicely blend warm colours with very contemporary elements. The stores fit equally well into old stone heritage buildings or brand new condo buildings (as here).

Coffeeshop manager Mia Eriksson and Bridgehead chain owner and my local brand hero Tracey Clarke (yes that's a box of subway tiles she's slogging).

1. 1. Great product consistently delivered - yes it’s fairly traded, organic, and shade grown, but Bridgehead puts great care into the quality, variety, and freshness of the product. The rest of my top ten list would matter not a bit if the beverages, treats, and lunch items weren’t top notch. They are.

Oh, and on the innovation front, BH managed to scoop Starbucks on the custom coffee front. Just as the Seattle mega-java purveyors were buying the Clover company  BH was able to get a small number of the uber sexy Clover Machines before Starbucks stopped selling to cometitors.As a result, Ottawa coffee lovers will get to taste Clover coffee years before Starbucks ever brings the technology to its Canadian stores.  Wired.com reviews the Clover. 

2. Great cause(s) – Tracey Clarke got into the coffee business after visiting Central America in the 80′s and realizing that the local people were producing incredible coffee, but they couldn’t get any of it because of a) export monopolies, b) prohibitive prices, and c) shamefully low prices for their beans. She and a partner bought the original Bridgehead brand from a well-meaning charity that was way over its head trying to run even one  retail store, then turned it around, and in a few short years has become the quality coffee brand in Ottawa.

3. Local brand – I’m an Ottawa boy. They are an Ottawa-based chain; the money stays in town. All good.

4. Committed to walkable urban neighbourhoods – despite the obvious pull from suburban areas, there are no drive-thru windows at any Bridgehead (yet). The chain has continued to place its new locations in traditional main-street areas throughout Ottawa, and as a founder of the Welling ton West BIA, I can tell you they have been very supportive and active in street-level retail initatives and issues.

5. Really nice people – the founders are level-headed, approachable folks, and their approach has attracted strong staff in the stores. Employees tend to be older, better educated, and “hipper” than in the other shops around town.

Here's me at the new Bridgehead withthe first cup of coffee served to an outsider and the all-important first Internet ticket.

6. Great spaces - real attention to the usability of space. Nice blend of lounging, working, and conversation spaces, Bridgehead has been refining the blend with each new store they build, creating a noticeably more “human” place than the average Starbucks or Second Cup.

7. Family friendly – because of the demographics of many of their host neighbourhoods (and fact that most of  the management have young children), they’ve proven much more open to non-coffee drinkers in the stroller set, plus toddlers and school-aged children. Creates a lot of noise at times, but on the weekends, my kids love to visit.

8. Business-friendly – after some wrestling over the prevalence of laptop “campers” in some early stores, Bridgehead has struck a nice balance between open areas and places to plug in, and free wireless with a one-hour limit. 

9. Strong retail branding – their online and social-networking presence could use some definite work, but in terms of creating a brand experience outside and inside their stores, they are hard to beat. This is due to the active involvement of the founders in every aspect of store design, so it will inevitably become increasingly challenging to sustain as they grow further without more formal “policy” work. But the fundamentals are very strong.

10. NO ADVERTISING(!) – this may sound strange on a “branding” blog, but remember this site is about brand strategy, not advertising, so I don’t make my money from media buys or column inches purchased. Bridgehead has managed to accomplish all of the above without spending a penny on traditional advertising. Again, this may have to change as they grow, but by reaching out through social-justice oriented circles, supporting like-minded causes, lots of “in-kind” community contributions, and to reitierate, being incredibly smart about their product and retail fundamentals,  they have succeeded by DIFFERING not by TELLING people they were different.