The Business Card: Your Best Brand Buddy

These days, while every company large and small races to get themselves suited up with iPhone apps, mobile marketing campaigns, Web 2.0 sites, blogs, Flickr Accounts, Vimeo and YouTube pages, Twitter feeds and so on – I’m tired just writing that list – it’s good to remember that a strong brand story can just as easily be communicated with a smart idea using the simplest of tools.

Witness the humble business card. I worked at an advertising agency years ago called The Alligator Group, and our business cards had an anatomically accurate bite die-cut off the side; a bite that we had researched with the help of a veterinary dentist to ensure accuracy. Like most advertising and marketing firms, creating advertising for ourselves was way down on the bottom of the to-do list, somewhere after replenishing the cereal cupboard, or clearing out the paper samples shelf. However, these gator-bitten cards were the best promotional tool we could have ever done. Everyone commented on them. Everyone remembered them. People asked for extras to give away to friends. I don’t have stats to back it up but I bet a huge percentage of the contracts that company won began by someone being impressed with the business card.

That was a case of a card that reinforced the name of the company, The Alligator Group. Others I’ve found online are far smarter, and actually reinforce the brand promise or consumer benefit.

There’s the carpenter who has business cards printed on the back of sandpaper. 

There’s the direct mail processing house that prints business cards on tiny white envelopes (the kind you get floral greeting cards in).

There’s the divorce lawyer who has a business card that is perforated down the middle, so it can be divided in half.

There’s the Adventure tour planners who have cards printed on beef jerky (for emergency rations when you are lost).

There are even whole blogs devoted to creative business cards. Some are just nifty. Others are brilliant. CreativeBits is one you might want to check out.

And of course, recently, people have starting handing me business cards that are memory sticks, or miniature CD-Roms, or pens with a USB gizmo attached. I hate these. They force me to DO something in order to find out what I want to know which is: how do I reach you and what do you do and, most important, why should I care?

The point is this: most of the time when you meet someone face-to-face, the first thing you do is hand out a business card. If your card can be unique and reinforce your special niche or your brand promise, you will have begun a new relationship in a very powerful way. You’re no longer just “Bob, that guy I met last night.” Now you are “Bob, the city’s only antique taxidermy restoration specialist.”

This is obviously more difficult to do if your company is a bank or an insurance company or some other professional services firm. Chances are you have standard cards designed by HQ and no opportunity to muck about with them. And for some of these kinds of firms, it’s probably best to just do what you’re told.

But if you are an entrepreneur, or a retailer, or anyone involved in selling a good or a service, don’t forget to think hard about your business card. It’s the first impression you make, and it may be the last impression many of your customers ever see from your company. Consider hiring a design firm to do something smart and memorable and appropriate to your brand and your industry. It will be worth the investment.

A Social Media Backlash?

There is a pattern that societal changes seem to follow. Early adopters rush in, others gradually follow, and eventually widespread acceptance is the new norm. The change is either then accepted and we move on, or there is a revolt. I think we’ve hit widespread acceptance of social media. Will we revolt or adapt and move on?
I was at a lunch put on by the Urban Development Institute last week, and one of the speakers exhorted the assembled throng of real estate developers to embrace social media. I’ve been telling our real estate developer clients to do this for since 2008. But now one of their own is finally on the soapbox with me.

We’ve all seen the statistics. Staggering numbers of people of all ages and socio-economic categories have embraced these new networking and sharing tools. There is nary a TV commercial or billboard or print ad remaining anywhere across the land that doesn’t include a Facebook address or a Twitter feed link. Traditional media have stopped taking pot shots at social media, and have instead incorporated these tools into their reportage. I think we can safely say we’ve reached the tipping point.

And so, as could be expected, the signs of rebellion have started. Just as the last reluctant holdouts are resigning themselves to participating, others are starting to turn away. Twitter’s growth has slowed dramatically. Monocle Magazine is declaring Social Media dead, and is trumpeting the arrival of Slow Media, a phrase stolen from the Slow Food movement. Even our own esteemed scribe Tony Wanless is opening admitting that he’s on a social media diet. If you look at many other sectors of popular culture (food, interior design, fashion, etc.) the trend is towards the slower, the hand-made, the well crafted, the small, and the beautiful. Can the sleek shiny fast-paced tech-savvy world of social media continue in the face of this kind of cultural opposition? Will we tweet as we sip artisanal tea infusions from hand-thrown pottery cups in our antique Danish chairs on reclaimed barn-wood floors wrapped in our heirloom Amish quilt?

This is the closing paragraph where I am supposed to state my opinion and support it with a few pithy proofs. But I don’t know what to say. Part of me thinks that social media is an entirely new world-view, and that the collaborative communities it has spawned are too desirable and too efficient to ever be rent asunder. Another part of me is weary of all the effort and the chatter, and still enjoys the Sunday newspaper with a proper espresso, reveling in the opportunity to think, slow down, and disconnect. So I’ll end my observational rant with a question. What do you think? Is social media going to become the new Sony Walkman, destined to gather dust in the junk drawer of the internet? Or is it here to stay as an accepted and integral part of how we live our lives?

Fear Not the Marketing Contest

There was a day when sending three boxtops to the makers of Crunchy Oat Bites might win you a bicycle, and high-end brands avoided this kind of promotional activity like the plague. Not so much anymore. Cohiba cigars gave away a 75,000 dollar vacation last year, complete with a private jet. Cartier, the high-end jewelers, sponsors contest for artists and with a little bit of clicking around on the web you can find contests sponsored by Mercedes, BMW, Louis Vuitton and pretty much any other high-end brand you care to search for.

Correspondingly, mid-level and discount brands are using contests more than they ever did before. There are even multiple websites that aggregate contests for your convenience, to make it easy to learn about how you could win detergent, appliances, furniture: just about anything you can imagine.

I’ve also seen a huge uptick in the number of tiny companies using contests as a way to engage. My own company teamed up with Trevor Linden, former hockey great and newly-minted real estate developer to give away a fundraising tool to charities who wanted to enter. Other small companies use Twitter and Facebook and their own blogging activity to give away everything from cameras to consulting services. My friends at John Fluevog have an ongoing contest, called Open Source Footwear, where anyone can submit a shoe design for consideration, with winners having the shoe named after them and manufactured by the Fluevog team.

So, having established that contests aren’t just for kids anymore, why and how can you use this tool for your brand?

The why is simple: all stigma is gone, and in this information-overload world a contest can be a great way to generate some excitement and engagement for your company.

The how is more complicated. There are many kinds of contests and contest structures as there are companies. No one approach will be right for everyone. This might be an area where expert guidance is a good idea, certainly from a legal perspective (there are a lot of arcane and cumbersome rules whenever you want to give something away), and perhaps from a nuts-and-bolts perspective too.

And how better to end a post on contests than with a contest? If your company has used a contest as a marketing tool, leave a comment in response to this post and describe the contest and the results you generated. I’ll pick the most innovative reply (assuming we get more than three entries) and I’ll donate $100 to the charity of your choice from my own pocket.

So take a moment and engage with me. Enter my contest – and win!

Q&A with Aritzia's Sally Parrott

In a recent Twitter poll of my followers, Aritzia emerged as one of the best-loved and best-managed brands in the Vancouver area. Sally Parrott is the senior director of marketing there, and has agreed to take us behind the scenes and talk to us about the branding and marketing efforts of this home-grown success story.

OBC: Introduce yourself, Sally, and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Sally Parrott: Ok. A little about me. I am a born and bred Vancouverite – grew up in ‘the ditch’ as I affectionately call my home suburb.  I Graduated from UBC with a BComm Marketing, in ‘97 and moved out to Toronto to work for Procter & Gamble. I was in Brand Management there for four years before I had my first early-life crisis and took 18 months off to travel Asia and complete a mountaineering course. 

When I returned to Vancouver I worked briefly for Westbeach Snowboarding Apparel and then was hired by Aritzia in the spring of 2004. When I first began here the marketing team was mostly just me.  Now I am accountable for two departments: Marketing and Creative Services. The marketing side covers everything from interactive to influencer relations to our retail environment. Creative services is a centralized graphic design and visual art department that develops all of the creative for our marketing, but are also accountable for graphics and branding on our clothing, murals and in-store art as well as window displays/installations. It’s an amazingly talented and creative group. We are about 25 people now.

OBC: What does the Aritzia brand stand for? What are the brand values and brand truths that you are trying to build with your audience?

SP: That feels like a huge question, doesn’t it? Ultimately we are a boutique clothing store that is aspirational and accessible to young women. In terms of values and truths, we believe in style and good design. Quality and attention to detail. We also believe in the power of culture, femininity and authenticity. You can’t fool people with poor quality or marketing BS – they may not recognize the designer of a piece of furniture or know the band that’s playing on the stereo – but they can feel that there’s quality and authenticity to the environment.
When we last talked, you told me about a change in direction in terms of your approach to social media. You tried one thing and then found a better way. Can you fill us in on that? SP: I think the common belief, particularly when you are an aspirational brand, is that you need to tightly control your content as well as every medium where you want to find that content. The challenge with social media is that the mediums for content are growing exponentially. Self-publication had taken the reins of control out of our hands. Rather than fight that, we decided to develop compelling content, fundamentally centralize it on our web properties, then make it as flexible and ‘transferable’ as possible.  Then encourage the social media world to come and take whatever they want and let them do the work of pushing it out.  We aren’t completely there yet but we’re heading in the right direction.  
 
OBC: What lessons have you learned about branding and marketing that you think apply to any business? What lessons are unique to Aritzia?

SP: Coming from P&G I was very bought-in to the whole brand and marketing juggernaut. Our marketing there was very focused on traditional advertising and print media. The brand lived in the messaging or tag line, in the benefit statement. That model works – P&G is a powerhouse. But what I have learned here is that the brand can and should run deeper than that and extend far beyond ‘marketing.' Our brand is not just a layer of creative that lives on top of what we do.

People spend a lot of time focused on the magic of marketing when they should be looking at the fundamentals and core proposition of their business model. What have I learned that’s unique to Aritzia? The fashion industry is a crazy business. I love it but the pace of change is extraordinary – you can be the next best thing one moment and forgotten the next.  I guess what I’ve learned that may be unique to us is to roll with the punches.  Our brand is not a hard-and-fast set of rules – it’s a moving entity.  Our logo, our creative, the colours we use – all are up for grabs if the mood strikes. We treat our brand less like a set of graphic requirements and more like a beautiful sieve that everything must pass through.

OBC: To what do you attribute the success of the Aritzia brand?

SP: I think I’ve touched on this a bit already.  We have product young women want to buy, in an environment that is energetic and compelling, with staff that know how to service the clientele, all represented by marketing that is interesting and challenges the norm. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  I think people feel that. It’s our 25th birthday this year and no one has really been able to duplicate what we have built. I think it’s a huge testament to Brian Hill, our CEO, and the entire team here.

OBC:  Thanks Sally. Keep us posted on new things you are working on. We'd love to hear more!

Ten Marketing Resolutions for 2010

I’m sharing them because they are universal, and apply to any company; it doesn’t matter if your company sells real estate or potato chips or environmental consulting services.

1. Stop thinking about social media marketing as a separate thing and start thinking about all-inclusive marketing. Let’s get over it and get on with it.

2. Be comfortable with ambiguity: things are going to keep changing faster than we can keep up with. That’s ok.

3. Remember that tactics are not strategy. 2009 was all about discovering new tools. It’s great that your YouTube video got a million views, but how did that help you meet your objectives?

More: 10 B.C. Luminaries & Their Resolutions
Video: Vancouver's 2009 Resolutions
More: 2010 Resolutions Are Pure Folly
More: Five Web Trends to Watch in 2010

4. Realize that you must converse with your fans, customers, and anyone else who reaches out to you. It’s a two-way conversation now. Plan accordingly.

5. Stand for something bigger than what you are trying to sell. Have a passion. Preach it. Be bigger than yourself. Don’t build a brand; build a movement.

6. Collaborate with suppliers and clients and competitors and customers and anyone else who can help. Throw your doors open.

7. Do something to help. The Not-For-Profit sector has been decimated. They make our communities and lives better. We need to actively integrate support into our corporate game plans.

8. Be a sponge. Find time to read more. Subscribe to newsletters and RSS feeds and blogs. Set aside time every day to stay on top of everything you can.

9. Sell the truth. Ensure transparency and honesty and fairness is at the core of everything your brand says and does.  

10. Stay healthy, personally and professionally. Get rid of habits and activities that don’t contribute to your brand or your own well-being.

Here’s a bonus resolution, just because I’m feeling generous. It’s a kind of uber-resolution that applies to the previous ten listed herein, and to pretty much everything else that you need to accomplish or want to accomplish in the coming year.

It’s this: Start Small and Start Now.

Happy 2010, everyone.

Fluevog Marketing Director Bares Sole

A few weeks ago I ran a Twitter poll (follow me at @BAdavid) and asked my followers what Vancouver-based brands were rocking it. John Fluevog Shoes was one of the top brands mentioned. With 10 stores across North America and sales of 75,000 pairs of footwear a year this is a brand with legions of fashion-forward followers, that seemingly rides the trend wave year after year without much turbulence. Stephen Bailey is the Marketing Communications Director at Fluevog, the crazy kooky shoe company based in Vancouver since 1970. Here’s my interview with him.

Q: Fluevog’s fan base is incredibly loyal – they are in love with your brand, which is an enviable position. How did you get there? What do you attribute this to?

A lot of people tell us it’s because we’ve never sold out – which I know means different things to different people- but we take it to mean the brand has stayed true and consistent to the vision it was founded on. The voice of John Fluevog himself has been the driving force behind that for 40 years now. People know what to expect. There’s a flag planted in the ground. It’s a blessing and a curse; the shoes all come from John’s brain; if people get it they love it. If they don’t, they don’t.

We are a family internally too, revolving around John Fluevog, and the theme of consistency is internal as well. We all want to do things right. There’s a human-ness to what we do and who we are and how we represent ourselves through our marketing – it’s a little sarcastic and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re not curing cancer here, but at the same time we are interested in being good: good people doing good things. 

Q: What are the core values of the brand, and how are they played out in the life of the company?

Quality, Comfort and Uniqueness are our written-down-on-paper core values. But the line I like better is “unique soles for unique souls.” We have this amazing variety of individualistic people coming through the door, and the product itself is very unique. I had an email from a teacher in Istanbul the other day. Another teacher saw her shoes and not only knew they were Fluevogs, but knew the name of the style. We think of Fluevog as more of a movement than a brand. I know everyone is saying this stuff these days, but we’ve been at it for 40 years. That’s a huge advantage. We stumbled on this early.

Q: What new branding and marketing tools and techniques are on your radar? Have you been using social media? Crowd-sourcing? Other stuff?

Again, we stumbled into things a bit ahead of the curve. We’ve been crowdsourcing shoe designs for more than 8 years and have had over 2000 submissions online from various people. For the first 32 years of our business, people were constantly giving John their “dream shoe” sketch on a scrap of paper when he was in the stores. So we decided to let them load their ideas up onto the website.  If we make your shoe we name it after you and you get a free pair. This was crowdsourcing long before there was a name for it.

And of course social media is an exciting thing for us, given our customer loyalty. We’re using Facebook and Twitter. I really don’t understand why any company wouldn’t be in this space. CBC news was interviewing us about how we use social media, and off-camera the reporter was telling me they were going to interview an office supply company that didn’t think social media was necessary. I was stunned. Why wouldn’t they use these tools? It makes no sense to ignore social media, regardless of what industry you are in. Why wouldn’t you want to talk with your customers?

Q: What’s the most successful marketing tactic you’ve ever used?

Without question it’s been the crowdsourcing of shoe designs on our website. It provides incredible consumer engagement. It’s a hugely active section of our site, and not just for those who are submitting designs. Everyone hangs out there. I guess it’s just human nature to want to see what others create.

Q: What tactic did you try and abandon because it didn’t work?

That’s a hard question. We’ve been lucky and cautious, so most things we’ve started have worked out. The ones that didn't work out as well as we'd hoped might not have been given time - we could probably work on our patience. I think if you’re not ready to commit to something 100% you shouldn’t do it. We live by that rule. It helps us stay focused on doing things well.