A good slogan (also known as a good tagline) is a cornerstone of an enduring brand. To be good, a slogan needs to be memorable. An important aspect of branding is to ensure your brand is remembered by your target customers and customers. A recent Cornell University research paper provides insights into how phrasing impacts on memorability. While the Cornell research study used quotations from 1,000 movies to examine memorability, the findings are worth considering in evaluating why some brand’s slogans and taglines are memorable and some are not.

Key Slogan Takeaways

The Cornell research study found that there were distinctive features of memorable phrases. In the study, the two key features of memorable movie taglines are that the phrases are:

1. Distinctive – in that distinctive words have been injected into a common sentence structure, and
2. Portable – the line has been composed as a general statements. As a result, it can be readily applied to other situations. People enjoy repeating memorable lines.

Pragmatic Slogan Tips

Beyond the key slogan takeaways, we offer three pragmatic slogan tips from the Cornell research study.

1. Avoid past tense. Present tense is not only more immediate, but more “portable” in making it meaningful to other situations.
2. The i’s have it. Sounds made at the front of the mouth apparently roll off the tongue more easily, and this makes them easier to remember. The letter i is a “front sound” and the letter u is a “back sound”.
3. Alliteration, rhyming and humour can help people remember a phrase.

For those interested in further reading, please see the full paper “You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability” by Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University.

What do you think? Do the Cornell research findings line up with the brand slogans and taglines that stick in your mind?

It’s no secret that a good tagline or slogan can be a cornerstone of an enduring brand. At Distility, we believe that a concise, elegantly-crafted tagline can drive home the value of a brand. But coming up with the perfect one-liner is no walk in the park. There’s lots to consider.

For an in-depth look into the world of the tagline, we highly recommend the podcast entitled “Slogans” of one of our favourite CBC radio shows, The Age of Persuasion.

A Slogan is not just a Jingle

A tagline, or slogan, is the essence of a brand distilled into one brief phrase or sentence. It is simultaneously an outward message to a brand’s audience and an internal rallying call for the individuals who make up a company. An effective tagline works to communicate what you can do for customers and also inspiring your team.

Taglines exist to achieve specific goals. A tagline benefits from being carefully crafted, with every unnecessary word deleted. Sometimes they work to separate a product from others in a category. Other times, they tell you how to use a product, reinforce imagery that speaks for the brand, or associate positive feelings with a brand or product. Often, they present a call to action. The Age of Persuasion Slogans episode includes the example of Frito Lay’s “betcha can’t eat just one”; this tagline acts as an enticement to the consumer to eat more Frito Lay chips.

The simplest taglines are often the best, provided the tagline is associated with the right image. Consequently, the actual tagline phrase does not need be genius to be an ingenious and effective tagline. Think of the highly effective Obama slogan “yes, we can” or the Nike tagline “just do it”.

Brand Strategy Rooted Taglines

At Distility, we believe that ingenious and effective taglines are based on one or more elements of our clients’ brand strategy. As a result, the first step to creating taglines is for a brand to have committed to its brand strategy, and we do this with Distility 1day1brand to ensure client-team collaboration and commitment to their brand promise, position and personality. With commitment on brand strategy, Distility creates taglines. Two recent examples are: (i) Sim IP Practise: “Sim.plify” and (ii) Combined Wisdom: “Cross Border. Made to Order”.

Slogan Trivia

Funnily enough, according to the CBC Radio Age of Persuasion podcast on Slogans, the term “slogan” stems from the Gaelic “Slaugh Gairn”, meaning “cry of the host”. The origin of the word underscores the idea of taglines and slogans as a rallying cry for a brand.

Your competition is all the other solutions that are vying to resolve your customer’s needs.

An important part of defending your brand’s ability to compete is to think about your competition and how they are vying to solve your customers’ needs.  However, if both you and your established competition are being complacent about your customers’ needs, then you are all vulnerable to a new entrant breaking into your brand category. The new entrant will be in a position to quickly establish a strong brand position if they focus on solving a problem that you and your established competition are ignoring.

The Ikea Brand Enters the TV Brand Category

The recent Ikea entry into the TV brand category is a great example of solving a problem that the established TV and electronics manufacturers have long ignored. The problem as identified by Ikea in their clever viral ad spot (Ikea Uppleva) is: how to fit the TV, along with all the cables and cords that come with home entertainment electronics in the living room. The customer pain identified by Ikea is the tangle of cables and cords which are an unsightly mess in the living rooms of their customers.

Ikea has launched itself into the TV brand category with the Ikea Uppleva, which is positioned as an all-in-one “TV solution” comprised of a TV, Blueray player and speakers integrated into a piece of Ikea furniture. The ad spot was launched on April 16, 2012 on YouTube and by the end of April the ad had 1.5 million views. Ikea has done an excellent job with the Ikea Uppleva advertising spot of:

• outlining the problem of the complicated mess that the TV and electronics brand category has made of customers’ living-rooms, and
• setting out their simple, accessible solution.

The humorous and approachable personality of the Ikea advertising video is well differentiated against the high-tech sophistication of the big TV and electronics brands.

3 Tips  to Help Focus on Your Customer

To defend your brand against customer need complacency, the following are tips to help you and your team focus on your customer. Keeping an eye on your competition, and also your customer, can help defend your brand’s position in your brand category.

1. Think about Usability

Think about your product or service from the point of view of your customer.

Are you customers experiencing unintended pains and problems when they use your product or service? Can you think of ways to design and improve the customer experience? Can you simplify the use or design of your product?

2. Visit your Customers

Be like Ikea. Visit your customers. Try to learn about their needs and problems. See if your organization can develop solutions to their problem. Try to focus on your customers’ needs and problems. Don’t fall into the innovator’s trap of focusing only on advancing your field of technology and not considering whether the innovations are ones that your customers value.

3. Branding is in the Details

Strong brands are built by keeping an eye on the big picture, but by also being in tune with the small things and details that make a very big difference to customers. In the TV brand category example, a customer may or may not be able to perceive small enhancements in picture quality of a television, but they certainly can see the rat’s nest of cables radiating from their TV.

At Distility we are passionate about delivering branding at the speed of business rather than at the typical glacial speed of other branding agencies and consultants. To make this possible, we developed Distility 1day1brand which allows our customers to develop their brand strategy in one day. We have also developed design and digital workflows to permit our customers to launch (not simply design) their new brand systems (wordmarks, taglines, websites, business systems, etc) in two to three months following their Distility 1day1brand workshop. We have mastered how to get branding done quickly without sacrificing quality. But there is one instance when we urge our clients to budget a good long time: company naming or product naming.

Three Reasons To Take Time with Brand Naming

We get calls from organizations looking to rename in time for an event or launch in one to two months. We caution them that using such a rapid renaming deadline is high risk and high cost. We urge them to take the time needed to allow enough time for name development, but importantly to ensure trademark protection, fraud prevention and domain acquisition.

1. Brand Name Trademark Protection

You need to allow sufficient time for a trademark review of your proposed new brand name to ensure (i) you aren’t infringing another brand’s trademark and (ii) you can get trademark protection for the new brand name. Failure on either can be an enormously costly misstep.

Ultimately, having a trademark application rejected is never good. For an early stage start-up that isn’t even marketing yet, it is a big pain to have to change your name. For a brand that is in the market, and has been using the rejected trademark, it is a full-on marketing disaster.

In terms of potential infringement, it is vital to remember that a trademark can be based on usage and need not be based on a registered trademark. You face trademark infringement risk if another organization is using the brand name for a similar purpose, and this risk exists even if they have no website and zero search engine hits. The upshot is that you should ensure that your legal team has the time they need to do required due diligence, apply for a registered trademark and get back meaningful results.

2. Domain Name Acquisition

If you need a short “.com” domain name (or URL), then additional time can allow significant domain name acquisition cost savings.

Some brands cannot afford to be without a short “.com” domain name. It is essential to their business. In addition, they need a domain name that is easy to pronounce, easy to read and easy to spell. This means they will likely need to negotiate the purchase of that domain name; it is unlikely that the desired short .com domain is unregistered. Allowing additional time to secure a desirable domain name can mean that, instead of paying $100,000 (or more) for that domain name, you might end up paying a fraction of that amount. Added time gives tremendous negotiating leverage; you can investigate the cost of multiple domain names, negotiate with more than one party on different names and not be under pressure to secure one domain name at any price.

3. Domain Name Fraud Protection

“Phishing” is the fraudulent activity where criminals will create a fake website that look and feel like the real thing. After the fake website has been created, then through email, instant messaging, or other online tricks, the fraudsters get unsuspecting customers to share private information, or download nasty software designed to steal your customer’s assets or identity. For prominent brands that have customers which fraudsters may want to target, owning “defensive registrations” means owning domain names that look like yours, but are not exact matches. For instance, through an instant message, you would be encouraged to click on “BrandNameforBigBank.co” instead of “BrandNameforBigBank.com” (notice the missing “m” in the first domain).

Allowing extra time for naming, gives you extra time to negotiate and obtain domain names (URLs) that could be used to mislead your customers.

Brand Name – Essential Brand Marketing Asset

Your brand name is an essential brand marketing asset. Decisions about naming or renaming are the most important brand marketing decision your organization will make. Ensure that you allow enough time to do it right.

The amount of time which we recommend budgeting for brand naming or brand renaming will depend on the situation of your brand. We work with our clients to help them balance their time and budget requirements for naming. Please see our post “What is Your Company Naming Strategy” to help you consider your brand naming needs.

It is a reality of the digital age that customers, leads, prospective employees, vendors and other stakeholders will assess your brand based on your brand’s website. Not having a website at all leaves the impression that you are a fresh start-up or potentially fly-by-night risk; for an established brands, the impression is akin to discovering that a business address is actually a vacant lot. As a result, we recommend that all organizations have at a minimum a clean, typographically driven, one page website, with the means for visitors to contact them. However, we find that the no-website problem is much less prevalent than the bad-website problem.

There are a number of potential website issues to consider in deciding whether it is time to redo your brand’s website. The issue(s) you identify will also help diagnose what work is needed to make your website better reflect on your brand.  Depending on the extent to your website issues, your website improvement could be achieved by migrating your brand’s website to a new platform, a website redesign or refresh, updating your content or a completely new website.

Key Website Issues

The five key issues that we see regularly are, as follows.

1. Outdated Strategy

The website is rooted in outdated strategy (business strategy or brand strategy). While the look of your website does matter, the biggest question is really how your website embodies your brand. Does your brand’s website embody your brand promise, brand position and brand personality? If your business strategy and your brand strategy have changed significantly but your website has not, then you may need to consider creating a new website to replace the outdated one.

Answering yes to one or more of the following questions indicates that a completely new website (and potentially rebranding) may actually be needed.

• Has your audience (target customer) changed since the website was created?
• Has what you are selling changed since the website was created?
• Has your competition changed since the website was created?

An affirmative answer to any of these questions indicates, in essence, that your current website doesn’t reflect your current business and brand.

This may be the case, even if your organization has not yet created a new brand strategy, and your bad website may be a symptom that a more fulsome rebranding is needed to get your brand strategy (brand promise, position and personality) in gear and your brand systems (wordmark, colours, tagline, font, imagery) in shape to better represent your business.

2. Outdated Brand Look

The website looks dated and doesn’t reflect well on the brand. The look of your brand is a reflection of your brand. It is a first impression (like your business suit) and, ultimately, Would you wear a bad suit to meet your best customer? However, we don’t recommend leaping into redoing the look of your brand without considering whether it really is Time to Rebrand?

3. Outdated Website Content

The website content and copy is neither magnetic nor useful for your target audience.

It may be obvious that there is a problem with your website content because, with so much copy being added over the years, it now reads like government regulations. However, it may not be so obvious to you and your team. It may be that your business could get a real benefit by investing in content marketing or inbound marketing. To do this, you will need to position yourself to create customer-centric content by (i) being clear on your audience and (ii) creating a content strategy.

4. Bad Website Navigation

The website has clunky navigation, so it is hard for website visitors to find their way around. We see this happen for businesses that have outgrown their website navigation plan, never really had a navigation plan or where the original site was so elegantly simple that navigation was intuitive.

However, difficult website navigation may stem from a lack of clarity on your brand architecture. If you have more than one brand and multiple offerings, then you need to decide whether these brands or offerings should share a website or have separate websites. Website navigation may get very difficult for your customer if you have not thought through your brand architecture and defined website architecture that suits your brand architecture. For most brands (but not necessarily all brands), your brand architecture type will guide this choice. Our post Online Location and Social Media Channels summarizes what website architecture generally matches with each of the major brand architecture types.  In summary, website architecture used for overbrand, masterbrand, freestanding brand and endorser brand are:

• Overbrand – One website in the name of the Overbrand which houses sections for each sub-brand. An example is Apple which includes sections for sub-brands (like iPhone).
• Masterbrand – One website which houses content related to all your offerings. An example is Rogers which includes sections for its descriptively named offerings (like TV).
• Freestanding Brand – Separate websites for each freestanding brand. Unless there is an issue with linking brands, there may be links between different brand’s websites and the ultimate parent site will likely include links to each brand’s website. An example is P&G and individual P&G brand websites.
• Endorser Brand – The endorsing brand website is the main online location and the product brands content is housed on that main endorsing brand website. An example is Nabisco, Nabisco product brand pages and the Nabisco Recipe content which includes multiple product brands.

5. Prickly User Interface

The website can only be updated by an expert; it may be heavily coded, the interface is clunky or it is in a proprietary interface. There have been major advances in the user interfaces for websites. While you need to ensure that you have proper internal controls and security to protect your website, you may may not really need bespoke website coding and functionality.

If you have an old site, you may be tied to the vendor who built your site, and stuck in the position that no one internally can add new content or even fix a typo. If your vendor is responsive and affordable, your content magnetic, your site look and navigation is good, then there is no need to invest in a new website.  However, if you are embarking on a website refresh or redesign, then we recommend you consider building it in, or migrating your content to, a user friendly interface.

Be an Inbound Marketing Hero

Inbound marketing is a brand marketing strategy that focuses on having customers and potential customers find you. The heart of inbound marketing is online publishing of highly valued content that is magnetic to your target audience and that helps your audience decide whether to buy or recommend your solution.

This blog post is the fourth in our series of posts setting out the steps needed to develop a successful inbound marketing program. The first three posts were:

1. Inbound Marketing Step 1: Is Your Brand Ready to Start Inbound Marketing?
2. Inbound Marketing Step 2: Be Clear on Your Audience.
3. Inbound Marketing Step 3: Create a Content Strategy.

Where Should Your Content Be?

To ensure that your brand’s valuable content can be found by your target audience, you need to consider where it should be. It is essential that your content is located in an online location where your target audience will find it. As set out above, inbound marketing is a brand marketing strategy that focuses on having customers and potential customers find you.

In considering where your content should be, there are two different questions you will be answering.

1. What should be the primary online location where your content will be housed?
2. What social media and online channels should you use to share your content and engage with your audience?

Primary Online Location

For most brands, your brand’s website should be your online location where your content is housed and this is the least risky choice. Your website then acts as the hub for your content and you will seek to drive target audience traffic to this online location. Having your website as your primary hub will likely result in focusing on having compelling core website copy, vibrant blog posts and clear resource pages.

The wrinkle is that if you have more than one brand or offering, then you need to decide whether these brands or offerings should share a website or have separate websites. If the answer to this question (which is rooted in brand architecture) is baffling, then you should revisit Inbound Marketing Step 1: Is Your Brand Ready to Start Inbound Marketing? and ensure your brand is ready for deciding on your online location. You will be investing significant resources overtime if you plan to build your brand with inbound marketing, so don’t gloss over your website choice. For most brands (but not necessarily all brands), your brand architecture type will guide this choice as follows:

• Overbrand – One website in the name of the Overbrand which houses sections for each sub-brand. An example is Apple which includes sections for sub-brands (like iPhone).
• Masterbrand – One website which houses content related to all your offerings. An example is Rogers which includes sections for its descriptively named offerings (like TV).
• Freestanding Brand – Separate websites for each freestanding brand. Unless there is an issue with linking brands, there may be links between different brand’s websites and the ultimate parent site will likely include links to each brand’s website. An example is P&G and individual P&G brand websites.
• Endorser Brand – The endorsing brand website is the main online location and the product brands content is housed on that main endorsing brand website. An example is Nabisco, Nabisco product brand pages and the Nabisco Recipe content which includes multiple product brands.

It is possible that choosing Facebook or another site is a good choice as the primary online location for your content. However, choosing a location other than your brand’s website is a riskier choice and should only undertaken if there are clear and compelling reasons. Migrating content from one online location to another can be expensive and time consuming.

Social Media and Other Online Channels

Having considered your primary content hub, the next consideration is the social media and online channels you will use to promote your content and engage with your audience. There are many many social media channels. Trying to use all channels or even multiple channels is a big commitment, and we recommend that you rank social media channels in terms of importance and use by your target audience. The universe of social media channels is an expanding one. Select social media channels include (but are in no way limited to): Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube and Pinterest.

Research Social Media Channels Used by Your Target Audience

Do some research and thinking based on the profile of an ideal member of your target audience. If this seems like an amorphous question, then you may need to revisit Inbound Marketing Step 2 to make sure you are clear on your target audience.

Your top choices should not about where you want your brand to be. It should be about what social media channels your target audience is already using. If you want to experiment with other social media channels, then you can consider this as part of your inbound marketing budget. To rank social media channels, here are some considerations that you and your team can work through either internally or using an inbound marketing expert.

Some questions to get you started.

• Ask your audience what social media channels they use. If your budget allows, commission market research or send out a survey to ask a sample of your target audience. If you do this, make sure your approach is audience-centric, respectful and doesn’t come across as spam. You will get the best results if you include both a list of choices and also a bucket “Other” category to collect beyond your assumed list.
• Do the ideal members of your target audience have an active twitter feed (not just a dormant twitter account)?
• Do the ideal members of your target audience have LinkedIn profiles? Is there activity on their LinkedIn account – periodic profile updates, posts, comments, etc.?  Are they members of particular industry or other groups?
• Consider using Rapportive to get a sense of twitter use and other social media use by your audience. Rapportive is a plug which we use in for our Google Apps Premium accounts which allows us to instantly get a social media snapshot of people we are emailing.
• Think in general terms about your audience and consider if there are other social media channels which are an intuitive fit with what you know about them. You will need to decide if you want to spend resources to use the latest social media channels or wait until a new social media channel achieves critical mass before considering it. For example, Pinterest is a new channel which is getting a lot of brand marketing attention lately, but it only existed in prototype form two years ago.

After you have ranked social media channels, you can consider how many and which ones you will use as part of your budgeting process. In television and print terms, this choice would have been the choice of what network to use to air your commercial or which magazines and newspapers to place your advertisements. Trying to be everywhere may eat up your resources (quickly) and may hinder your efforts by diverting your resources and attention for creating compelling content. Budget and resource considerations will be the subject of an upcoming post in this series.

Remember, social media channels are being added all the time and so the social media channel question can and should be revisited in a systematic way. The frequency of revisiting your ranking will depend on whether your brand is best supported by using tried and true (or bleeding edge) social media channels. However, you should revisit your social media channel rankings at least annually to see if your ranking hold true and whether any channels should be added or removed from your inbound marketing program.

Be an Inbound Marketing Hero

This blog post is the third in our series of posts designed to help you progress from inbound marketing wannabe to your brand’s inbound marketing hero.  The first post “Inbound Marketing Step 1: Is Your Brand Ready to Start Inbound Marketing?” addressed ensuring you and your team have committed to a winning brand strategy and brand systems. The second post “Inbound Marketing Step 2: Be Clear on Your Audience” covered the importance of refining and further segmenting your brand audience to be clear on which audience or audience to target for inbound marketing. With Step 1 and Step 2 complete, you are now ready to begin creation of an inbound marketing content strategy.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a brand marketing strategy that focuses on having customers and potential customers find you. The heart of inbound marketing is using digital media to publish highly valued content that is magnetic to your target audience and that helps your audience decide whether to buy or recommend your solution. Creating your content strategy involves considering your solution through the fresh eyes of your target audience, thinking about the questions that they have and identifying the information that they want to know.

No Content Strategy, No Inbound Marketing Success

To have repeated, ongoing and scalable success at generating high value content, you need an inbound marketing content strategy.  While you can expect to refine and pivot your content strategy over time, it is essential that you take the time to develop a content strategy with your target audience in mind. The content strategy should address:

• the categories of topics which will provide real value to your target audience; and
• an initial parking lot of topic ideas.

Audience-centric Content

To create an effective content strategy, ensure that you think about the topics and types of content from the point of view of your target audience (and not yours). Forget what you want to say about your brand and your solutions, it is critical to think about content from the point of view of your audience.  You should consider content which covers what your audience wants to know at the different stages of the buying and decision making journey – from problem or need identification, consideration of alternative solutions, selection and buying decision and after-sale support and use of your solution.

Developing your inbound marketing content strategy may be an area where working with content strategy specialists provide key insights. You and your team may simply be too knowledgeable and too close to your solution to see it through the fresh eyes of your target audience. At Distility, we were fortunate to work with BrainRider when we developed our own content strategy.

However you decide to develop your inbound marketing content strategy, the process requires thinking about your target audience (or audiences) for inbound marketing and answering the following questions.

• What is their need or problem?
• What are their concerns?
• How sophisticated are they in terms of technical terms, jargon and industry knowledge? Do they crave basic technical information?
• Does your target audience have different concerns at different points in their buying journey?
• What are the questions that you dread being asked about your solution?
• What information is your audience not getting from you and your competitors?
• What would make it easier for them to understand and assess solutions, both your solution and your competitors?
• What would make it easier for them to buy a solution, hopefully yours?
• What are the questions they are asking? What questions do customer support, sales or other front-liners frequently encounter?

Blue Mountain readies re-brand with tech-enabled one day power workshop

by Brian Jackson, Associate Editor at ITBusiness.ca
[This article is reprinted with permission of Brian Jackson, Associate Editor at ITBusiness.ca. The original article appeared in the March 2, 2012 edition of itabusiness.ca]

As director of marketing at Collingwood, Ont.’s Blue Mountain Resorts Ltd., Paul Pinchbeck is tired of the ski and snowboard destination’s reputation as “a friend that you wanted to spend time with.”

That branding idea was formed by the resort in 2004 and advertised heavily. But to Pinchbeck, it never really sang true. Perhaps because Blue Mountain had tried to include too many voices in the conception of the brand, or perhaps because the resort was shifting away from a focus on winter sports to more of a four-seasons adventure experience.

“Bit by bit the brand became watered down or altered,” he says.

So Pinchbeck and Blue Mountain turned to a Toronto-based startup marketing firm currently housed in the MaRS incubation centre. Distility offers businesses a one-day exercise using interactive technology to collaborate across a focus group that represents a cross-section of the company’s stakeholders. At the end of the day-long session, an action plan that synthesizes the brand message into a single sheet is automatically e-mailed out to all the workgroup participants.

Axle Davids ran what he describes as a “traditional marketing agency” until he turned 41 and started Distility to formulate a lightning-speed workflow that would distill a company’s brand strategy in one day.  While marketing communications have changed drastically over the last five years, the CEO says, brand strategy hasn’t kept up to the new real-time reality of communications in the digital age.

“Having been through the experience of a multi-month process just to end up with something not very palatable to us, Axle’s brand in a day was very much appealing,” Pinchbeck says.

Blue Mountain Resort staff celebrate the end of their day-long branding exercise.

Distility is an effort to concisely reduce the branding process to a product package, Davids says.

“Branding is broken,” he says. “It’s often vacuous, ill-defined, and unpredictable. Branding is too slow, too complicated, and too expensive.”

So his one-day workshops lean on collaborative technology to help speed the process along. When participants show up to the workshop in the morning they are each armed with iPads that access a Web-based software that allows them to assemble images, diagrams, and words on a blank canvas. Instead of what Davids calls “airy-fairy” trust exercises to warm up the group, he cuts to the chase and has the individuals use the iPad to tell a story about their brand.

A projected, giant work wall in front of the group shows the time table for the day and all the exercises ahead of the group. The far-right side shows a one-page brand strategy that contains three sections: promise, position and personality. That’s the end goal, and to the left is the chart of how to get there.

Before the workshop ever begins, choosing the right people at the organization is a critical step, Davids says. One that Blue Mountain got right by including management, marketers, and front line workers such as lift operators.

Even the chairman of the board was there, Pinchbeck says, for a total of 13 in the group. Using technology to collaborate proved to be an equalizing force for communication in the group, despite varying ranks.

“The takeaway from the iPad experience, above and beyond the novelty of the tablet, was breaking down the barriers between departments,” he says. “They started to use their real voice.”

The iPad software, sitting on Amazon’s EC2 platform, allows group participants to vote on what ideas are most representative of the brand, and take surveys to see where common ideas can be found. That meant “there wasn’t one loud voice in the room that’s going to sway the results,” Pinchbeck says.

Using a patent-pending method to visualize the collective opinion of the group, the group pares back the brand’s personality traits to just eight. The projected wall software includes virtual post-it notes to attach new thoughts to existing ideas, and virtual cut-out hearts to show a vote of confidence in an idea.

Distility’s workshops are offered in two packages, one for up to six people for $14,500 and the other for between seven and 12 participants for $21,500.

It’s well worth it for Pinchbeck, who’d recommend the service to other businesses.

“Walking away at the end of the day, we had a brand that was emotional and that resonated,” he says. “It had a life of its own after we finished the branding exercises.”

The Blue Mountain Resort Team at the End of Distility 1day1brand

At the end of the work shop, Distility’s system automatically e-mails everyone in the group the one-page summary of the new brand. Davids is working on making the workshop compatible with smartphones, and wants to pursue a self-service option for customers. Distility put its product in a metaphorical box, and will offer training and certification for the program online.

“Our vision is to make this a product that other marketing and communication agencies can license,” he says.

For Pinchbeck, Blue Mountain’s vision of being an all-seasons adventure destination is a little bit closer. The new branding will launch full steam ahead this summer.

“Blue Mountain is going to be your adventure guide. That changes us from being just a provider of a lodging or a lift ticket to that more aspirational side,” Pinchbeck says. “All of our activities are going to be focused on our escarpment position with the village beneath it.”

Source: itbusiness.ca

Brand Name

Clients come to Distility when their brand name is no longer working for them. It may no longer fit what they do. It may not allow them to expand into new markets. They may be under siege because they did not do their legal due diligence in their home market.

They know they need a new name, but, not being versed in the art of naming, may not know much more than that. They are akin to someone who knows little about cars, having to buy one. Do they need a new car or used? Do they need a two-seater or a seven-seater? Do they need standard or automatic? Do they want economy or luxury? The answers to these questions can net a car that costs $5,000 to one that costs $500,000. It is the same with naming. Without a clear sense of exactly what they need in a name, companies can end up with a clunker or a high-priced, high-maintenance name.

Start with a Company Naming Strategy

In order to get the best name to build your brand, while also keeping your naming project on-time and on-budget, we recommend that you:

1. Identify your current brand architecture (Freestanding, Masterbrand, Overbrand, Endorser);
2. Decide whether you will stay with current brand architecture or change it;
3. Define your brand strategy: brand promise, position and personality for inspiring naming themes and ensuring “on-brand” results;
4. Determine type of name(s) required (Descriptive, Semi-descriptive, Suggestive, Arbitrary, Invented);
5. Determine Top Level Domain requirements (ex. “.com”);
6. Consider whether defensive domain registrations will be required to minimize phishing and fraud;
7. Determine parameters of Top Level Domain budget (expect $10,000 to $100,000+ depending on quality);
8. Identify languages and cultures where name must be tested for negative connotations;
9. Identify geographic regions where trademarking of name is required;
10. Consider how to transition from old name to new name.

Once you have considered the above, the answers can be distilled into your proposed naming strategy. You can use your proposed naming strategy to get clarity from an agency, like Distility, on the budget you will need for renaming. With the initial budget in-hand, you may decide to revisit your proposed naming requirements and determine what is essential and what isn’t. With your naming strategy in hand and your naming budget (and likely an updated budget) in hand, you will be in a position to (i) plan a successful re-naming project and (ii) ensure you and your team agree on the key naming requirements.

At Distility, we believe that the best brands are the result of real commitment by an organization’s people to a brand’s promise, position and personality and to the brand systems representing that brand. We do this through Distility 1day1brand which we developed to combine best practices in collaborative decision making and best practices in branding. In fact, our innovations are the subject of patent applications under the catchy title “Method for Visualizing the Collective Opinion of a Group”. Consequently, collaboration enhancements and best practices are often on our minds.

This post shares three of our tips to improve your team’s collaboration and key takeaways from two pieces on the pitfalls of traditional group brainstorming session. We caution that, unlike the two pieces distilled below, we still see value in brainstorming as a tool but we advocate an enhanced brainstorming approach (equivalent to a brainstorming 5.0 as opposed to the less effective brainstorming 1.0).

3 Tips to Improve Collaboration

While great collaboration is often the result of many factors, here are three things that have been shown to enhance innovation and creative output.

1. Physical proximity and interaction has been shown to be an important aspect of true innovative breakthroughs. This is a big reason that we hold our brand strategy sessions as an in-person workshop.
2. Brainstorming is only one idea generation approach. Even enhanced brainstorming 5.0 should only be one tool in your collaboration toolkit. Brainstorming works best when people have some quiet time to come up with ideas and then have the group share, evaluate and discuss ideas. While creative tension is important, it is important not to squash input and idea generation. At Distility in our workshops, we focus on promotion of good ideas (instead of focusing on killing bad ideas).
3. Groups can get stale. Bringing in an outside facilitator with their own domain expertise to work with a cross-functional team from your organization can make a dramatic difference. An outside facilitator also frees up your team members to more fully participate and not have to act as de facto facilitator.

Key Ingredients to Successful Collaboration and Innovation

The recent article “Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth” by Jonah Lehrer in the January 30, 2012 edition of the New Yorker and the older PsyBlog post Brainstorming Reloaded provide insights into how to foster successful collaboration. While neither piece provide the magic bullet to use to kill Groupthink and other collaborative decision making pathologies, there are some useful takeaways which we have summarized below.

From the article “Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth”, there are four key takeaways:

1. Brainstorming is well known approach to generating ideas and problem solving.  Alex Osborn of the B.B.D.O. advertising agency first described the brainstorming approach in his 1948 book, “Your Creative Power”. While it is still a really popular approach, empirical studies have actually found that a group brainstorming ideas is less effective than one person working alone. It turns out that there needs to be a certain amount of creative tension, criticism or different perspectives for groups to be at their creative best.
2. The brainstorming edict to not criticize brainstormed ideas may actually work against creativity and innovation.  The author notes that: “Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren’t predictable.”
3. Research has shown that creative teams can be too familiar and get stale once they have worked together for too long. Collaboration can be enhanced when a team includes new members (or facilitators), people from different disciplines and with different backgrounds.
4. Physical spaces can help foster creative friction and sparks of insight. Amazing innovations have resulted from spontaneous and repeated interactions between people from disparate fields. To make this happen, physical proximity can act like a “magical incubator” for ideas.

The PsyBlog post Brainstorming Reloaded notes that “[e]xperiment after experiment has shown that people in brainstorming sessions produce fewer and lower quality ideas than those working alone” and summarizes the poor brainstorming results as a result of:

• social loafing (slacking off in group situations),
• evaluation apprehension (ultimately people realize that their ideas will be scrutinized), and
• production blocking (while one participant is talking or sharing their ideas, other participants must wait and stop producing ideas).

PsyBlog suggests some ways to improve brainstorming sessions. The two key ideas are that:

1. Group collaboration will be enhanced if participants prepare ideas in advance;
2. The best use of group time is in evaluation and discussion of ideas, rather than initial idea generation.