Corporate Eye

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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius

Put Your Brand Logo Through the One Color Test

water_colorsBrand identity is an elusive subject for marketers and non-marketers alike.  One of the most important tangible representations of your brand is its logo.  These days, logos are getting more and more elaborate with half-tones, surface effects, and a myriad of design effects that look great online but can be a nightmare to reproduce offline – technically and financially.

While it’s nice to say, “logo design shouldn’t be restricted by future production budgets,” the truth of the matter is that an elaborate logo could become cost prohibitive every time you need to print it.  From brochures to business cards, billboards to coffee mugs, and everything in between, your logo needs to reproduce well in a lot of sizes and on a lot of surfaces throughout the course of its life.

As you’re developing your brand logo, you need to use the Brand Logo One Color Test to ensure the logo you create to stand for your brand promise takes more into account then how cool it looks.  While I’m not suggesting that you sacrifice “coolness” in an effort to save money, I am suggesting that you take the time to consider all applications of your logo before you commit to a design which will cost you a fortune every time you print it or a design which doesn’t translate well onto various media.  I’m continually surprised by how even large corporations roll out logos that a design agency sold them on, knowing the production issues they’re likely to face down the road could be expensive and limiting.

With that in mind, here is the Brand Logo One Color Test

Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Will my logo still stand out from the crowd in black and white?
  2. Will my logo design force me to print it in one color because it would be cost-prohibitive to print it in full-color?

Depending on your answers to the above questions in the Brand Logo One Color Test, you might want to reconsider your logo design.  Remember, there is more to logo design and brand identity than meets the eye (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun, but it’s very true).

Image: stock.xchng

Calculating the Value of Facebook Fans

currency-chartA recent study by Syncapse and Hotspex analyzed 20 top brands on Facebook and the activities of their Facebook fans in an effort to calculate the value of each one of those fans.  The average value of each fan is valued at $136.38 according to the study.

But you should approach that number with caution.

One of the biggest challenges for big corporations trying to implement social media marketing strategies is calculating the elusive return on investment (ROI) of those efforts.  My position on social media marketing ROI is a bit different than the traditional ROI metrics that we’ve all learned over the years as we calculate response rates, lift, and all those other easily quantifiable success metrics that have been developed over the years.

However, social media marketing is still in its infancy, and the traditional hard metrics that marketers use to justify budgets to corporate executives don’t really apply to social media marketing.  Instead, social media marketing is more closely aligned with brand building.  Both offer incredible value to an organization, but that value is difficult to measure in hard numbers.

That’s where what I call the shift from calculating Return on Investment as the form or ROI to Return on Impression as the form of ROI is necessary to evaluate social media marketing success.  You can read my complete post about the new social media marketing ROI on the Yahoo! Advertising blog, but I’ll recap the highlights here:

  • Calculating the success of social media marketing depends more on soft metrics than hard metrics.
  • Those soft metrics can be valued in two forms of impressions: eyeballs and perceptions.
  • Eyeball impressions are the quantifiable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the number of times branded content or messages are actually viewed by the online audience.
  • Perception impressions are the immeasurable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the added value that your branded content and messages deliver to the online audience and how that content and those messages affect their perceptions of your business, brand, and products.
  • If your social media marketing success or failure is measured solely by click-throughs or actual direct sales, then you’re heading down a path that will never allow you to fully leverage the power of the social web in generating word-of-mouth marketing, brand advocates, brand guardians, and brand loyalty.

What do you think about calculating hard metrics related to social media marketing initiatives?  Does relying on hard metrics give an accurate reflection of what’s happening or is it doing a disservice to the intrinsic value of social media conversations to rely on hard metrics alone as it does with brand valuation?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Nielsen Charts World Cup Perceptions from 7 Countries

As the World Cup got underway, Nielsen published an interesting blog post last week that shows what people are talking about online related to the sporting event in seven different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy.  You can take a look at the United States and United Kingdom charts below, and follow the link to read the full article (complete with all the charts) at the NielsenWire blog).

worldcup-buzz_united_states

worldcup-buzz-uk

In the United States, two things stand out as particularly interesting from the Nielsen chart.  First, the U.S. team was not the most talked about team in the U.S., and second, the power of David Beckham continues in the U.S.  Even though he’s out of the World Cup due to an injury, people are still talking about him — a lot.

Otherwise, most conversations within each country are about the teams and players from those countries, which is not surprising.  However, it’s not the conversation topics that I found most interesting in this post from Nielsen, but rather, it was the way the charts clearly show segmented conversations based on geography.  That’s some cool data that businesses should be gathering and applying to their own brands.

Let’s face it — marketers always have to show visuals and hard numbers justifying the various initiatives they need to secure budget dollars for each year.  Wouldn’t a chart like these help executives who still don’t fully appreciate the value of online conversations about brands get a better perspective?  It’s just another tool you can put in your marketing toolbox to help build the case for social media marketing investment.

Charts like these prove that people are talking.  As marketers, our job is to find ways to leverage those conversations and keep them going.

The World’s Greenest Brands

green_brands_2010_chartThe 5th annual ImagePower Green Brands Study sponsored by Landor Associates, Cohn & Wolfe, Etsy Environmental Partners (EEP), and Penn Schoen Berland (PSB) has been released.

The 2010 study polled more than 9,000 people in eight countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Brazil, China, France, and India.

The results of the survey show that consumers continue to be concerned about the environmental-friendliness of products and brands.  In fact, concern increased by 3.5% over 2009 results.

The 2010 ImagePower Green Brands Study reports the following conclusions, which you can read about in more detail on the Landor Associates blog:

  • Most consumers want to buy from environmentally-friendly companies.
  • The market for green products is growing in emerging economies.
  • Environmental concerns vary by country.
  • Hurdles to buying green vary by market.
  • Consumers learn about green products and companies in different ways.

From a branding perspective, the study reveals that environmental consciousness is very important to consumers, ranking fourth in terms of what consumers are looking for in a brand behind providing a good value, being trustworthy, and caring about consumers.

So who is doing it right?  In the United States, Burt’s Bees and Whole Foods Markets lead the pack as far as consumer perceptions related to being a green brand.  In the United Kingdom, The Body Shop comes out on top, while Australian consumers rank Toyota number one.  You can follow the link to see the complete list of green brands by country.

One of the biggest learnings from the 2010 study and the four annual studies conducted previously is the obvious difference between consumers in different countries related to the importance of green brands and the messages marketers should focus on related to the environment in order to appeal to those geographic differences in consumer perceptions.  For example, consumers in the United States and the United Kingdom are more concerned with energy while consumers in Australia are more concerned with water management.  In other words, a one-size-fits all green marketing plan won’t work as consumers become better educated around the world about the importance of companies and brands being environmentally conscious.

What brand do you think is doing a good job of being green?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.