Funding the Unsexy

Last week, I took part in a meeting to talk about fundraising campaign messaging with a non-profit that’s gearing up to raise tens of millions of dollars over the course of the next few years. With this money, the organization will effect a grand master plan, fulfilling its mission on a larger scale and in a better way. The total dollars to be raised amount to several times more than the organization has ever attempted in the past.

Among the litany of familiar challenges we reviewed—a shrinking pool of donors with less to spend exacerbated by a tough economy—one in particular caught my attention: The first infusion of funds needs to go to some things that are decidedly unsexy for conventional funders: upgraded systems and infrastructure, along with a large-scale migration of data. Which can you more easily justify, Mr. Donor, putting your millions into buildings (solid, enduring, real and potentially beautiful) or bits (insubstantial, ephemeral, out of public view)? Which excites you more, Ms. Contributor?

And yet, increasingly, the bits are precisely the thing that will require large-scale priority funding in health and social welfare, culture and the arts. As marketers, we have our work cut out for us: How do we drive home the significance of these needs in visceral ways? What role can we play in cultivating a mindset that accepts, even prefers, to contribute to the infotech component of a major initiative over its buildings and spaces? How do we help funders eager to raise their civic profile to find compelling value in earmarking for “the digital plumbing”, as we like to think of it today? Let’s put our minds to it. (EL)

LG Thrill and Marquee: Smartphone naming gets smarter

With a huge appetite for evocative names based on real English language words, mobile carriers have put OEMs in an difficult position: to locate something ownable in an increasingly picked-over namescape. The resulting names, while resourceful, sometimes also come off as a bit ludicrous—to the endless delight of critics in industry pubs. (How many 10 Worst lists can you find?)

LG Electronics asked Applied Storytelling to address the naming bottleneck at several levels, from assessing the “state of naming” category-wide to refining LG’s own process to actually developing names for LG’s newest devices and technologies.

Thrill and Marquee are the first outcomes to go live from this ongoing effort. Debuting in 3Q 2011, the LG Thrill™ 4G is the first glasses-free 3D smartphone from AT&T. The name has enjoyed ready acceptance as a fitting cue for 3D-and-more capabilities the phone delivers.

Likewise, the LG Marquee, marketed through Sprint, has set the stage for a story around the smartphone’s ultrabright 4-inch Nova display as well as for its sleek, lightweight fusion of fashion and technology.

Ultimately, we see a world in which carriers and manufacturers come together to develop more truly brand-centric naming solutions. Until that day, we’re pleased to provide LG with a naming platform that supports an ambitious product roadmap while responding to the realities of smartphone naming today.

Be interesting

A friend with a small startup business asked me not long ago what single piece of advice I would give him to build a successful brand. Just be interesting, I told him. If you don’t have the time or money to embark on a full-fledged brand development effort, then at least make the effort to be interesting. In itself, this will go a long ways to setting you apart. And setting yourself apart is a key objective of brand work.

I realize this piece of advice risks leading the less savvy and emotionally honest among us astray. And so, a few caveats to go with it:

First, watch out for being interesting simply for the sake of being interesting. Your “point of interest” needs to be grounded in some real facet of your business. This is probably a roundabout way of saying, “In being interesting, remain true to who you are.”

Second, remember that your goal is to be interesting to your customer, not to yourself. It’s okay to start with what you personally find interesting about what you offer or do. That may, in fact, be the best place to begin. But it’s by no means the place to stop. If you think you’re interesting but your customer doesn’t, you aren’t. So pay attention. Eric La Brecque

Raymond Loewy and the birth of the brand platform

How gratifying to read about this early, great industrial design consultant in Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things.

First, of course, Loewy was an early proponent of the argument that good design sells. Few have argued more convincingly since.

Better still, he was a champion of the idea that integrated design sells. By no means did he limit himself to products themselves: His assignments extended to packaging and even messages.

Loewy might also be the grandfather of experience design itself: Petroski recounts how in 1927 Loewy was invited by Henry Saks to appraise the layout of a new, uptown branch of the famous Manhattan department store. Loewy did that and more, commenting as well on the conduct of staff and their role in the customer experience, the design of store graphics, a unified advertising campaign and so on.

In this regard, he’s the direct forerunner of the discipline we practice today.

Local is the new national

We purchase a Lululemon sweatshirt and read on the label, “Made in Vancouver”. We open the box of a new Apple computer and read, in white print on a black box, perfectly centered in a sea of Styrofoam: “Designed by Apple in California”.  These statements give a brief if specific pleasure.

Just as the nation state is no longer the motive political force it was, it may no longer be the motive brand force, either.

In our networked and branded world, the rise of the city-state or region-state may prove every bit as important as the rise of the tribe. After all, when did the nation ever, really, speak to a sense of community? Eric La Brecque

Positioning: Choose one

Recently, a major research firm tested three positioning scenarios we’d developed for a new energy company. The results? Test subjects (who represented potential customers and business partners) felt all three were viable. Going further, several participants asked if the scenarios could be combined in some way.

The good thing about these test findings is that the company knows it can move forward with any of three possible positionings. The temptation to avoid is to try to combine them. In isolation, each of the three scenarios is crisp: a clearly defined value proposition that stands to set the company apart from the competition. To the contrary, any combination of new, hybrid scenarios almost certainly risks being muddy.

And, in fact, the scenarios will be combined—just not in the way the participants are thinking: One will be elevated to the company’s brand positioning and the other two will become supporting strengths. Put another way, one will drive the story and the other two will enrich it.

Naming made easy

So easy, in fact, anyone can do it. (Except that a growing number of the names you generate will already have dibs on them.) First, forget about any symbolic or rational link to the company to be named. That doesn’t matter. What matters is sheer, raw memorability—an iconic pow. This is the most important rule in the exercise. If you can’t do this, you simply can’t have the kind of name that will gain the notice you crave in the brave new world we live in.

Okay, now create two columns. Your name will be the combined result of the lh + rh columns. (Some clever, resourceful people will invert this order in the never-ending pursuit of ownability.)

In the lefthand column, list the four Pythagorean elements — air, earth, fire and water. Or, if you prefer, the six elements of the I-Ching: heaven, earth, thunder, water, mountain, wind (or wood), sun (or fire), marsh (or mist).

Beneath them, list the names of colors. Give preference to the basic colors of the spectrum. Obscure hues (carmine, sepia) or colors with long, complicated names (viridian, chartreuse), generally don’t work as well.

If you think you might need more options, you can add the names of basic elements (iron, copper, helium) or stones (jade, sapphire, diamond).

In the righthand column, list lots of names of animals. Give preference to commonly recognized animals —barnyard animals, the animals of the Chinese zodiac, etc. Add lots of birds and great cats.

If you think you might need more options, you can add a second set of names derived from flowers (rose, daisy, orchid) and possibly other plants and trees as long as the words are simple and the species aren’t overly obscure (pine, alder, ash).

Now, get some of those great multi-sided dice that used to be so popular for role-playing games in the pre-computer days — you can still find them at Forbidden Planet in Manhattan, among other places — and randomly generate some candidates. Keep going until you tire, get something that strikes your fancy, or hit upon something still ownable.

Lithium Bear

Rose Pine

Daisy Gray

Donkey Neon

Earth Rhino

Cheetah Green

Marsh Monkey

Ruby Tulip

Still not ownable enough?

Go to three elements (alternating columns):

Blue Cheetah Green

Add some fun numbers. Only you need to know what they refer to. But some numbers are inherently more pleasing than others. Our faves: 7, 13, 21, 24, 52, 69, 2000 and any numbers that repeat themselves (55, 66, 77, etc.). Don’t forget the the address of the street where your parents lived when you were born or derivatives of your birthday. Remember, good numbers should be easy to say as well as fun to look at!

21 Red Plover

Violet Monkey 69

Go have fun! And be a great, visionary entrepreneur, too.

[Apologies to anyone who already owns these names. We didn’t check them. We  just generated them at random.]

RealD: from startup to stock offering

Working with startups requires special attention—and can provide unique satisfaction. Last week, we celebrated the kind of milestone we hope to see with every startup client when RealD went live on as RLD on the NYSE after a successful public offering that raised US $200 million.

We started with RealD when it was just the founders sitting in two chairs in an otherwise empty room, named them and helped them at successive stages of growth.

Even better than the pleasure of seeing the RealD logo across the screen at every new 3D movie is the unique level of trust that develops over the course of working together from those early stage days.

The Toledo Region: Positioned for growth in the New Manufacturing Economy

Live, learn, work and play attributes set to drive economic development

At a time of increasingly intense competition between cities and regions for talent, funding and resources, a broad consortium of companies and organizations representing the Toledo Region has adopted a platform communicating the region’s unique appeal from an economic development, quality of life, education and leisure tourism perspective. Applied Storytelling led the ten-month initiative.

“For those of us who have a stake in this region’s well-being, its strengths have always been clear,” says Joe Napoli, President & General Manager of the Toledo Mud Hens and a member of the Toledo Region Committee. “Until now, however, we literally haven’t been on the same page in communicating those strengths. Now we have the ability to do so.”

A consortium committed to adoption

The newly defined regional brand was introduced to local media and a group of more than 100 business leaders and local media on June 16. The committee is currently developing a plan for large-scale implementation. Significantly, each of the committee member organizations has committed to integrating key messages of the brand platform into their own communications.

Adopting a best practices approach

As part of the development effort, Applied Storytelling conducted a series of six community forums throughout the region, convened six work sessions with regional opinion leaders and conducted a public survey that generated several hundred responses. At the same time, Toledo-based Great Lakes Marketing conducted a research effort geared to gathering opinion and insight from more than 100 regional business leaders.

“From the outset, the committee was committed to pursuing a best practices approach,” says Dave Nolan, President of Destination Toledo, the region’s tourism and convention marketing organization, who convened the committee in early 2009. “We knew that the keys to widespread adoption and long-term success rested in an effort that was as inclusive and transparent as possible.”

Unified story, differentiated positionings

The communications platform developed by Applied Storytelling included distinct positionings, messages and storylines for economic development, quality of life, education and leisure tourism, with economic development identified as the lead component of the region’s overall brand story.

“On one hand, the region will benefit from a cohesive story that is emotionally engaging and easy to understand,” says Eric La Brecque, Principal of Applied Storytelling. “On the other, the days of one-size-fits all messaging to serve the many agendas of an entity as complex and diverse as an entire region are long gone.”

Competitive research validated the committee’s decision to focus overall brand positioning around leadership in the New Manufacturing Economy—manufacturing enabled by digital technologies, sophisticated systems and processes, and a highly-trained workforce. In addition to being highly differentiating, the clarity and sharp definition of this positioning reflect a level of brand discipline that relatively few regions have been able to achieve.

Creating an open, accessible content hub

The Toledo Region brand platform will be placed on the initiative’s initial web site, www.toledoregionstory.com, together with other background materials. Initial implementation plans call for developing a robust site as a dynamic communications hub and content-rich resource for any individual or organization seeking to integrate the region’s story into their own brand marketing initiatives.

Applied Storytelling adds Russell Banks & Gail Brackett to lead Los Angeles office

Applied Storytelling, a brand consulting firm with offices in Berkeley, CA and Detroit, MI has added two senior brand communications experts—and long-time collaborators—to open Applied Storytelling’s new full-time office in Los Angeles.

Beginning this month, Russell Banks is now Director, Brand Engagement and Gail Brackett is Director, Brand Strategy for Applied Storytelling. Most recently with the Los Angeles office of Gensler, the world’s largest architecture and design firm, Banks and Brackett led the Brand Design business practice firm-wide. While at Gensler, Banks and Brackett oversaw multi-disciplinary teams in brand initiatives for MGM Mirage CityCenter (Las Vegas), The Beverly Hilton and the City of Calgary, among others.

Previously, the two also teamed for several years at the Los Angeles office of strategic brand and design firm Siegel & Gale, directing engagements for global brands including Lexus, Technicolor, American Express and Herbalife.”

“We’ve enjoyed a solid decade of exciting work partnering with Russell and Gail on many of our respective firms’ most important efforts,” said Eric La Brecque, Principal of Applied Storytelling. “We know each other’s strengths and sensibilities, and we’ve put them to the test literally dozens of times.”

While strengthening the firm’s overall ability to work with clients in a range of business sectors, Banks and Brackett bring particular depth to Applied Storytelling’s growing destination brand practice and expand our firm’s brand management offering.

“Our clients have expressed a growing interest in mapping how their brand lives beyond the approved strategy,” says Matthew Kruchko, Managing Director for Applied Storytelling. “We’ve worked to continually strengthen our brand management offering to support this and now have added two new team members who are leaders in this area.”

Established in Los Angeles in 1992, Applied Storytelling has continued to maintain a strong client base in Los Angeles and Southern California more generally since relocating its main office to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004.

“Los Angeles has always been a place of inspiration and opportunity for us,” says La Brecque. “And we are delighted to be strengthening our day-to-day presence in the region once again.”

About Applied Storytelling

A leading independent brand and name development firm,  Applied Storytelling has developed corporate and product brands and corporate and product naming systems for organizations ranging from startups to top Fortune 50® companies. Dedicated to the development and refinement of new tools and methods, Applied Storytelling has also recently focused on helping clients to increase the value of their brand development initiatives by using the brand as a lens for identifying prospective business partners, new business opportunities, and additional sources of revenue.