Got a nice surprise in the mail today: The Super-Incredible Activity Book For Creatives from Veer. If you’re not familar with Veer, they are a website that sells fonts, stock photos and other resources for creatives. First off, it’s not everyday you get a nice, unsolicited direct mail piece like this. Secondly, it’s a pretty sweet little book filled with random puzzle and mind games with a lot of good design and great typography. My favorite game has to be “bah bah black sheep” which is a list of random phrases you try to get your relatives to say out loud at a family gathering. Anything from “How was the drive?” to “Have you seen my teeth?” Classic!

Anyway, this is a great direct marketing piece targeted to creatives. As I already stated, it’s unique and not something you’d expect in your mailbox, so more reason to open it up. Secondly, it engages the audience; I’ve already played a couple games in there. Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, is that it sells Veers products without directly selling. Wait…what? Let me expand a bit. The booklet is filled with photos, fonts, illustrations, etc that Veer sells. It’s basically a catalog, letting the reader see what they have, how to use the creative assets and on top of that giving out a little creative inspiration. If you know any creatives, you know we LOVE inspiration!

Next time your thinking about a marketing piece, use the The Super-Incredible Activity Book For Creatives as inspiration try and think of different, creative ways to engage your target audience,

Oh, and P.S. Thanks Veer!

DISH Network has been in what seems like a never-ending battle, playing third fiddle to DirectTV and big cable providers like Comcast (Xfinity), Cox and Time Warner. Their growth over the last few years has been somewhat impressive and they’ve seen marginal success playing the pricing game in their past campaigns. However, for the most part they have played the same game as DirectTV and Comcast rather plan plowing their own road, attempting to boast number of HD channels or sports packages. Although they have offered cheaper service and a progressive HD service, DISH’s brand hasn’t outgrown their underdog status.

DISH is seemly trying to change this fact by taking a different angle in their latest “Let’s Watch TV” campaign, going for a transparent, down-to-Earth strategy. Their new TV ad campaign features DISH CEO & Founder Charlie Ergen reminiscing on the company’s humble beginnings inviting the viewer to “watch some TV” with him. It further drives this theme with a picture of a younger Ergen delivering “his first dish” himself on a trailer hitched to a motorcycle. Remember back when satellite dishes were huge?

Although this isn’t a necessarily groundbreaking strategy in general, for cable/satellite providers this isn’t exactly a common tactic either. Ultimately, they need to propel their brand positioning from an alternative for frustrated DirectTV and cable users to one of being the first choice over their competition. With their competition still trying to bigger, better and flashier than each other, DISH’s new campaign could have more customers truly “watching TV with them” in the near future.

PROJECT: Web Banners & Email
CLIENT: YoloDeals.com
DESCRIPTION: YoloDeals is an website that offers a daily discount on a local product or service and donates a portion of the sales to selected charities. Yolo’s brand was designed to promote a fun, colorful and casual company who is out to do good and they needed to utilize and build that brand equity within future projects. b.todd designed a series of web banners to be used for an affiliate marketing campaign. We also helped YoloDeals streamline their email marketing deployment which they use to send out the “Daily Deal” and cleaned up the layout and design of their mail template.

Affiliate Web Banners

YoloDeals HTML Email Template

PROJECT: Web Design- WordPress CMS
CLIENT: Aqueous Solutions
DESCRIPTION: We assisted AQ in further developing their brand by redesigning their website based on their updated brand identity. They wanted a minimalist style site with slight splashes of color and utilizing their vast library of photographs from AQ’s work in South East Asia. Based on their current direction and focus on research and field work, AQ desried a site that was visually appealing and communicated their story and principles, but did not require a lot of maintenance or updating. However they wanted a good back-bone in case future plans required expansion of the site. We decided on implementing WordPress on the back end for functionality and ease of maintenance for AQ.

aqsolutions.org Home Page

Project Subpage

PROJECT: Brand Identity Design
CLIENT: Havana Nights
DESCRIPTION: Havana Nights is a Cuban-themed party that is being put on to benefit the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center. They needed a logo for the event that embodied classic Cuban feel with a modern contemporary edge to target both young adults as well as high-net-worth philanthropists. The mark combines a classic symbol of Cuban lifestyle, a fedora, and colorization inspired by Cuban artwork with a nightlife/club feel.

Brands can be funny things sometimes. Companies will spend hours upon hours along with a small fortune to develop, strategize and promote their ideal vision, yet when it comes down to the true brand perception, it is the consumer who gets the final say. As a company, you have the power to lay the groundwork for you brand and guide the consumer down the path that you see as ideal. Companies can preach certain values, choose who they market to, dictate store environments and determine product usage, yet they are always at the mercy of the consumer and whether or not they buy into that brand that is presented to them. When the company and consumer on the same page, it can be bliss. When they are not, it can be fatal.

Sometimes when a company’s branding efforts don’t match up to their brand equity, it is predominantly the organizations fault, whether it is poor customer service, inferior product performance or even an insider trading scandal. Other times an organization has very little control over their brand equity, like if a toxic celebrity personality endorses a product (Lindsay Lohan + Fashion Designers). Or maybe, just maybe a former NFL star wanted for murder chooses to run from the police in a vehicle you make (OJ + Ford). Occasionally, brands experience some quirky association that is neither good nor bad, but connects the brand to some other thought or emotion nonetheless (Diet Coke + Mentos fountains).

The perpetual challenge for companies and brand strategists is identifying the brand equity associated to a company, determining the effects put on the brand, and taking action. Today we are going to look at three recent examples of an organization going through this process and embracing their brand equity (whether it is positive, negative or neutral).

Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s is known for quite a few things, namely fast deliver and terrible pizza (I am partial to their thin crust though). I know this, you know this and now it is apparent that Domino’s definitely knows this. Why is it apparent? Because Domino’s. Says. It. Right. In. Their. Commercials. This may seem like corporate suicide to most (the jury is still out on this one), but what I see and what Domino’s sees is a strategy of honesty, transparency and improvement. They’ve identified a huge part of their brand equity…bad pizza, determined the effect…umm, it’s negative, and took action by changing their principles and approach to pizza making to deliver a better product.

Cornell Law School

Because of Cornell’s history and prestige, people have many differing views of the institution and it’s students. Some are very good, while others are very bad. The Office’s Andy Bernard seems to embody many of the negative and annoying traits that correspond to the Ithaca, NY school whether that is The Nard-Dog’s cheesy personality, pastel wardrobe or his ability to find a way of mentioning Cornell in almost every conversation.

In an effort to show their lighter-side and possibly shed some of the pretentious and serious attitude of Cornell, their law school decided to embrace the Nard-Dog within their marketing campaign by featuring Ed Helms in character representing the school in his usually way. Although there was some student backlash, the tactic has proven to be a hit with the Cornell community.

Volkswagen

We have all played Slug Bug. Most times we were unaware that we were playing until our arm went instantly numb and your friend is screaming “RED ONE!!!” in your ear. You then anxiously and attentively wait for next Bug to drive by so you can retaliate, which of course never comes. Such is life and such is Slug Bug, an unforgiving game.

Now, VW has had nothing to do with the invention of the game, other than selling the VW Bug. No, the game was surely invented by bored children forced on 8 hour long road trips by their parents in the dark days before Walkman’s, iPods and SUV’s with DVD consoles. Nonetheless, Slug Bug was become strongly associated with the VW brand, although not really in a directly positive or negative way.

I think it is a great tactic because it targets an established brand experience in a target audience outside of just VW owners. You see, in order for most companies to successfully play on emotions and memories of a product, they need consumers with direct product usage. However, in this specific instance, VW has identified a huge group of consumers who have had that direct brand experience but may or may not have actually bought or driven a VW car. The question is, can this campaign turn the experience of playing slug bug and the association with the brand into new car purchases?

(Nard-Dog article via @brianjelkins)

PROJECT: Brand Identity Design
CLIENT: Beecher Development Services
DESCRIPTION:Beecher Development Services is a new company that offers owner representation services, project management, construction management and sustainable design consultation. They wanted their new identity to be simple and clean, yet be very geometric in design. BDS offered the challenge to us to try and design a logo and identity within these guidelines while also incorporating the golden ratio. The logo mark was built using a true perspective grid and a geometric typeface was chosen to compliment the mark. We then combined the two pieces to be golden ration proportionate.

Every so often, a designer accidentally (or vengefully) designs a logo that is maybe a little too phallic, and the client doesn’t pay enough attention or care to notice that their brand new logo depicts a man’s naughty bits. Unfortunately for these companies, their customers notice, oh do they notice.

The London Sperm Bank happened to end up with a brand new phallic logo themselves, however, this one was on purpose….for obvious reasons. Seems like quite a clever branding strategy to attract younger male clients, we’ll see how the plan pans out for them.

(article via The Drum and @LogoDesignLove)

PROJECT: Brand Identity Design
CLIENT: Clear Stream Fulfillment
DESCRIPTION: Clear Stream is a new fulfillment and warehousing company who needed to develop a strong identity for their company launch. They see themselves as a versatile company and wanted a logo that was fluid and matched their new name and their versatility.

Logo in Grayscale

Logo in B&W

Full Color