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The Brand Personality is one of three types of brand positioning guidelines (or "platforms") developed by The Brand Development Company. Although "Brand Personality" might be the term more frequently known, we've found "Creative Platform" gets clients interested in their brand and in the concept of branding.
In Brand Personality 101, you learned a very hard lesson: that a brand
is much much much much much much much (much!) more than a logo. (You
owe me a nickel.) You learned that The Brand Development Company
insists that strategic choice of words and color will result in more effective marketing tools.
At The Brand Development Company, we try to encourage you not to simply put on daddy's old white shirt backwards and fingerpaint a logo based on something you ate for dinner last night or something you saw oozing on the road on the way into work.
Nooooooo. At The Brand Development Company we encourage you to consider that the presentation of your
brand -- via your logo, tagline, website, brochures, ads, sales slicks,
direct mail, trade show booth, cold calls, sales letters, meetings,
news releases, parties, elevator music, office decorations, employee
dress code, on hold music, promotional merchandise, holiday gifts to
clients & vendors (including agency) and so on should be based on a Brand Positioning Statement, Brand Message and our aspirin and Rolaids.
Case in point, a while back I was fortunate to meet Robert P.,
an incredibly smart business person, marketing enthusiast and all around good guy. He and a colleague were launching an internet marketplace for wholesale mortgage loan products. It would provide mortgage brokers instant access to hundreds of
product and pricing options. Nothing
like it existed, and Robert and his friend were launching it from a
guest bedroom office in L.A.
Robert great person to work with from an agency perspective because he understands branding,
appreciates its value, and practically dares you to go to The Wall Of Very Wild Ideas. With his input, encouragement and money, we created this powerful campaign to brand the new dotcom (while he
and his buddy raced to string together the programming).
Here's how it unfolded:
We targeted young, impatient, ambitious mortgage brokerage owners.
We chose hot, bright "technology" colors 1) because hot colors
would appeal to the young, impatient, ambitious target ( more on that
later) and 2) hot colors would put us at the other end of the color
spectrum from everyone else in the mortgage industry (at the time, most
were using cold conservative colors).
Think Pepsi's blue to Coke's
red.
Next, we chose retro wording at a time when the internet was just making its way into business applications, and
at a time retro culture was just coming into fashion -- in fact, the new VW Beetle was
coming out.
We developed our hot colors into a bright yellow-red-orange
tie-dyed motif. We used carefully chosen, colorful words: "It's Revolution,
Baby!" over a subhead that read "Plug in. Log on. Find out."
The only other information we added was the website's address -- no body copy whatsoever. Reason: we didn't want decisions about the new website made anywhere other than at the new website. We wanted to drive people onto the Internet to see what all the hoopla was about.
We put these bright colors and wild words in ads in mortgage industry trade media.
We put tthem on bandannas then mailed them in clear plastic
tubes and handed them out at trade shows while wearing them.
We put them on a brand new Beetle.
O yeah, we got noticced. O yeah, the client's goals were achieved in half the
budgeted cost in half the allotted time. O yeah, the campaign won a Best Campaign of
the Year award from the National Association of Mortgage Brokers.
And today The LoanTrader campaign lives happily ever after at a marketing campaign stud farm.
BRANDLAND CHALLENGE:
Ever you ever run into Robert Palmer, pat him on the back, give him a
nickel and tell him how much you admire him and how much you admire Tim
Bryant at The Brand Development Company.
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