Weblog Consulting Register Login Subscribe to Free Influx Emails Join our Facebook Group Follow us on Twitter Branding Street Cred Technology Lifestyle Style Entertainment Interviews Art InfluxTV Map Widgets RSS — All Subjects RSS — More Feeds

Search

Advanced Search

Contact Privacy Policy

The big challenge if your a marketer of domestic beer is your scale and ubiquity can be both a blessing and curse.

The downside of mass is that you lose your cool pretty fast. While domestics have experimented with more upscale/premium lines and a little bit of packaging innovation, they haven't really exploited the opportunities that exist with packaging. With the US design and art community often seen as being at the forefront of trends, it seems an obvious opportunity for the big domestics to work with these guys.

Heineken in Europe has done a lot of the work in this space, with the latest being a collaboration with Parisian packaging design legend Ora-Ito.



Of course, the other mass brand to do lots of cool stuff with graphic designers, was Coke.

Packaging seems like such an easy way for a mass brand to do something interesting and surgical to push into cooler spaces.


Posted by Ed Cotton "Well, let’s be practical. The company is still Freshjive. It’s just that none of our product will have any of our logos or even our name AT ALL. Not even in the labels. And after the turn of the year, no promotional material, nor our website will have any logos. It’s really invigorating to approach designing a line WITHOUT the constrictions of how the logo is gonna be placed or used on the garments."

The Hundreds

Via PSFK

Now is not the time to flaunt and display your logo.

What's next, the demise of the car badge?



Posted by Ed Cotton Mission Street Food is a pop-up restaurant concept located in The Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.



For the last six months, it's been the talk of the town and way beyond, because it shows an almost telepathic understanding of what the twenty-something crowd is looking for from food right now.

Here's how it works.

MSF "leases" a Chinese restaurant on Mission Street for two nights of the week and invites guest chefs to come in and create menus and prepare meals.

What Can Brands Learn from MSF?

1. The Power of Surprise

MSF is based on a pretty smart assumption, people like to try new restaurants all the time, which makes it hard for a single concept to gain traction and gain a group of loyal customers. In a world of hyper-instant gratification, people are constantly demanding for and seeking out the new.

How does your brand surprise its audience?
What are you doing to prevent brand fatigue?

2. Partnerships and Collaboration

MSF partners with a Chinese restaurant to host the events, it gets access to its kitchens and staff and it also partners with guest chefs every night. MSF is really a facilitator to the process.

Who is your brand collaborating with to add value?

3. Understanding the Audience

MSF gets who it's audience is and what they want. They know this is an audience that is easily bored and is looking for culinary surprises. They know they are prepared to trade off ambience for food quality.

Does your brand know its audience?
Do you know what they are looking for from you now?

4. The Concept of Value

MSF gets value right. This is of course not about low prices, but instead the combination of price and quality. The interesting items on the menu are priced perfectly to acknowledge the audiences understanding of value. There's no sense you are paying for the priviledge of eating there.

Does your brand have its pricing right?
Do you know what people are prepared to pay?
Do you have value add and do you know what it's worth? 

5. Giving Back

MSF gives back profits to local organizations and non-profits giving diners another reason to eat.

What is your brand giving back?
How are your causes tied to your brand?
How open are you about your contributions?

6. A Story

MSF has enough layers to build a great narrative including its original incarnation as a taco truck.

What's your story?
How do you share it?
How are you building on it?


Posted by Ed Cotton Nokia is trying hard to be seen as an open organization. This website is a good example of a company that's opening its people and process up for public view. If you happen to be interested in working for the company, a huge fan of Nokia or work in a related field, this can be good stuff to see. In essence, it's material for a very limited core audience.

Nokia is a really smart organization which has become truly global by listening to user needs especially in the developing world, but it's in trouble.

It's nice to tick the box in the C21st marketing text book and make some effort to be open, but if it doesn't drive business success, then it's simply a nice to have.

Can Nokia turn its openness into something more powerful?

It's certainly one area that they lead Apple, a company that's widely recognized as being controlling and secretive.

However, Nokia needs to turn its openness trait into something more powerful.

Could Active Openness help Nokia to become the "people's phone company"

By listening more and opening up more it could seize some advantage, but it needs to make this openness bigger, more active and more broadcast worthy. Simply seeing what Nokia employees are doing is no good if you can't interact. Also, if you don't having a rich understanding of the potential of mobile technology, it limits your ability to participate.

Nokia can do one thing that Apple can't, it can educate and invite a global audience inside its company. It can embrace the whole idea of openness and invite all kinds of audiences to help make a truly mobile life a reality for the globe.

While Apple will continue to control and dictate, Nokia has the opportunity to provide an alternative point view, one that's powered by a broad community who are working together with the corporation.

Nokia has a real chance to bring the idea of openness to broad media and encourage two way dialog, debate and discussion about the future of mobility.

Of course, it's obvious Nokia needs killer products, but Active Openness could help them engage.





Posted by Ed Cotton Springwise has a great example of a new company that's made Twitter integral to its business model. Kogi Korean BBQ is a food van that travels around LA serving an interesting hybrid- Korean BBQ served in Mexican style tacos. The twist here is that to find out where the van is going to be, you have to follow Kogi on Twitter.

While Twitter has been dismissed by many as a passing fad that just creates a stream of useless information, others like Kogi and Wesabe are embracing its power and fusing it into their business models.

The other smart idea about Kogi is how it embraces the low overhead model for a restaurant start-up; using a mobile van, instead of a costly space to build a following and a nice size business.

Mission Street Food is doing something similar in San Francisco, by renting space in a Chinese restaurant for a couple of nights a week.


Posted by Ed Cotton "Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else.

The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture.

Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup."

NYT


Posted by Ed Cotton