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Thoughts on Brand Strategy by Dennis Van Staalduinen

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Tag: Logo

Of skateboards & stripping poles: thoughts on the Mitsubishi City Chase brand

Last Saturday, remedy my brother Brent and I ran and rode OC Transpo buses all over Ottawa. Along the way, we (over) acted in soap opera, skateboarded, played croquet, danced around stripper poles (no nudity involved – this year), and ate really, really gross stuff. Not a normal Saturday for us or the more than 900 other participants – but all part of the fun in the Ottawa edition of the Mitsubishi City Chase urban adventure series. Which got me thinking about brands. Surprised?

My brother Brent and I still looking fresh(ish) at the beginning of the day.
My brother Brent and I still looking fresh(ish) at the beginning of the day.

logoModeled on the same idea as the “Amazing Race” reality TV show, the CityChase is positioned as a “One-day Urban Adventure Challenge”. “Chasers” (as we’re called) are given a clue sheet at the outset, then have to choose between 10 challenges or “Chasepoints” spread throughout the city. And challenges can range from whitewater paddling to rapelling down a building to eating bugs or other stuff with a high “ick” factor. Chasers can only use foot-power or public transit, and are allowed to use cellphones or smartphones with no limit on the amount of help you can get. This is the third year Brent and I have entered, and it’s a riot.

But since this is a blog about brand strategy, I’ll offer a few thoughts on CityChase branding and marketing.

Brand elements that work:

The name. “CityChase” is a great name. It’s descriptive enough to give you a strong sense of what it’s about (“Chasing” around a city), but the unusual term “chase” lends it enough character to a) force you to think about / explain / start a conversation about it, b) create a memorable impression, c) act as a strong, ownable trademark, d) create natural insider language (GO CHASERS!), and d) lends itself well to sponsor extensions – Mitsubishi here, Samsung and National Geographic overseas.

The logo: like the name, simple, strong. The arrow icon won’t win any design awards, but its placement on the right side of the wordmark, along with the small opening on the right create just enough distinctiveness to allow the organizers to use it as a repeated design element (as in the shirts above).

BBerryThe sponsors: because it appeals to young, fit urban types 25-45 years old, and because the whole day is about combining fitness, fun, and technology, there are a huge range of opportunities to highlight sponsors in a way that doesn’t seem forced or unnatural. And do I fee better and more in tune with the Mitsubishi and BlackBerry brands after spending a day with them? Yeah. I do. 

Local exposure: but even better, because the Chase sends us out into urban retail areas, small local brands are able to highlight themselves and draw new people in. Would I normally walk into a Strip Fitness studio? Not on your life. Will I tell my friends about it? You bet.

The promise: It has been summed up by organizers as “you can expect a day of adventure”. And indeed, that’s what we get year after year. For the more competetive, it’s about moving fast, mapping a route, and strategizing. For the average Chaser, it’s about getting out and pushing the boundaries – testing yourself in different ways.

Brand elements that need attention:

Web site & social media: For a brand that’s built for a high-tech savvy audience, the Web site is pretty clunky, and the Social Media efforts are getting better, but need to be better coordinated as part of the experience.chart For example, while there are 1100 members of the relatively active  MCC Facebook fan site, on Twitter, @citychase has only 215 followers. Why? Because a) they don’t follow anyone back, b) they only use it as a “mesage blast” medium, not as a conversation among co-enthusiasts, and c) they don’t use the opportunity to live tweet or hold CityChase themed TweetUps between events. 

Logistics: two years in a row, after waiting several days for the results online, my brother and I have had our ranking assigned to other people. Last year we were 11th, and this year 12th, so we’d love to send the link to friends and family (and further extend the brand!), but this looks like we didn’t finish. We’re coming back next year, but these kinds of problems make it difficult to be unqualified in our praise.

I need to be less clumsy: I think the annotated picture below says sit all.

Cell Phone FAIL

News item from last year in Philly – does a good job of explaining the Chase.



Author Dennis Van StaalduinenPosted on July 24, 2009Categories Analysis & review, Automotive Brands, Brand Names, Brand Value, Contains Video, Innovation, Logo, Marketing Materials, Message & Positioning, Social Media, Technology BrandsTags adventure race, Blackberry, brand positioning, brand strategy, Brent Van Staalduinen, Canada, City Chase, Dennis Van Staalduinen, event name, GPS, Logo, maps, Mitsubishi, no nudity, not nude, Ontario, Ottawa, product name, Social Media, stripperLeave a comment on Of skateboards & stripping poles: thoughts on the Mitsubishi City Chase brand

No, Twitter brand: what are YOU doing?

twitter-home-pageOkay, dosage confession time. As an emerging Twitter devotee, page (@denvan) I’ve been “drinking the Kool-Aid” of the Twitter brand for too long to really be objective about their brand strategy. I’m a tribe member now, viagra 100mg and I’ve learned the buzzwords, tools, and idiosyncrasies of this social media monster. But as a brand strategy geek, I also hear rumblings of trouble in the Twitterverse that I can’t ignore…

As I encounter more and more fellow “tweeps” (a word about insider language later) and have the same old “what the heck is Twitter GOOD for” conversation, the more I begin to wonder about different aspects of the Twitter brand package – are the elements holding together? Do they make sense? Could this be why we learned yesterday that Twitter’s growth is flat-lining and more than 50% of Twitter accounts are dead? Perhaps.

But let’s start with the good stuff.

What I love about Twitter Branding:

Basically, the thing I like about Twitter is the thing that may kill it in the end: it’s rough around the edges.

Twitter gained my instant affection by making absolutely NO attempt to be slick or professional – in design, messaging, or corporate positioning. The graphics are simple and inviting in a cartoonish-but-zen-elegant way that gives the site class tempered with a sense of humour. Nothing arty farty-highbrow or in-your-face revolutionary here.

Scroll down to the bottom of any twitter.com page and click on About Us and you get the feeling that this thing started in somebody’s garage in 2006, and that they’re hoping to stay there. The main login page is a study in simplicity with only 183 characters in the main body copy (note to Twitter: I could help you get this down to 140. I’m getting REALLY good at that!).

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Aw shucks. Ain’t that nice?

The whole brand package seems to promise new users a few key things: 1) small (i.e. unintimidating – easy to grasp), 2) fun (breezy tone, quick hits of cool content perhaps) 3) free (not going to take my credit card and sucker-punch me later with weirdo fees), 4) easy (get started – and hooked – fast), 5) social (geared toward social, not “serious” conversations)… and 6) disposable (geard toward a quick pay-off for a small amount of effort).

Which brings us to the potential dark side (spoiler alert: the light sabers are about to change colour!).

The potential problem(s) with Twitter Branding

The problem with sustaining this promise can be expressed in one word: Oprah. Okay, maybe two: Oprah and Ashton Kutcher. All right, three: Oprah, Ashton, and the coming of Summer patio season to the Northern Hemisphere (now THAT’s a social network!!). The first two are problems of scale, that is, reasons for rapid viral growth, while the third is one of the non-brand factors that should lead any sane person to want to get away from the computer or Blackberry (he writes at 5:01 p.m. on a gorgeous Friday evening).

The big question for the Twitter brand is this: can it scale to meet the hype?

In early 2009, Twitter went from cool-kid buzzword to mass market sensation with over 5 million additional new visitors in March – up from 4.3M in February to 9.3M in March. And the growth continued strong into April with the addition of the Great One (Oprah not Gretzky) and the 1 Millionth follower for Kutcher – with the attendant .

And the pressures are only increasing with big serious events like the election in Iran and the attacks in Mumbai, and the pundits trumpeting the game-changing nature of the medium.

And with all that hype, came… a great big collective “HUH?!?” from the new users attracted to the platform.

Because, you see, the Twitter brand is havign trouble emerging from the basement it dug for itself. Its initial brand promises are being met with the problems of massive growth:

Promises Twitter might be breaking

1. Small: sorry Twitter. MILLIONS of users. Repeat that. MILLIONS.

2. Fun: despite the breezy graphics and light tone, Twitter is not fun until you connect with at least one other active human. But for the average newbie, Twitter.com doesn’t do a very good job of helping you understand how to make that first connection (or whay
you’d want to)…

3. Free: for now, but with the weight of so much stuff comes the time cost that mid-market adopters are more likely to factor into the equation. Business users in particular are skeptical that this isn’t just another time-waster for employees, and Twitter doesn’t help itself – starting with the name “Twitter” which is incredibly catchy and viral, but also implies empty, and possibly annoying background chatter.

4. Easy: I like and compulsively use Twitter, but even I barely ever use Twitter.com. TweetDeck and other tools are absolute necessities for anyone serious about the medium. Twitter itself may be Open API-ing itself into obsolescence unless it starts taking the user experience – and more to the point – the IMPRESSION of control that a new user needs – more seriously.

5. Social: This and all the other examples on the site imply that Twitter is just for F2F (Friend-To-Friend) communications. Sample value messages are about delving into the trivial parts of people’s lives, which, as most people find pretty quickly, is not the main content that forms the bulk of Twitter traffic. I’m finding that the most successful Tweeters mix maybe 10-20% personal with maybe 60-70% subject matter expertise and useful cross references, and the rest being current events, trivia, etc. Twitter has outgrown “What are you doing” and has crossed into the realm of “Why are we doing what we’re doing?” and “What does it mean to me?”

6. Disposable: here’s the crux of it for me. By playing up “fun” “easy” and “social” aspects, Twitter’s current brand strategy is focused on “fast-twitch” brand drivers, and missing the most important aspect of the Twitter service: that it takes time, effort, and commitment to really get anything out of the medium. New users see the firehose coming at them, and it’s no surprise they’d be tempted to go elsewhere for a drink.

So how does Twitter tune its brand package to 1) help the newbies get it and get involved, 2) make the case about the serious work values the medium can fulfill, without 3) losing the core values and emotional ties that made the brand attractive in the first place?

Or is it all just a deeper level of brilliance than this poor brand geek can grasp – after all, they’ve got the millions of devoted (and not-so-devoted) users, so something must be working.

That’s a question I throw back to you dear reader. Comment away.

Author Dennis Van StaalduinenPosted on June 12, 2009Categories Analysis & review, Brand Names, Brand Value, Logo, Message & Positioning, Online brands, Positioning, Retail Brands, Service Brands, Social Media, Tag LinesTags brand management, brand strategy, branding, Consumer product brands, critique of Twitter, Internet, Logo, online, positioning, Service, Social Media, tagline, Technology, Twitter, Twitter branding social media brand audit critique tweetdeck oprah ashton kutcher2 Comments on No, Twitter brand: what are YOU doing?

Your word of the day: Crowdsourcing

Maybe I’m a bit slow, more about but I just came across the term “crowdsourcing” – the process of solving business problems using social media (not to be confused with another term I recently picked up: “FLASHMOB” – the process of creating absurd but strangely compelling YouTube videos with your friends).

The image above is from my experiment with one of the early commercial applications of the concept. 99Designs.com allows businesses to design their logo / business card / Web site by posting a prize, a creative brief, and holding an online contest.

In this case,  I’ve challenged designers to tackle a logo for the BEGtoDIFFER brand. The results are mixed, but while there are no obvious winners in the pack yet, the results are really creative and certainly better than a lot of professional designers I’ve worked with for a lot more money. But is it an ethical way to secure creative content? I have two minds about it: 1) the client mind: great! Bring it on, and 2) the agency / freelancer mind: whoa, that’s undercutting and devaluing the industry!

447_question_sheep

As if to underline the difficulty of the issue, one interesting sideline came up in the process that illustrates both the risks and some of the issues involved in this process. One entry, quite a strong one, which contained a sheep similar to the one in the graphic on this page, struck me as oddly familiar, and upon some reading, sure enough, it is very similar to the sheep icon used by a 1.5 Billion dollar British ad agency:  http://www.bartleboglehegarty.com. That’s not to say there was any plagiarism involved – far from it. It’s just to say that the onus is still on the owner of the “marque” to ensure that the final product isn’t going to get you into any trouble.

As a further cross-current, I found to my surprise – that the “research” arm of BBH, called BBH Labs  recently commissioned its own crowdsourced logo from another site called crowdspring.com. Well, can you imagine the indignation from the “serious” design community when a big firm offers *only* $1500  for a logo…

Some industry commentary:

  • http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10001606/bbh-offers-just-1500-for-new-logo-design-creatives-infuriated/
  • http://www.johnsonbanks.co.uk/thoughtfortheweek/index.php?thoughtid=447
  • http://thedenveregotist.com/article/4049/wtf-bbh-labs

Reflection from BBH Labs on their own blog:

  • http://bbh-labs.com/crowdsourcing-our-logo-the-crowd-has-spoken#more-1790
  • http://bbh-labs.com/crowdsourcing-continued

So how about you? What do you think?

I’m looking for comments on both the ethics of crowdsourcing professional services and on the logo options I’ve got in the hopper right now.

Author Dennis Van StaalduinenPosted on June 9, 2009Categories Agency Brands, Analysis & review, Brand Value, Branding Advice, Logo, Online brands, Rebranding, Social MediaTags bbh black sheep begtodiffer beg to differ, crowdsourcing design logo service crowdspring, design, Logo, outsourcing7 Comments on Your word of the day: Crowdsourcing

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