F-Secure: Sauna for your software

Apparently, the people of Finland are great believers in the healing powers of the Sauna. According to a Finnish proverb; if liquor, tar or sauna doesn’t cure you, it’s probably fatal.

When your computer catches a virus however, no amount of liquor, tar or even sauna will help (not the computer at least). That’s where Finnish computer security firm F-Secure comes in.

F-Secure is one of the most respected names in the field of computer security, Twitter being an example of one high profile client.

So we were intrigued when we learned from one of our favorite blogs, Brand New, that F-Secure had overhauled their brand. Those who share our interest in brand guidelines should check out the F-Secure guidelines (pdf).

What sold us the new identity was seeing the new logo on software boxes, below.

We were not averse to the old “super-hero” logo, but the new version makes the product feel very professional and, well, secure.

Geographic distribution of Interbrand’s top 100 brands

Business Week published an in depth coverage of Interbrand’s recently published list of the most valuable 100 global brands.

Interbrand is of course a U.S. based company, but comparing the geographical distribution of the top 100 brands is interesting nonetheless. The chart below shows how many brands each country has on the top 100 list.

A few interesting points from the list:

• Coca-Cola has held the top seat for 10 years.
• In the top 10 seats, the U.S. has eight brands, Finland one (Nokia) and Japan one (Toyota).
• Four out of the top 10 are Software companies (IBM, Microsoft, Google and Intel).
• There are seven new entries, four from the U.S. and three from Europe.
• The fastest growing brand of 2009 is Citi (a bank? really?).

Measuring the dollar value of a brand is difficult and some say the Interbrand top 100 list is little more than a parlour game. Whether or not this is true, we recommend checking out Business Week’s interactive table with the results. See if you can find your favourite brand.

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.

Is the brand name Insure.com worth $16M?

Last Friday news broke that Insure.com sold its domain name and all related media assets for $16M. They’re changing their name to Life Quotes (click here to see the original story).

Is buying a domain name for $16M dollars a good idea?

In the classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al and Laura Reis maintain that generic brand names are worse than, well, proper brand names. According to the Reises, it’s easier to remember Amazon.com than Books.com.

More important than memorable URLs though, is Google Juice. How high does Insure.com rank in Google?

Sure enough, search for “insure” on Google.com and Insure.com is the first result. But what do people search for when they’re looking for insurance? Below is a screenshot form Google trends which shows a comparison between how often people search for “insure” on one hand and “insurance” on the other. (See for yourself here.)

Why are we only seeing one line? Because compared to “insurance”, the search term “insure” doesn’t even register. And where does Insure.com rank when you search for the wildly more popular “insurance”? It ranks at no. 37. Insurance.com is at no. 10.

It makes you wonder whether they accidentally bought the wrong domain name.

“Minor” movie made major!

I am a huge movie fan and spend hours every week watching movies and reading up on what is coming up. I am also a fan of clever marketing so when I ran into a movie called Paranormal Activity I was intrigued. A movie that had a 15 thousand dollar budget and is being distributed by Paramount and Dreamworks is pretty huge.

What I like about the marketing is that it is unorthodox. Paramount could have used some of its billion dollar marketing budget to release the movie in the US and all over the world. Instead they have been hyping up the movie with a few screenings all over the USA and using the internet to spread the word. This reminds me of the marketing stunt of the Blair Witch Project. Personally, I couldn’t wait to see that movie after reading the journal of the main character online beforehand.

Click here to check out the official trailer.

On the movie’s website you can see that they will open the movie nationwide when it will be demanded 1 million times, currently the counter stands at 796.124 demands. The tagline is: “First ever major film release decided by you“. It is no fluke that this hype is starting in October, Halloween is just around the corner and everybody knows that if you release a great horror movie before Halloween, you have struck gold. Just look at the Saw quintology, the first movie was without a doubt one of the greatest and cheapest horror movie ever made.

I am predicting that paranormal activity will do as good or even better than Saw, which made around 100 million dollars. So the profit of the initial $15,000 investment will be around 6.700% not too shabby.

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.

Stuck on square one

Happy anniversary Iceland! One year ago we had no functional banks and we were labeled thugs and terrorists. We have come so far. Or have we? A year ago angry protesters demanded reelection due to the government’s incompetence. Strengthening our foreign exchange reserves was said to be the key to get through the recession and we begged all our friends and the IMF for a loan. But in order to get a loan we have to acknowledge a dept to the British and Dutch government because of Icesave.

Now, one year later, we have accomplished nothing. The new government hasn’t reached a decision on what to do. And now people are speculating that the government will collapse again as soon as this weekend.

It is tough to work in country full of uncertainties. No matter what political view you have, it is important that we reach a decision so we can work through our problems. Right now, nothing has changed.

The recession isn’t all bad; we are trying to build up a society with new values. Tourism is doing great and both airlines, Iceland Express and Icelandair, are expanding their routes. Innovation is blossoming and there are new ideas coming to life every day. Iceland is a brand that is being rebranded, it takes time. Icelanders have an entrepreneurial mindset, and motivated by innovation we might move from square one.

Coldplays square one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGaNufCuvOs

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.