The great brain freeze: the perils of too much ice cream… or choice

This happens to me a few times every week: I’m standing at a store or restaurant, this web getting customer service by phone, information pills or buying something online, and suddenly I’m faced with a dazzling, badly organized array of choices like this menu board at an Ottawa area Dairy Queen Brazier (no comment on that name for today). And how does it feel? Well, imagine shoving a whole Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard down your throat all at once…

The THARN Effect: for me, this DQ board was a Brain-Buster Parfait
The THARN Effect: for me, this DQ board was a Brain-Buster Parfait

Basic brain freeze

In the video below from the last Beg to Differ Brand Strategy Boot Camp, I describe what happened when I was faced with this menu board.

Basically, I had walked through the door having already made a number of choices: first I’d chosen between a dozen different food establishments in that neighbourhood; then I’d to choose to ignore my guilt about going with fast food at all; then I chose between ice cream – the product I normally associate with Dairy Queen – and hot food; and finally I had to choose whether to wait when I saw a significant lunch-rush line at the counter.

So by the time I got to the counter, after passing up several opportunities to walk away, you’d think DQ would try to make my life easier. But no, once I got inside the store, I faced a wall of giant posters with exclamation marks and starbursts all over them, and the menu board above that utterly failed to line up my choices in a clear way, filled with cleverly-named products that were all yelling, dancing, and fighting for my attention like a room-full of sugar-buzzed preschoolers whose Ritalin had run out.

Choice: the hidden “THARN”

Richard Adams, in his classic novel Watership Down, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice:

THARN: (adj) the helpless, catatonic state a rabbit enters when it is caught in the headlights of a car.

Humans react the same way when you throw too many choices at them: they go “tharn”. Sounds a lot like the headache most people get when they swallow too much ice cream doesn’t it? Like ice cream, small, measured bites are a heavenly experience; too much too fast is physically painful.

But bright headlights & ice cream sundaes are good aren’t they?

Now, you may say, “but that’s just effective consumer marketing”, and perhaps the marketing sages at DQ know something I don’t about what sells sandwiches. Plus, as a 40-year old male, I suspect I’m not at the heart of their target demographic.

I also don’t want to imply that choice is bad, nor is it a bad thing to get your customers to slow down a bit and pay more attention to you while you have their attention.
But remember all the other choices they had to make to get to your “counter”: it’s a delicate balance between deepening their understanding by showing them more and overwhelming them with too much choice.

So ask yourself:

  • 1) Are you helping customers quickly scan their options by organizing clear “decision trees” of plainly labelled and named options?
  • 2) Are you making them feel confident about your brand – that is, their their end-to-end experience of it , and not just the individual sandwich they buy?
  • 3) Are your marketing tactics really deepening their understanding, or just adding to the wall of noise they already face and defeating the point of marketing (to help people decide to buy your products)?
  • 4) Are you managing your whole brand including your product portfolio, your decision-making interfaces, and your customer service to remove THARN moments or are you just turning on the high beams and shoving the ice cream down their throats?

The choice is yours. Well, actually, it’s theirs. And that’s the real point isn’t it?

Tag lines: if they don’t help people, there’s no point

When I was in Korea a few years back, adiposity I was struck that even in cities where very few people spoke English, find “upscale” stores always had an English tagline under an English name. But the words didn’t seem to matter: most were incomprehensible, cialis 40mg vague, or with uninteded double entendres (as below). Weirdly, these businesses seemed to have taglines simply for the sake of filling space under their name with letters, not because anyone would get information from them. You know what’s even weirder? It happens here too.

Fitting and Feeling - w
For this Korean tag line, you can at least tell what they were going for. But are they really offering both those services?

A global plague:

Lest we seem to be picking on obscure stores in non-English speaking countries, a couple of weeks ago, we pointed out this tagline from a local real estate agent – and we could have chosen many more from that industry alone.

And size of company doesn’t seem to matter. Check out this bit of tagline vapidity from a major international brand – spotted in July 2009. “Sychronizing the world of commerce” is actually less meaningful than “Fitting & Feeling” – and I imagine UPS has a few more people working on their materials than Teman.

ups-truck-slogan
Another space-filler tagline - UPS fails to deliver.

Say something nice… or say nothing at all

KR - KY - Good Feel
Another uncomfortable tagline from a Korean store - but it just looks right to have one doesn't it?

Or rather, just say something useful.
Like every other aspect of your brand, a tag line is supposed to be a tool to help people understand something about your brand – some aspect of your service that will help them make a purchase decision in your favour.

A good tag line needs to inform me or help me differentiate you from your competitors; maybe it will make a leadership claim or offer me a guarantee; at the very least it should give me a clever “hook” to remenber you by; otherwise it’s just filling a space.

Here’s a secret that should never have to be spoken: a tag line isn’t a design element. It’s actually a set of words that happen to be occupying  prime real estate on your sign, page, or Web site. So make sure they “pay their rent” by actually doing useful things.

At Brandvelope, we have a whole set of tools to help clients develop really useful tag lines. But without getting too deeply  into that topic in this post, just remember that at the very least, make sure it’s helping somebody.
Tomorrow: 25 useless taglines from brands that should know better.

Announcing: Ottawa Brand Strategy Boot Camp – August 27

Registration has just opened for the August edition of our successful Beg to DIFFER Brand Strategy Boot Camp – brought to you by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) and Brandvelope Consulting.

Wide angle - brighter
Dennis fields questions at the last OCRI Beg to DIFFER Brand Strategy Bootcamp in May 2009.

generic Helvetica, information pills sans-serif; FONT-SIZE: +3″>Register here at the OCRI Web site.

This  boot camp is for all managers and executives with marketing, PR, or communication responsibility–whether in technology, government, not-for-profit, or other industries.  Basically, if you manage a brand and want to learn how to manage it for maximum connection and value (for your customers and for yourself) this boot camp is for you.

Date:

Thursday August 27, 2009

Location:

Nepean Sailing Club 3259 Carling Avenue

Two Options:

OPTION 1: Half-Day Bootcamp – morning only

  • 8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. – Registration and Coffee
  • 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Seminar 

OPTION 2: Full-Day Bootcamp

  • Morning seminar (as above), plus:
  • 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch
  • 1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Hands-on Workshop

Why you should attend:

Reason 1: morning session

Dennis at front -square
Morning Session provides theory, practical case studies, & tips

This seminar provides a great overview of three important topic areas for all Brand Managers:

  • What is a brand, and why is it important? You’re being branded one way or the other; we’ll help you take control.
  • The building blocks of brands. How to analyze, develop, and leverage the different facets of corporate strategy to ensure that your brands are making the right promises, and following through.
  • Brand management. How to use the brand elements and marketing tools at your disposal to manage your image in the minds of consumers. How to be a brand stickler without being seen as a “brand cop”. How to get your colleagues to live the brand.
  • Reason 2: afternoon workshop (only for full-day participants)

    Interaction
    Afternoon workshop (available only to full-day bootcampers) is more interactive, and involves hands-on critique of your brand.

    In this smaller-group setting, you’ll get a chance to apply the theory from the morning to your brand and get help from other participants and the workshop leaders.  The workshop will allow you to do a point-by-point inspection all the aspects of your brand. But note that the afternoon is for active participants only; be ready to give and take constructive feedback.

    Reason 3: Take-aways

    All participants will receive 1) Beg to DIFFER Brand Strategy Workbook  plus, full-day participants will also get 2) a personalized assesment of your brand strengths and challenges.

    Reason 4: Beautiful setting

    Nepean Sailing club is at 3259 Carling Avenue, just West of Andrew Haydon Park – only a short drive from downtown and Kanata. This venue offers stunning scenery and a relaxed atmosphere – we took the photo below from just outside the conference room. It’s the perfect place to spend a late August day gearing your brand up for the fall. Google Map here.

    Back deck
    Boot Camp will be held at the beautiful Nepean Sailing Club - 3259 Carling Avenue on Lac Deschênes near Andrew Haydon Park

    Reason 5: don’t take our word for it

    “I thoroughly enjoyed the day and want to thank you and your colleagues for your efforts. I believe this seminar is a definite requirement in the Ottawa area and you have already put in place many of the cornerstones to build on to make this a truly awesome and interactive event for new and seasoned brand management professionals.”

    Dan Chaput
    Director, Marketing Communications
    March Networks

    Register here at the OCRI Web site.

    NOMO lie number 2: all acronyms are bad

    (Part 3 of a 4-part NOMO series about abbreviated brand names) Right, more about so this week we’ve dealt with nomonyms, order our term for any unhelpful abbreviated names, tadalafil initialisms like IBM, and whether they can be a brand at all. And later we’ll deal with the 25 worst acronyms of all time. But first: acronyms. And here’s my lie about them: all acronyms are bad.

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    The happy couple in the merger of Russia's Gazprom and Nigeria's NNPC: the awkward new name "NIGAZ" (pronounced "NIGH-gaz" - no really)

    So yeah. It was a lie: not all acronyms are bad.M

    But just as initialisms are not a good choice for the vast majority of products and companies, acronyms are very difficult to do well, and are fraught with hidden perils – as the well-meaning folks in the picture above thought when they chose their acronym – based name, or the example we commented on last month: the SciFi channel, who thought Syfy would make a spiffy (not “siffy”) name for their channel rebrand.

    What is a (real) acronym?

    But lets be clear what an acronym actually is. The word is used as a blanket term for all abbreviations – as in this Wikipedia post, which starts off making the distinction between acronym and initialism, but then ends up lumping them together. A true acronym has to meet three tests :

    • a. It must be the abbreviation of a series of words, which
    • b. creates an actual word that people can realistically use in everyday conversation, and
    • c. the new word must stick — that is it must actually be used by people as a proxy for the longer phrase.

    Meeting criteria a. is really, really easy. Anyone can take a bunch of letters and throw them together into a sequence. But if the combination is “YTJNE” it’s not an acronym, it’s an initialism.

    Which brings us to criteria b. This one seems easy, but is actually devilishly difficult in practice. And criteria c. is the hardest of all, since this involves actually convincing people to use the name you create – and preferably without rolling their eyes or laughing aloud.

    Why it’s so hard

    It’s like trying to give yourself a nickname. In my early brand-geek days (when I was 8), I tried to get my friends to call me “Tater” (don’t ask). But of course it didn’t work. Why? because it was my idea of what would be cool, not other people’s idea of what FIT me.

    Because essentially that’s what an acronym is – a nickname.  Think about how we call Coca-Cola “Coke”. We know the “official” version, but saying “Coke” feels more familar, more friendly. A good nickname is a proxy; a good acronym is a short, catchy version of a longer name that people are aware of, but if the right handle comes along, they’ll use it.

    The secret to good acronyms

    So here’s the key: a successful acronym has to be so simple, so elegant, so natural, that it feels like it was you customer’s idea all along. Essentially, it has to be a useful tool to help people notice, remember, and refer to you. Oh, wait, that’s our definition for a brand!

    • Successful acronyms like “laser”,”NASA”, “Benelux”, and “UNICEF” are easy to say, easy to remember, and natural to use. When this is the case, the acronym actually supercedes the full name in the customer’s mind. I was an adult before I learned that UNICEF was anything but a strong stand-alone brand name. Quick: what does “scuba” stand for? Most people don’t even realize that it’s an acronym for “self contained underwater breathing apparatus”. That’s how natural a good acronym should be.
    • Unsuccessful acronyms are either unwieldy (UNRWA – pronounced “un-rah”), unpleasant to say (GATT), or just too long (PUMCODOXPURSACOMLOPOLAR – Pulse Modulated Coherent Doppler-Effect X-Band Pulse-Repetition Synthetic-Array Pulse Compression Side Lobe Planar Array).
    • Really awful acronyms: At their worst, acronyms are so laughably bad they make news on their own – ususally because the combination of letters forms a word that is just too much of a stretch. But we’re reserving those for another post.

    The whole NOMO series: