How Marketing owes its language to the Wild West and other short stories

Staking a claim - I thought this may have had something to do with the time when the colonists in the USA rode as far as they could in a great race to claim their own piece of land. This was shown in the film Far and Away with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but after a half hour search on t'internet I gave up looking for any definition, ost his may not be the gospel truth. From what I can remember, they had to drive a stake (a wooden pole) into the area that they wanted to claim, which then entitled the person to mine or farm or do whatever he wanted to do to that piece of land. The only useful piece of information is this.

Branding - the art of pressing red hot metal stamps or brands on to a cow's or hrose's flesh. The " branding" was to designate whose cattle was whose on the vast grassy plain of America. The brands showed ownership.

The beast without a brand or mark was known to be a maverick, another defintion is one who doesn't abide by the rules, or being independent in thinking or actions. The French translation is excentrique (I guess this may mean "out of the circle")

Carrying on from the Interbrand Survey from last week, the 2005 best global brands show that the top ten brands are Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, Nokia, Disney, McDonalds, Toyota, Marlboro.

But more suprising is the list of the five big winners on the Interbrand list ( I feel like JK & Joel from Radio 1 - no silly jokes, please) - Ebay with a 21% increase; HSBC with a 20% increase ; 19% increase from Samsung; not surprisingly with Apple with their 16%rise from 2004's brand value and finally UBS with another 16%.

More on the short stories to come

Lena's post on trademarks, registering maarks, copyright, licensing & patents

I went to a CIM event last Monday in Brighton about ‘ How to Protect your Brand’. The speakers were two lawyers specialised in intellectual property. I took down some notes (if I’d known I were to post them, I would have put a bit more effort into it!) Anyway I hope they are helpful to you.

How to Protect your Brand

The speaker first started off by talking about intellectual property and how to protect it. He stressed that we can only protect the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.

It is done by using a ™(trade mark) or a registered ® mark. In a reform in 1995, the word trade mark was replaced by the word brand, but are both used.

A ™ could be a sign, word, logo, colour, sound picture, smell, shape, 3D shape. For example, Coca Cola have registered the shape of their bottle, Mc Donald’s have registered the shape of their French fries box.
It should identify the business and should not conflict with other trade marks.

They can be:

1. Invented words such as Kodak, Reebok, etc.

2. Arbitrary words such as Apple for computers, Elephant for car insurance.

3. Suggestive words such as Pampers, Lastminute.com, Microsoft, etc.

4. Descriptive (that is not the best way to choose a trademark) such as Game, The Perfume Shop, Vision Express, etc.

5. Generic words which you cannot register such as Aspirin, Cornflakes, Hoover, Biro, Sellotape, etc.

He then talked about domain names for brands, ie the brand websites.

The second speaker talked about Copyright ©.

It can be applied to:

1. Literary works.

2. Dramatic and musical works.

3. Artistic works. They are given on a basis of the person’s life plus 70 years. So if the work is out of its copyright, it can be copied without illegal consequences.

4. Sound recordings and films.

5. Broadcastings.

6. Publications.

7. Databases as literary works. The EU introduced the Database as having copyright.

8. Moral rights. They are not technically a right but are also called right of attribution. (so long as you can prove the work is yours.)

9. The right to prevent derogatory treatment.

He then talked a little about licensing and patents.

If you have a registered product or company as a ™, and you do not trade with it for 5 years, it loses its registration.
The more you trade, the stronger your brand gets. He gave an example of a man in Russia who had registered the name Starbucks as a ™ because Starbucks were not operating there and did not have any near intention to.
Starbucks took legal action against the man and won the case because of the strength of their name and brand.
Lena

Can I thank Lena for this post, an excellent job
Peter

Freddie Laker, academic airlines, superbowl adverts and kinky boots

Freddie Laker, one of the fathers of the lo-cost and no-frills airline, died on February the 9th 2006. He saw the niche for such a service in 1966 with the transatlantic Skytrain getting its permission to go ahead in 1977. The firm declared bankruptcy in 1982 owing £250 million. He was the inspiration for Sir Richrad Branson and Stelios Haji-loannou for Virgin Atlantic and easyJet (respectively). More can be found here

In a similar vein, another entrepreneur (is there like a French word for this word?) Barry Considine has set up an airline aimed at academics travelling between Oxford and Cambridge. The 22 minute flight is claimed to save 2 hours, so go look at Sky Commuter. Nearly complete spectrum opposites of the airline business.

If you liked the Honda adverts, why not have a look at this site. Part of the video Google library, this is a page with all the adverts from the Super Bowl XL - the best of the best adverts for American consumerism and some of the ones that didn't get through the censorship board. Why waste time on watching adverts, aren't we trying to look at other examples of marketing.

Then back on to the Niche Markets, there once was a shoe maker in Northampton, who as time went by with the strong pound and cheaper imports. The family name was Pateman, the son convinced his father to make boots for the drag queen market. Not only that he also got the BBC 2 series, Trouble at the Top, to make a documentary - an excellent advert. Then to top it off, you get a movie made of the success of the company. The film Kinky Boots and the company Divine, hey you can even watch the DVD, out now.

That's all for this week, now the curse of the Boston Group Matrix!

The (new and old) Honda Adverts - To vroom or not!

By now, you should have seen the choir humming, vrooming and hitting their teeth with their nails in the mulit-storey car park remininscient of the sixties and seventies in a way to sell a car or at least to create more brand awareness. If you haven't, please point your pointy thing (cursor) here

When was the last tim eyou felt a connection with a car
A car that might just change the way you feel about driving.
At Honda, we want driving to be fun, exciting and involving, it says on the Honda advert
So we built the new civic

So following the 7 P's of marketing, does the advert follow the criteria? Well I am only going to use the first three as I don't want you to get too bored.

1st P = Honda Civic, never been built by Honda before so you have to market it right. The advert is different and although at the end of the advert, it only just states the brand name (not even the name of the sodding car) and its tag line - The Power of Dreams, maybe subliminely it writes out tPod. Maybe I am just lookng into it too far. But the advert and the making of the advert is avaiable as a video download for your generic white mp3 players and on computer software. So already, are the advertisers targetting a set market, youngish lot who have a disposable income (they have mp3 players or computers, slightly fixated about how an advert is made).

In the advert, a man states that Honda are well known for making very reliable cars, the man is Michael Russoff (the advertising creative), he says that part of the civic is about, really, connecting back to driving. So how do you get that feeling (the emotional feeling) across?

They recorded the sounds of the car and then got a choir to emulate the sounds use their voices, etc. Will it sell the car or are you selling the brand? To watch the video and the making of it, unless you are video podcasting, you are on the Honda website and with the click of a mouse, you can build a Civic, you can obtain a brochure and get the specs and prices. So maybe the advert has the idea of getting the punter (customer) to the brand website. Has anyone else got any ideas, or is anyone else reading this?

The second P - Prices - the website is linked to the price list as said above, there are three prices, the most expensive is put first to grab the attention and you can tot up the specifcations to your heart's content. You also order a brochure or download it as a pdf file. So you are sorted for the pricing.

The third P - Promotion - the website, gives you the chance to play the video and the making of the video. But what else does it do to promote the car (sorry, product). A message from Honda's Civic Project Leader - Customers should not think 'this is a good car', but rather feel 'I can enjoy this car'. Mr. Matsumoto - even the name is slightly westernised, "Mr". On the explore window, you can see the vehicle from any point of view. Then you can click on the car to see its selling points (the design, it is wedged shaped so it is moving towards the next generation or the sharp and smooth flowing lines of the kimono into the desgin of the wedge shaped car) or the i-shift transmission (go from an automatic to manual with the ease of a racing car shift gear). I am starting to like the idea of buying one (no I musn't). Steering wheel with bluetooth connectivity and voice recogntion to control satellite navigation, audio system and interior climate. Sorry getting side tracked, but the website is the main part of the promotion. One of the older adverts, Cog, you could order the dvd of the film and then of course, they have your address to send you more details, no sign of this type of thing on this website or ad as of yet!

New articles after tonight's lecture - biofuel

On the way to the lecture, I was listening to BBC Radio 2's Business News (Martin Shankleman)and heard the article based on George Bush's State of the Union address. He, George, has stated that the US is addicted to the dependenance on Middle Eastern Oil, so is now looking to exploit the ethanol market.

"By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past," Mr Bush declared in his state of the union address to Congress early today... taken from quoted from this Guardian article

Ethanol can be made from corn (USA), sugar cane (Brazil) and sawdust (Sweden).

This BBC article explains more with reference to the ethanol market and the success in the southwest. Even SAAB cars are releasing the Saab Biopower car and more information can be found at this blog

Even Richard Branson is getting in on the act.

Want to make your own electricity, have a look at this

However, before jumping on the band wagon, have a look at this Climate change experts claim that far from being environmentally friendly, the new fuels in fact pose a threat and this other article (you try and save the environment and get taxed by the Government)

Any comments, go on I dare you!

The importance of the colour blue in marketing

Just stuff taken from the Internet, so be prepared to take with a huge pinch of salt and be wary of your blood and heart conditions

Blue is one of the three primary additive colors; blue light has the shortest wavelength range (about 420–490 nanometers) of the three additive primary colors. The English language commonly uses "blue" to refer to any color from blue to cyan.

Colour coordinates

Hex triplet #0000FF
RGB (0, 0, 255)
CMYK (100, 100, 0, 0) Normalised to (0-255) (changing to (0-100)
HSV (240o, 100%, 100%)

Etymology

The modern English word blue comes from the Middle English, where it began to be used along with bleu, an Old French word of Germanic origin (possibly Old High German blao, "shining"). A Scots and Scottish English word for "blue-grey" is blae, from the Middle English bla ("dark blue," from the Old English blæd). As a curiosity, blue is thought to be cognate with blond and black, also with Latin flavus ("yellow"; see flavescent and flavine) and with Russian белый, belyi ("white," see beluga), all of which derive (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning "to shine, flash or burn", whence the names of various bright colors, and that of color black from a derivation meaning "burnt" (other words derived from this root include bleach, bleak, blind, blank, blush, blaze, flame, fulminate, flagrant and phlegm).

A clear sky on a sunnyday appears blue because of Rayleigh scattering of the light from the Sun. Large quantities of water appear blue because red light around 750 nm is absorbed as an overtone of the O-H stretching vibration. Interestingly, heavy water is colorless, because the absorption band (~950 nm) is outside the visible spectrum.

Blue at Wikipedia

The colour blue in food

A few years ago, the makers of "m & m's," an American candy which contains an assortment of different colored chocolate sweets, added a new color to its candy bag: Blue. Blue ? Why Blue? Although they reported that this was the result of a vote by m & m's fans it raises a few questions. It may very well be the last color left in the bag after the novelty wears off.

Of all the colors in the spectrum, blue is an appetite suppressant. Weight loss plans suggest putting your food on a blue plate. Or even better than that, put a blue light in your refrigerator and watch your munchies disappear. Or here's another tip: Dye your food blue! A little black will make it a double whammy. A million years ago, when our earliest ancestors were foraging for food, blue, purple and black were "color warning signs" of potentially lethal food.

Color and the appeal of various foods is also closely related. Just the sight of food fires neurons in the hypothalamus. Subjects presented food to eat in the dark reported a critically missing element for enjoying any cuisine: the appearance of food. For the sighted, the eyes are the first place that must be convinced before a food is even tried. This means that some food products fail in the marketplace not because of bad taste, texture, or smell but because the consumer never got that far. Colors are significant and almost universally it is difficult to get a consumer to try a blue-colored food -- though more are being marketed for children these days. Greens, browns, reds, and several other colors are more generally acceptable, though they can vary by culture. The Japanese are renowned for their elaborate use of food colorings, some that would have difficulty getting approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.

Blue Colouring

Marketing for the Tweens Market

With tweens, aged about eight to 12, you move into the "concrete operations" stage.

Here, "kids can classify and prioritize. They have the capability for logic, for understanding...why something may be better or more valuable." These tweens may be able to outwit younger kids at trading games such as Pokemon because they understand this concept of value.

"They become very peer oriented, but they're really still not totally conceptual," said Livingston. "They can't make big, abstract leaps. If you put a blue ball (in a magazine ad) and said, 'This can be your world if you wear this cologne; you'll be in a state of euphoria,' they wouldn't get any of that."

Tween sector can't make abstract leaps in advertising

Any other ideas welcome, click on comments

First post and just a link to cold calling

This is the first post and it may or may not be a good idea.

But the idea of this BLOG is to get us lot in the group to post addresses of articles we see that either embrace the wonderfulness of marketing or want to make you throw up in the alcove of an adjacent doorway as you walk out of the nightclub of marketing orientation whilst holding the kebab of marketing myopia.

As in the topical words of the Oscar (registered trademark) award, For Your Consideration, an article in the Guardian on Saturday talked about the life, times and decline of the cold calling industry
Cold Calling article in the Guardian

If you would like to see some other ideas, articles,links or whatever, please add to the cooments and then everyone can see them, if you don't like it as well put that in the comments as well and then we can change it or at least put the marketing blog out of its misery. Or if you know of another way of doing this better, add it to the comments, but just add a comment ...

thanks Pete