Merriam Associates, Inc. Brand Strategies

Merriam Associates specializes in branding that gets results. Everything we do systematically generates leads, closes sales, boosts profits, and builds a solid reputation for your company and your products or services. Our background combines the rigor of global Fortune 500 companies with the tenacity of successful entrepreneurs.

Glenn Beck's Brand of Politics at the Restore Honor Rally

Merriam Associates doesn’t often cover politics, but when we found ourselves in Washington DC during the Glenn Beck Restore Honor rally, we couldn’t resist asking participants why they came, what they stand for and what they hope will happen next. We discovered the “Glenn Beck brand” of politics is different than portrayed and is broader than expected. Watch to hear what Restore Honor participants have to say in their own words.

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Congratulations to Geomentum

Merriam Associate’s client Geomentum is in the news with a new president, Lisa Bradner. Read about the new appointment here.

Merriam Associates created the Geomentum name a year ago when Interpublic consolidated several large local media-buying and marketing services units including newspaper buying agency NSA Media, Wahlstrom, a specialist in Yellow Pages and local search, and out-of-home expert Outdoor Services. Geomentum controls over $2 billion in traditional local media.

The Geomentum name was created to begin to tell the company’s brand story of hyper-local media analysis, planning and management. More than a media buying company, Geomentum’s expertise and technology helps marketers use highly detailed local-level information across media (including traditional print, out-of-home, mobile, and local Internet) to impact sales success across tens of thousands of neighborhoods. Geomentum helps marketers “own the neighborhood.”

Congratulations to Geomentum turning one year old August 5th.

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Breaking the Motorola Brand

Splitting up Motorola

Splitting Motorola into two companies should have been a great branding opportunity—a chance to create two distinctive, focused, world leading brand names. Unfortunately, the brains behind the Motorola branding missed the opportunity. Trying to spread the Motorola brand equity across two companies destroys the brand for both.

Breaking up the company makes business sense: the two companies now become a business-to-consumer company for cell phones and a business-to-business market for engineering products. What doesn’t make sense is breaking up the Motorola brand.

Instead of one company keeping the Motorola brand and the other creating a new brand, both are using the Motorola name. They double down on the damage by attaching two bland descriptions to the brand: “Solutions” for the mobile devices company and “Mobility” for enterprise and carrier infrastructure.

Breaking Branding Rule #1: Be Distinctive

The reason to brand anything in the first place is to stand out as uniquely the best in the market. Motorola has been in the 100 best brands because of its clear and distinctive focus. From beginning in the 1930s as “sound in motion”, Motorola has been a leader in mobile communications. By two companies being known as Motorola, the brand no longer stands out and is no longer unique. The market will always be asking “which Motorola?” Equally dangerous, the actions of one company will always impact the actions of the other. Though legally separate companies, their identities remain locked together. If one Motorola stumbles, it brings the other one down.

Meaningless Words Make for Bad Brand Names

To make matters worse, the venerable Motorola name is joined with two add on words. Whoever came up with Motorola Solutions must have used the Dack.com’s Bullshit Generator . The word should have been retired years ago as a meaningless banality. “Solutions” is so overused that you no longer hire a kid to mow the lawn, you get Gardening Solutions*. You don’t buy underpants, you buy Underwear Solutions*. Forget about taking your shirts to the laundry—now you have Dry Cleaning Solutions*. What makes Motorola Solutions a worse brand name is that “solutions” once described a 1980’s style of consultative selling that better fits with the business-to-business market. It does not work for the consumer company. (* Yep, believe it or not, these are all real companies.)

The Motorola Mobility brand name is just as bad. “Mobility” is a term strongly associated with the mobility industry, which markets scooters and wheelchairs to the disabled. Mobility has come to have an opposite meaning to its actual definition with its strong identification with immobility. The word “mobile” better carries the meaning. European’s and Asians don’t care cell phones, they carry mobile phones.

Brand Names Are a Different Kind of Asset

As accountants broke Motorola into the two spin-offs, they perhaps thought splitting the brand was as easy as splitting the other assets. Brands don’t work that way. Start trying to split them and they lose their integrity. Like Solomon resolving a custody dispute between two mothers by cutting a baby in half, cutting the Motorola brand in half kills it.

The better approach would have been to decide where the Motorola brand had the most power to influence share and profit in the future. Most likely, the Motorola brand is best suited for the vast consumer business where it has equity that would be expensive and time consuming to rebuild. Creating a new name for the business-to-business infrastructure business would require reaching a smaller pool of highly involved and educated buyers. A new name would have helped sell the engineering expertise and future vision of the company. When AT&T broke up, the consumer-facing business kept the venerable name, while the B2B side adopted Lucent.

The Demise of a Top Brand

Both Motorolas face daunting business challenges. Both would be helped by names that could help the companies carve out strong market positions. Unfortunately, by breaking up the name and adding the blemishes of “solutions” and “mobility”, the Motorolas have pre-doomed their marketing efforts. Watch this venerable brand fall off the 100 top brands within a year.

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Lisa Merriam NPR Interview on BP

Lisa Merriam interviewed on NPR about the fate of the BP brand

Scott Neuman of NPR asked me about the possible boycotts of BP. I explained that brand is not a driver for people buying gas. Location is most important. People will literally not drive across a median to reach a gas station on the other side of the street if there is one conveniently located on their side of the road. Price is also a huge driver.

Can the BP brand survive this accident? Of course. Brands have done worse things on purpose and continue to thrive. Allianz, the insurance giant, covered the Nazi guards of Auschwitz, but to this day refuses to pay the claims of thousands of Jewish customers. Bayer manufactured the Zyklon-B gas that Nazis used to kill millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Top executive Fritz ter Meer was sentenced to seven years prison by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, but resumed his career as chairman of the board of the company in 1956 upon his release. More recently, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley don’t seem to be suffering from multiple serious criminal investigations.

The BP brand can survive this disaster. The bigger question is will the company survive. That is a far less certain thing.

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Boring Green Logo Redesigns Are a Color Cliche

Green–it’s the new blue. As an overused boring corporate color, blue is losing ground to green. Corporations everywhere have been jumping on the “green” bandwagon, whether they are hotels that wash towels less frequently, moving companies that reuse boxes, or retailers that recycle plastic bags. The green washing trend is even spreading corporate logos. Companies with once distinctive and exciting brand marks are trading them in for boring green ones.

Mayflower Movers redesigned their logo and lost their iconic graphic presence. (That creepy giant girl puppet in Mayflower’s “Big Move” ads gets points for being unusual–but not in a good way).

Holiday Inn looks like they hired the same designer as Mayflower. They ditched their fantastic funky retro signature for this forgettable brand mark.

Animal Planet redesigned their mark so that there is no more animal and no more planet.

Quick Chek incongruously grew a leaf in their logo redesign.

Lending Tree went from a Fall-ish maroon leaf to a green one. And they’ve adopted the newly ubiquitous lower case typography that is supposed to make us feel warm and trusting.

Joining the crowd is never a good idea in branding. It’s time to induct the color green into the Overused Brand Ideas Hall of Lame.

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BP’s Social Media Slip Up: BP Can’t Tweet

BP can’t seem to tweet. Maybe you can help?

BP Doubles Down on Damage

My previous post discussed how the oil spill killed BP’s environmental brand positioning. BP’s response to the spill has done even more damage. While the company is focused on the disaster, surely their marketing people aren’t out personally mucking out the marshes (if so, that is a story worth telling). What are they doing now that they aren’t producing commercials in corn fields about biofuels?

No BP “Human Energy” in Social Media

While the accident is beyond the control of BP’s marketing department, the public response is not. For a company spending millions crowing about being about “human energy” and immodestly boasting of being “progressive, responsive and innovative”, their behavior has been anything but. Focusing just on BP’s performance in social media alone, the company fails across the board:

YouTube: How come some kid can instantly produce a video that appears in the top 20 YouTube search results (hoxvlog), and as of now, some 17 days after the disaster, BP’s resource-rich marketing team can’t produce one single video?

LinkedIn: BP’s LinkedIn profile makes zero mention of the disaster. In fact, the company’s only recent post is for a job opening in Libya. No employees of BP seem authorized to even so much as express condolences to families who lost loved ones.

Facebook: BP’s Facebook page has no activity, just a general corporate description taken from Wikipedia—in fact it looks like the BP presence is Wikipedia’s! Worse, our own Merriam Associates posts with the new “Crude BP” logo dominate the page.

Twitter: The corporate BP_plc Twitter account is entirely empty—not even a logo or company description. The BP_America Twitter account is only marginally better. Still it took BP seven days to get out their first tweet. Since then, they have used Twitter solely to promote old-fashioned press releases. There is no “human energy”, human emotion, or evidence of human beings at BP at all. Their CEO should be out there offering condolences, expressing gratitude to people helping with the clean up, posting news, insights or human-interest information.

Live the Brand in Social Media

We live in an age where media never sleeps. BP, instead of being the progressive, responsive innovator their marketing claims, is old-fashioned, guarded, cold, and aloof. Many companies are caught off-guard with no social media strategy when disaster strikes (see my previous post on Crash Branding). But not all companies have made such a big show of being better and more innovative.

Twitter Assistance: Help BP Tweet

With the money, manpower and effort BP is throwing into dealing with this disaster, surely BP has something worthwhile, even positive, to say. Maybe they just need some help from savvy marketers and people who understand Twitter. Suggest some tweets for BP and we will post the best ones here and on Twitter @BP_TweetHelp. No BP bashing, please.

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BP: Disingenuously Branding

The oil spewing from the destroyed drilling-rig off the coast of Louisiana is devastating the environment; it also damages one of the decade’s most prominent brands.

No matter that the oil rig in question is actually owned and operated by Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor. No matter that nine of the eleven victims are Transocean employees. The Obama administration today, followed by most of the media, have branded this disaster the “BP Oil Spill”.

Like Exxon before it, the BP brand is going to be tarred as an environmental demon. Frankly BP has been asking for it.

BP: A Disingenuous Brand

Oil is a dirty business, despite the very best efforts of everyone involved. It isn’t a matter of if, but when an oil company will cause environmental damage. BP put itself in certain jeopardy when it positioned its brand around “energy that doesn’t damage the environment”. The green sun logo, the flower-like “helios” mark , was meant to redefine the company as “beyond” dirty old petroleum, embracing cool, smart clean energy. The fact remains that BP is a dirty old petroleum company, with all of the risks that dirty old petroleum companies face. BP loudly claiming environmental superiority was disingenuous from the start. It was only a matter of time before the truth came out to bite BP. No wonder consumers are so cynical. BP made a brand promise it could never keep. No amount of BP cool advertising about wind farms or solar panels can fix the brand now.

BP Progressive, Responsive and Innovative? NOT

One more thing: BP’s web site immodestly claims that it is “progressive, responsive and innovative”. Yet BP’s response to the oil spill has been nothing like that. They have been totally old school—talking heads and careful press releases vetted by lawyers. The company has a Twitter account, but—hard to believe here in 2010—had nothing to Tweet about on April 20th, the day of the disaster. It took seven days before the first robotic corporate Tweet appeared. That is not progressive, not responsive, and not innovative.

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When “Good Enough” Web Video is Great

Many companies worry about video quality and spend a fortune on slick production. While you should always aim for the best possible results, sometimes good enough is more than good enough. Very often, the simple and genuine communication trumps the sophisticated.

How a Cheaply Produced Web Video Wins

Take the example of Tino Gagliardi, a candidate for President of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians union in New York City. Though rich in ideas and enthusiasm, Tino and his team were low on funds. They wanted to produce a YouTube video so they could present their values, ideas and plans directly to union members. The problem was they had almost no money. Merriam Associates shot the video in Tino’s apartment, complete with room echo, street noise, and the occasional howls of a cat angry to be locked in a back bedroom. We worked on a shoestring budget with no lights , no audio equipment, no editing budget, and no time. Still, Tino was still able to get his message out there in less than a day for pennies on the dollar.

Tino’s very basic video contrasts with the high production values of the competing campaign. Tino’s opponents, the Concerned Musicians, spent richly to shoot high quality visuals and taped speakers in a professional studio. The result is a much nicer piece.

Web Video: Content More Important Than Quality

If you define success by slick production, Tino lost. But success in marketing rarely is defined that way. What matters in marketing is always the content itself. Who was telling a better story? Who was more believable and motivating?

The major issues of the Local 802 musician’s union election were inaccessible leadership and misuse of union funds. Members felt that the Concerned Musician’s union leaders were not listening and were angry that union leaders were spending union money for personal expenses. The fancy video made union members wonder if union funds were used to produce it and it made the candidates seem as aloof as ever. In this case, slick production backfired.

Tino’s video got almost twice the number of views per day than the competing candidate’s. He won by a landslide, and his slate of allied candidates won 19 of the 20 open positions—and he did it with a mediocre, yet genuine, relevant and believable video produced for almost no money at all.

Spending Thousands Vs. Spending Millions on Video Production

This same relationship between expensive production and genuine simplicity can be seen by comparing two recent Super Bowl ads. Budweiser spent well over a million dollars to produce the technical masterpiece “Bridge is Out” commercial.

By contrast, Google can’t have spent more than $1000 to produce a commercial of mostly screen captures and off-the-shelf sound effects.

Both commercials consistently made the top 10 best lists.

Don’t purposely shoot for the low quality of Tino’s video. Do the best you can with the resources you have. But don’t let lack of resources prevent you from doing anything. Expensive videos are not always the best videos.

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Web Video: Preparing your Message

Kayla Schwartz, speech and presentation coach, and media trainer, talks about preparing your web video message.

When thinking about the content of your video, it is important to consider goals, the needs and interests of your audience, and your central theme: your main message. All communication has a purpose. In your video, make sure you tell your audience what action you want them to take and why they should take it. You’ll need to involve your audience and speak to their values if you want to motivate. Be vivid, specific and personal. Say “you”, not “they”. Remember, you are speaking directly to someone, not talking in the abstract. It pays to write your ideas down and spend time to distill them into the most concise and targeted form you can. That way, you’ll get the greatest possible benefit from your video statement.

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Web Video: Preparing Your Delivery

Kayla Schwartz, speech and presentation coach, and media trainer, talks about preparing to deliver your web video message.

While your message is the foundation of your communication, how you deliver it impacts its effectiveness. Here are five things to focus on when you deliver your message:
1. Connect with your audience. The person watching your video should feel you’re speaking directly to them.
2. Body language counts. You always want your behaviors and your physical self to be consistent with your words. Be open, relaxed and natural, or you may appear dishonest. People will feel uncomfortable while they watch you.
3. Use your voice. Vary pacing and tone. Don’t speechify. Aim for a conversational, personal, direct style of speaking so your inflection naturally modulates according to how you feel about what you’re saying.

4. Don’t forget to breathe and pause. The first thing that goes when we’re nervous is our breathing. Speak slowly enough that you have time to breathe in between sentences. Pause in between ideas. It not only gives you a chance to breathe, but it adds weight to what you say, and provides structure to your talk.
5. Practice practice practice! You want to be entirely comfortable with what you’re saying so you can look and feel most confident. If you do nothing else, run your communication by yourself or in front of someone else three times before you go to the shoot.

Once you’ve prepared your content, your physical self and your delivery, you can be your most effective, powerful communicator – in any setting.

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Glenn Beck's Brand of Politics at the Restore Honor Rally

Congratulations to Geomentum

Breaking the Motorola Brand

Breaking Branding Rule #1: Be Distinctive

Meaningless Words Make for Bad Brand Names

Brand Names Are a Different Kind of Asset

The Demise of a Top Brand

Lisa Merriam NPR Interview on BP

Boring Green Logo Redesigns Are a Color Cliche

When “Good Enough” Web Video is Great

Web Video: Preparing your Message

Web Video: Preparing Your Delivery

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