If Everything is Premium...

The back to basics trend is coming.

We are being bombarded by an onslaught of premiumness. And it's begining to get so overblown that consumers are questioning this shouting match that trys to tell us that everything is now made from the finest ingredients and is the highest quality to be found.

These so-called premium brands are now exploiting themselves by becoming the staples of every new strip mall. They position themselves to be the category leader but then grow to be so common that their exclusivety is now lost in a sea of premium brand overkill.

Premium brands used to have an exclusive or unique quality that was supported by the old school theory of being "hand-crafted" in small batches in order to create a product that is not "mass". The current trend seems to destroy the premium positioning if everyone can access the brand and it is found in supermarkets, airports, drugstores and shopping malls.

If everything is exclusive, then nothing is exclusive.

The consumer can see through this overblown excess and will be looking for brands that are honest and humble in their presentation and origin. Look for a very Earth-friendly aspect to this trend as companies are also looking to exploit the less-processed and less impact to the environment trend. It's unfortunate because there will be a lot of good products out there that are truly striving to create a unique position in the market but get overshadowed by the big monster brands who will jump on this trend and oversaturate it.

Even the little guys who are putting an honest product on the market will get bought up and masss produced and thus watered down in an effort by the big brands to hop on this band wagon. It will be so wide spread that everybody will be driving a hybrid vehicle while drinking a Starbucks soy latte as they pull up to the GAP store to get a pair of hemp jeans.

-Ross Patrick

Branding with Attitude

Have you ever considered that the impression you get from going to Starbucks or In-n-Out Burger is better because the people that work there are nice to you?

The customer experience is such a huge part of the brand that these retail operations give their employees extensive training and look for candidates that have a "good attitude".

CiCi's Pizza, a Dallas based pizza buffet trains their managers to create a fun and friendly experience for their customers. Energetic employees yell "Hi, welcome to CiCi's" when someone enters the restaurant. They empower their employees to go the extra distance to make the dining experience enjoyable.

With 'Brand Experience' becoming a major component of how customers evaluate a brand, don't be surprised to see this trend taking off. Consumers have less and less time in their busy lives so the few minutes of interaction that they have with a sales person or drive thru window person are critical.

Brands that seem to be suffering are the large retail chains like Circuit City where uninterested red shirted staffers ignore shoppers and seem truly "bored" with what they are doing. McDonald's is probably the best example of the "Worst Brand Experience" on the planet.

In Southern California you would be lucky to encounter a McDonald's counter person or drive-thru operator that speaks english and has any enthusiasm for what they are doing. These companies need to wake up and realize that this is the front line and consumers are going to rebel against this lackluster customer service.

Watch for Experiential Branding to be a buzz word in the next few years.

— Ross Patrick

Branding 101

Many clients confuse advertising with the term "branding". I've also seen many cases where designers and clients get caught up with focusing merely on the logo as the main brand attribute. When a product category begins to get crowded, the components of a brand become more sacred. These components, or brand attributes make up the sum total of a brand's personality. They define every aspect of how that product or service is interpreted by the consumer.

Brand Attributes
The 5 pillars of branding:

1) The Logo - for some companies, the logo is definately the rallying point. It is recognizable and stands for all of the things that the company does and more. It can have an emotional impact far beyond mere products and services.

2) Color - Choosing a color that represents a company is important. It can set the tone for how a business acts and how it is perceived. Blue seems very corporate. Red, very serious. Green, environmentally conscious? Orange, happy!

3) Visuals - the biggest problem in this every shifting brandscape is the lack of commitment to a "look". Many companies are schizophrenic when it comes to the "images" it presents to the public.

4) Voice - often overlooked as one of the most important assests a brand can utilize. The tone of voice is the key to revealing the personality of a brand. Is it funny? Authoratative? Sensual? Does it have swagger?

5) Shape - some brands have managed use the shape of their product as a branding device: the Coke bottle, the Volkswagon Beetle, the Eiffel Tower(Paris).

Essentially, these are the key equities of a brand and they need to work in unison with one another in order to tell the full story of a product or service.

Design: In the House

A look at agencies with advertising and design under one roof.
By Warren Berger

As design becomes a more central element of branding, it's created a basic challenge for ad agencies: How do you make design a core part of the agency itself? In recent years, a growing number of agencies have sought to bring design in-house, either by hiring more designers or by acquiring existing design groups. But just bringing design into the house doesn't answer the questions of where it should reside and how it should live once it is there. Should design be a separate department? Should the group work on its own projects? And perhaps most important, how does an agency go about blending design with other, more traditional creative disciplines, such as copywriting and art directing? one spoke with a number of in-house designers at agencies such as TBWAChiatDay, Deutsch, BBDO, Ogilvy, McKinney, and Arnold, to get a sense of how these issues are being handled in this new hybrid environment.

Approaches vary, though it should be said at the outset there is a consensus on at least one point: Design has never been in greater demand at agencies than it is right now.


"It seems like the floodgates opened up this year in terms of every client asking for help with design issues," says Ross Patrick, design director at Deutsch in Los Angeles. Patrick notes that the Deutsch in-house design group was originally created to serve one big client, Mitsubishi, that always needed lots of brochures and other designed materials; as it happened, the Mitsubishi account ended up leaving the agency, but instead of the design group then having less work to do, it suddenly had more� Because right around that time, every Deutsch client started seeking out design help, Patrick says. Something similar was also happening at many other agencies, as a kind of "design awakening" took hold among clients in the past couple of years, no doubt inspired by, among other things, the success of design-driven brands such as Apple and Starbucks.

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