First, Shaun has put himself into a brand expansion by dressing 4 year olds in skateboarder clothes. Second, the art of the label is great and whimsical, and gives equal love to Shaun and Target, telling us that Shaun is involved, but Target did the heavy lifting. Third, and this is the coolest part: It’s a sticker!

So, the kid gets a shirt (pretty cool flannel-ish skateboarder buttondown). Dad stole the sticker. I can put it on my laptop or whatever. I can put it anywhere. It’s a “share” tool built into something typical like a tag for a shirt.

Yes, I realize that this is very low tech, but I see many things in this move:

• Brand expansion for Shaun.
• Partnering by Target.
• Sharing by Shaun/Target.

These are all things I think 2010 will see more of, and this little example poses a microcosm of them all summed up. If you packaged your own marketing efforts so cleverly, social media or otherwise, what would you get for results? I’m thinking you’ll get a bagful of awesome.

What say you?

Marketers do this all the time. They use the current reigning champ’s language and write counterpoint to it. Lesser brands draft off the bigger brands’ positioning. We take (whether consciously or not) from the value of what we’re doing when we phrase it in other people’s language.

And yet (and this is a big “and yet”), there’s something lovely about when phrases and words catch on. I love that people are using terms like trust agents in the wild. I love that people talk about workshifting (client) as a verb that makes sense to them. When we talk about things like the tipping point and purple cows, it’s a shared language.

So now what? My thought: there’s a time to use the term we all understand and there’s a time where your words should be free of other people’s “logos.” Understanding when might be a mix for you. What do you think about it?

photo credit kevin dooley

I changed my Facebook profile URL today as part of their new Vanity URL program. I changed it to www.facebook.com/dotchrisbrogan. There was a purpose behind what I did. I was interested in pointing out that the URL is not the gold.

Yes, search marketers and SEO professionals everywhere just wrote me off.

I get that there are some SEO benefits to having certain URLs. I get that people will naturally choose to search in the url bar by putting my name. I understand that people looking for me will find someone else if they put in facebook.com/chrisbrogan.

But the characters in a URL bar are not me. The map is not the territory. The ship isn’t what brings the treasure.

This might or might not bite me badly, but I’m testing a point. Everyone else who voiced concerns on Twitter this morning are banking that Facebook is that important to my online presence and success that by choosing a different name, my entire brand will come crashing down around me.

It’s never about the sites and services. Never forget that. YOU add value to them, not the other way around.

So, let’s say you hear that message today. They say, “Pepsi is a great drink for these first few days of spring.” You hear it, smile, nod your head, and maybe buy some Pepsi.

Then what?

Now it’s a few weeks later. They want more sales. They might say, “We know you like Pepsi. Do you also want to try Vanilla Pepsi?”

Then what?

If Pepsi (and when I say Pepsi, I mean any brand) is trying to share its message with you, the question becomes this: how much of it is important and how much of it is small talk? How much of it is a reminder? What parts of the message are just pings to remind you that you should pick Pepsi over some other brand?

Is that how we buy things? I’m not sure we decide on soda pop that way. I think we settle into a brand and prefer that brand over others. But let’s stick with this a while longer.

If you’re Pepsi and you want to sell more, what other options do you have besides reminding people of your brand all the time? And if that’s what you have to do, how do you do it such that it’s not repetitive? And if you stopped reminding people about the brand, wouldn’t sales just drop?

One way to share that experience without being overpowering is to brand an experience. Pepsico did this with their Podcast Playground (disclosure: I was paid to make media at that event) at SXSW in Austin. They didn’t push or force or overpower. In fact, they were really eager to keep things slanted towards enabling others to make media. It was a kind of experience marketing.

My question, as is my question with most social media efforts: how do you know whether it sells soda pop or not?

What do you think about this? There’s a small talk to brands, some sense of ambient noise that happens. Is it important? When is it positive? What works and what doesn’t, in your mind?

What’s social media’s place in the small talk of these brands?

There are plenty of people helping the Bigelows with the effort, including two PodCamp alum, Justin Kownacki and John Carman, to name a few. They’ve done a great job of putting the Bigelows forward, and giving the brand a face. It’s a great project, and I’m hopeful that other brands check it out as a potential idea for their own B2C marketing.

Sometimes the face of a brand is a fictional character, and before you scoff at that in this age of transparency, think again about Colonel Tribune, the Chicago Tribune’s representative, who has parties thrown for him all around Chicago, even though he doesn’t seem to show up to many.

Would it hurt or help to have a face on your brand? I bet Cindi Bigelow can answer that.

Participants in ACTB as it was called (and they used the #actb hash tag in their tweets) stood out. I saw two of them at different times in my stream (of over 30,000 people) and that drew my eye. Then, I researched. Then, I felt sad I didn’t attend. (Can’t attend everything.)

If you plan events of any kind, what a wild and powerful thing they did here, just by joining together and making a very visible statement of their participation in the event. Hats off, ACTB-ers. And more power to people who figure out just how easy it is to make a loosely-joined conference with very minimal planning, provided everyone pitches in.

Tell me what you think of this idea: “branding is a behavioral expectation.”

I’m presenting with Jody Gnant today at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference about “branding and social media.” Honestly, after reading Branding Only Works on Cattle, I’ve been struggling with the role of brand in marketing and communications, especially the latter.

But one thing that came to mind solidly was this:

I don’t want to fly McDonalds Airlines.

Why? Because I have expectations of “McDonalds” that don’t match with “want to land safely.”

I don’t want to rent a car from Snickers.
I don’t want to get book recommendations from Senator Ted Kennedy.
I don’t want to eat at Microsoft, the Restaurant.

I do want to consider Richard Branson’s next move.
I do want to know what Matt Mullenweg does next.
I do want USAToday to evolve into a business traveler’s services organization.
I do want GM to get into the transportation business, not the car business.
I do appreciate the new Adventures by Disney product, no matter what you say.

So are those expectations of behavior? Yes. Is that what we can sum up as the main purpose of branding? Managing people’s expectations of our brand’s behavior?

Help me think about this, would you?

Photo credit, iboy Daniel

There’s a context, a design, a sense of style that needs constant updating, and it’s a lot like paying dues. As companies stay current and intend to work with contemporary customers, their typography and colors and the like have to stay recent and fashionable (in most cases). We want to feel that a brand fits our time, lives in our moment, is something related to us.

Even “timeless” brands evolve their logos.

We can argue that looks don’t make the can. We can say that it’s the experience that matters, that what’s inside is what counts, but when we see logos or styles that seem old fashioned, they do stick out in our head.

Lower-case seems to be hot these days:

But that’s okay, too. Again, it’s like being sure to wear the current clothes. Several companies keep their designs current. We don’t ding them for it.

I think they had to do it. Was the fanfare necessary? I don’t know, but if you’re going to spend a lot of money tidying up your brand, how much more is it to get the word out there.

Some thoughts from the couch as I look at the side of a shiny new Pepsi can.

What do you think?

Changing Behavior Drives MUCH More Value

Baskin left me thinking hard about two major points. The first was that money spent on marketing should be money spent on shifting a buyer’s behavior closer towards buying. Yes, I realize that this is fairly basic and fundamental in one light, but if you look at how far from this perspective marketing efforts seem to be drifting, especially online, it seems to me that maybe we should poke people on the shoulder and point out the basics again.

Is it more important that I remember the Geico Caveman, who somehow accidentally became a TV celebrity? Or should I be motivated somehow to double-check my insurance rates against Geiko’s? Repeat this with every brand. Did Starbucks win so many dollars because we remember the green and white logo, or because they invented the “third place?”

Search Is Vital

“Search is a larger, behavioral reality that impacts corporate strategy.”

Baskin rightly points out that marketing strategies that don’t include a heavy element of search won’t work well for us. One of the reasons that I advocate content marketing, such as writing a compelling group blog, is that it’s an opportunity to build search equity. Writing about things that people might search for is a great way to find some new people at your door who might want a look at your product.

Worth It

In the end, I think that Branding Only Works on Cattle is worth a purchase (or if you’re a library type, add yourself to the waiting list). The supporting information and some of the other points that I didn’t write out are worth looking into as well. It’s not a reference that I’ll be pulling down from the shelf every few days, and this book itself probably won’t be Baskin’s landmark work, but I tell you this: I’ll be waiting to see what he publishes next in a few years.

What’s your take on my representation of what he said? What do you think about focusing on behavior over branding? Are you naturally adding search into your marketing mix? Have you considered content marketing?

Related articles by Zemanta

• My Best Advice About Personal Branding
• My thoughts on Chris Brogan & Personal Branding