And then there was Alpha

Big day today as we open the gates of Brand Capital.

For now it’s only a tiny gap for a handful of Alpha testers with whom we plan to iron out the major bugs and nuances before migrating to Beta phase. Still a massive effort and a great milestone.

In this release we have put all our time and focus into the signup, upload and sharing features. It should only take a few minutes to create and configure your brand toolkit online and start sharing with employees and agencies alike.

We’re gathering feedback using Get Satisfaction and already have this wonderful praise in from the rock star CEO of Clara.

Great Tool!

This is an awesome Web App – I look forward to using it with my Team

Gunnar Holmsteinn CEO Clara

If you are interested in participating in the early testing, please sign up now as we’ll be extending the invitations during the next couple of weeks.

The business plan

As we might have mentioned we are currently developing 2 web applications and for the last few weeks we have been mastering the business plan. It was always there but now it is as close to perfect as it is going to get. It can be really frustrating writing a business plan; basically you sit in front of your computer for days brainstorming clever ways to make your idea look brilliant. But an idea is only a fraction of the process of making a company a successful one, the execution is 99% of the whole process.

Last night I started reading a book that a fellow entrepreneur lent to me called “Founders at work” it is about founders of startups such as 37 signals, Hotmail and many more. The first chapter is about how PayPal became successful and eventually was acquired by eBay for 1.5 billion dollars. The initial idea was making a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company (whatever that is). But soon after they got investment from Nokia Ventures, they changed their business model completely. Max Levchin PayPal’s co-founder claims that the main reason the investor didn’t freak out was because they belived in the team and saw that it was obvious that they were able to adapt to different circumstances.

What I take from the PayPal story is that innovation isn’t only one idea that you develop and hope that will become a success. It is series of innovative ideas that might sculpt your idea into a successful business. So even if our business looks solid according to the plan, I am keeping the option open that in the near future we might change it completely.

Marc Benioff, 1999: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?”

Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, posted an article on Techcrunch today titled “The Facebook Imperative“. In it he writes about what drove him to found Salesforce.com:

I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?”

More than a decade after Benioff asked himself this question, it is still timely. Why is so much enterprise software ugly and difficult to use?

Benioff had a point and Salesforce.com has been a firebrand for Software as a Service since 1999 – and still is.

Benioff’s phrase sounds like a mission statement for Brand Capital: Software that makes Brand Asset Management as easy and painless to use as Amazon.com.

Branding by association

The software company 37signals got a bit of flack recently regarding how they communicate with security experts about their products.

This brought our attention to one thing they are doing very well. Below is a screenshot of their security page:

The message doesn’t get much clearer: Adidas, Kelllogs and Sun trust us, so can you.

It’s a nice example of “association branding”, i.e. conveying trustworthyness by associating your own brand with brands people are already familiar with.

As soon as Barack Obama starts using Brand Capital, we will certainly make sure that as many as people as possible will find out.

Unorthodox marketing! The Canary Islands invade Reykjavik

Public relations are an art. An art I have been a fan of for a while. But good PR takes a lot of creative work and thinking outside the box. A year ago one of the most brilliant campaigns ever was launched titled “the best job in the world”. This is what the advertising agency Sapient Nitro had to say about the campaign:

“Tourism Queensland asked us to launch a new brand, the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef to Global Experience Seekers across eight key international markets. We drove people to an engaging website, initially through online recruitment listings and display ads. We gathered user-generated content and supported the interactive campaign with a presence on social networking sites.”

Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t want the best job in the world? The job description basically stated that you would be having lots of fun and doing all sorts of activity for 6 months, living in a dream house and all you had to do was clean your pool, feed fishes and have a weekly blog. Understandably this started spreading all over the social media and in the end most of the major media in almost every country in the world covered it! I even thought about applying, but I didn’t have a video camera. But I must say, I looked at few of the videos and the guy who won isn’t as charismatic I would have thought. Somebody might lose their job! check out his website here.

Now the Canary Islands are launching a campaign. Basically 100 Canarian residents between 18 and 35 were chosen to represent the islands as ambassadors. The reason I am writing about this is because these ambassadors are in Iceland at the moment and are basically going up and down our main street and handing out flyers to annoyed pedestrians, inviting them to an interview, and a party that was yesterday, that might get them a free trip to the islands. Online ads have been running for almost a week and everybody is aware of the visit. I hope these “ambassadors” will get to enjoy our country this weekend, because the last few days they haven’t been up to much. I like the gesture that they are giving away a free trip to the Canary Islands, but I think there might be a more refined way to use the ambassadors.

In their defense their target group is young people, but bear in mind that the current visitors of the Canary Islands are the older than 50 (at least in Iceland). And if they plan to change the islands in to an oasis for drunken Europeans their key demographic might evacuate the islands. But on the positive side, every media, web, television, radio etc. have covered the visit. So if the campaign fails, they can always think of the fact that at least they are raising brand awareness.

The browser’s user-agent as a brand

When the Mozilla foundation bought a two-page advertisement in The New York Times in 2004 for its rising star, the Firefox web browser, popularity was the message they chose to emphasize:

Find out what more than 10 million users from around the world already know: there is an alternative!

After authenticity one of the most effective messages a brand can send is popularity. When choosing between two restaurants, one empty and one crowded, all other things being equal most people choose the crowded restaurant.

One of the oldest web browsers on the market is the Opera web browser. Despite being renown for innovation, it was the first major browser to include tabbed browsing and ad-blocking, Opera has never quite caught on.

One factor which might have contributed to this fact is so-called “agent-spoofing”, when browsers such as Opera pretend to be Internet Explorer.

Opera, a browser that had been around for years prior to Firefox, stayed at around 1% while Firefox soared to more than 20% market share. One reason for this was that lots of Opera users identified themselves as Internet Explorer users. There were no statistics for the blogosphere or media to get excited about, because Opera users were below the radar. And Firefox’s popularity begat more popularity.

Recently, the agent-spoofing feature of Opera has changed and market-share statistics are more accurate. If the feature would have been disabled sooner, who knows, I might have been using Opera to write this post.

Interbrand’s decade of global brands

Interbrand has a very nice visualization of how their top 20 list of the most valuable brands has evolved over the past decade. Our screenshot below shows how google jumped onto the list in 3 years up to number 7 (click the image for a larger version).

Measuring the value of a brand is tricky and we’re sure Interbrand’s methodology has its followers and detractors (where’s Starbucks? We love Starbucks). We recommend taking a look at the graphic anyway, as it is a nice example of visualizing such data. Click here to check it out.

Le Brand

When asked why he dined so frequently at the restaurant in Paris’s Eiffel Tower, novelist Guy de Maupassant answered that it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the structure. He wasn’t alone in his dislike for the tower which faced much critisicm when it was built in 1889. If it hadn’t proven so useful for radio communications it would have been torn down in 1909. Many Parisians still hate it.

The Eiffel Tower is however, the most visited paid monument in the world and it is one of the most recognized structures on earth. In 2009, Paris topped the Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index and the Eiffel tower is, visually at least, a big part of that brand.

When it comes to branding cities nothing is as effective, albeit expensive, as a memorable skyline. Maybe Boris Jonson should bare that in mind in the upcoming rebranding of London (mentioned in an earlier post). Forget the Gherkin and Big Ben: London needs a huge, pointless, iron tower, preferably visible from space, to snatch the top seat in Anholt-GfK Roper’s Brand Index away from it’s ancient rival, Paris.

It’s not just the logo

One of the most controversial recent brand launches was undoubtedly when the London 2012 brand was introduced to the world. Within a week from its launch the logo sparked a nationwide debate, hostile questions in the house of commons and apparently, an epileptic fit (do I smell urban myth?).

The brand identity was designed by a London consultancy called Wolff Ollins (their site is one of the more original I’ve seen for a while – very nice) and got praise from some corners and scorn from others (via geekfriendly). It even generated parody logos, as seen on the right.

Regardless of how one feels about the logo itself, the frenzy that surrounded the launch was slightly misguided in one sense: The hoopla around the price tag, which was £400,000. Or as Seth Godin put it, “spending $800,000 for a logo is ridiculous”.

Now, don’t get me wrong. £400,000 is a lot of money. But it wasn’t just a price tag for a logo. Wolff Ollins is a brand consultancy, not a convenience store. In Don’t F*** Mess with the Logo, Jon Edge and Andy Milligan have an interesting take on what a brand actually is:

E x E x E = B

Essence (what you stand for) x Expression (how you communicate it) x Experience (what you actually make or provide) = Brand (what people think of you)

Magic x colour, fun, no cynicysm x family entertainment = Disney

The brand, and identity, is made up of every single facet of the 2012 games: Pens, videos, clothes, imagery, copy text, signs on taxi cabs and buses, stamps – everything has to be thought through and it all has convey a unified message for a very expensive, high profile undertaking.

It may have been extremely expensive … but it’s not just the logo. You’ll see. Hopefully.

Crowdsourcing a new brand for London

Last week I published a blog post about the I❤NY brand. Now, London’s mayor Boris Johnson has decided: Get me one of those.

That’s right, the city of London has published an invitation to tender for “creative development and design of a brand for London“.

Moving Brands, a London based brand agency, have been running a blog, A Brand for London, about the process of “crowdsourcing” their own submission. They eventually made their submission available online.

Unfortunately, they didn’t make it into the next round. It would have been interesting to follow the process of developing the brand further, and crowdsourcing it, and Moving Brands certainly had some top-rate people working on the job, including Scott Thomas, Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, we’ll be following the London brand story closely, as part of our team is based there and we love the city. We’re not optimistic that the other agencies will provide us with blogs about how they take their design further, but we can always hope.