Slow Brand

I first encountered Open Space as a meeting format in the mid-1990’s in Chicago. I was a member of the Company of Friends, a group of readers of the magazine Fast Company which gathered together on a monthly basis. In Chicago the monthly meetings were held as Open Space meetings.

Since that time I have facilitated and opened many Open Space meetings and helped with seemingly countless other Open Space events or events held in the spirit of Open Space, if not always in the most formal of manners.

I highly recommend that everyone interested in Open Space visit Harrison Owen’s site Open Space World (.com) and the sister site Open Space World (.org) , a site managed in part by my good friend Michael Herman. And of course, I’ll cut to the chase in this review and also suggest that you buy the book (hint the image above is a link to Amazon and yes, I’ll get a very small affiliate fee if you click that link and buy it)

So what is Open Space and how does it apply to Slow Brands?

The short answer is that Open Space is a methodology for holding meetings which is incrediably powerful, seemingly simple, and yet also somewhat counterintuative. The meetings start without any formal agenda, instead the participants set the agenda, usually there are no speakers and little formal structure yet a lot can and does happen.

Harrison Owen’s book goes into great detail about all aspects of opening and holding an Open Space, his focus is generally on a fairly formal process which starts from an assumption that the space is opened by an inviation sent to a group of people who share a common and usually pressing interest.

Here in Silicon Valley, however, a hybrid type of meeting started a few years ago and has spread rapidly all over the world. These BarCamps while structurely often very similar to Open Space’s usually involve a large group of people with some shared interested, but usually from many different organizations and often brought together without a large specific or pressing purpose. As a result BarCamps tend to be held in a somewhat less formal manner than an Open Space as Harrison Owen describes them.

In my own practice I also generally modifty the formal aspects of Open Space in a few key areas.

But getting back to Slow Brands, what lessons can be learned from Open Space?

A key part of Open Space is the Four Principles and One Law.

The Four Principles

Whoever comes is the right people

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have

Whenver it starts is the right time

When it’s over it’s over

The One Law

The Law of Two Feet

All that may sound a bit cryptic, even contradictory for a method of holding a meeting (how do you schedule such a meeting if discussions will take however long they have to take and that’s defined as being just fine?)

But underlying all of the principles and the law is a respect for others and a appreciation of quality over quantity or formal process. A lesson all brands, but especially smart, Slow Brands, would be wise to learn and ponder.

How can you think about your brand, your corporate identity and messaging, not just as something formal and sent down from above (i.e from the company to customers) but as part of an ongoing process?

If you get the chance to participate in an Open Space I encourage you to do so, if you find yourself planning a meeting, especially a meeting around a pressing and important topic and find that you are bogged down in agendas, schduling, and formal structure, consider the seemingly slower (but actually often faster) option of an Open Space.

And yes, though it is not my primary  service, I am occasionally available as a facilitator for Open Spaces (or can if I’m not available suggest fantastic facilitators).

A few days ago I attended part of the iPhoneDevCamp which was a fantastic event gathering together a large group of creative people and which was well supported by a range of sponsors. One of the sponsors had a small table where they were both demonstrating and selling an iPhone accessory they make, an external battery for the iPhone with a bunch of very clever additional features. It has an LED light (i.e. a fixed flash for your camera and also useful to have), is designed to work with the regular iPhone dock and chargers, has a USB passthrough to recharge other USB devices at the same time, and holds a charge sufficient to recharge the iPhone twice. All-in-all a fantastic product and though not super cheap, well worth the show special price of $75 and I’m sure lots of people will pay their higher regular price, especially when they come out with their next version for the iPhone 3G.

So what is the problem?

Note what I was unable to do in the above paragraph, I couldn’t refer to the product either by the product brand name or by the nameo of the company, neither brand is present anywhere on the product itself. Now personally when it comes to my clothing and appearance I look for items which don’t shout a company brand, I try to choose carefully those brands whom I associate with my personal image - for example I’m mostly only wearing t-shirts with logos of companies or organizations I support and in most cases really do use myself.

I could not however refer to this product or the company because though they used a very nice material to construct the product the neglected to spend the likely relatively small additional amount to embed their name &/or logos anywhere on the product. Earlier today as I used the device to recharge my iPhone which was dangerously close to running out of battery charge after a long day away from home I wanted to tell my Twitter followers about the product - but was prevented from usually doing so by this lack of branding.

So what is the moral here? Consider how your customers will use your products and without being too blatent don’t be so restrained as to make it hard for existing customers to refer others to your brands and products - indeed you want to make that process of telling people about your company and brands as easy as possible. This also suggests avoiding unpronounceable or really difficult to remember how to spell brandnames or the sometimes used avoiding a word brand at all (i.e. “the artist formerly known as Prince” who after a while decided having a name for people to refer to might afterall be useful).

Oh, what is the product and company? After a lot (and I do mean a lot of poking around and searching I found it). It is the iV from Fastmac. A great product but horrible branding (well complete lack of branding).

I am a serious food lover, have been for many years. I am lucky to have grown up in a household where we ate dinner together as a family every night and where my first memory of dining out was when I was 3 and learned to use chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant. And while I imposed Chucky Cheese on my family on many a birthday as a child (my family has a tradition where the person celebrating his or her birthday picks where we ate dinner as a family typically dining out) my parents also exposed me and my sister to a very wide range of cuisines and flavors as we grew up.

Before we moved to Chicago I remember teaching the parents and teachers at my 2nd grade school how to make Guacamole from scratch. I was a bit precocious but as I recall it also tasted quite good the way I made it (which I had learned from my mom).

In college I threw serious dinner parties every few weeks, typically where I cooked all the main dishes, friends baked dessert, and everyone helped clean or prep. Each week I would cook a different cuisine using a mix of recipes from cookbooks and the Internet (this was pre-web, so drawn from USENET or occasionally Gopher). But at almost every meal I would also improvise, adjusting a recipe to taste or often making up an entirely new dish from the flavors of a given cuisine and ingredients I bought. I had learned to cook from a combination of observing my Mom and my Dad as they cooked (and they both cooked as I grew up) and from a few “Home Economics” courses I took in the 7th grade.

Since college I have continued to be a very serious cook and dine out a great deal. In Chicago I was a highly active poster to Chowhound (in the days before CNET purchased them and upgraded the site’s software) and then on a website friends of mine set up after being frustrated by the forum software of Chowhound, LTHForum (the name stands for a Chinese restaurant we love in Chinatown, Little Three Happiness called that because there is a second and much inferior Three Happiness restaurant right across the street). The group of us and the forum grew quickly and we not only posted about food we also gathered together on a regular basis for meals and events all through out Chicagoland.

In Chicago and especially since I moved to San Francisco I have also become quite adept at the art of organizing large group dinners. Typically I pick the restaurant and very often arrange for all of the food, often ordering everything and arranging for a family style or at least a prix fix meal to maximize everyone’s enjoyment.

Why do I mention all these details about my past and present life?

Because, and this is where it gets tricky, even with all of that which I have claimed (assuming you have read this far) you still do not have any particular reason to trust me, my suggestions, my cooking or my reviews.

Yes, I claim to be good, even an expert but that claim, by itself, no matter how often I repeat it is just words, just an unverified assertion.

In contrast for the most part anyone who has eaten at one of my dinner parties begs me for invitations to future events. People who have taken my suggestions for dinner locations and/or been to a meal I have organized, generally let me help them again in the future. To a lesser degree people who have been following me on Twitter for a long time have noticed that amongst my random rants and discussions I also twitter about food a great deal. Mini-reviews, observations about places I find, and occasionally small rants and even some raves.

With every event I organize this list of people grows, people who both trust my recommendations and in many cases refer people to me for advice and assistance.

In the next post in this serious more discussion on how to best build (or rebuild) your personal brand, especially as you also shift your job functions.

Coke, Coca Cola, and diet Coke are some of the most recognizable and most valuable brands in the world.

Entire web communities invest time analyzing the subtle changes in the packaging of soda across the planet.

But even great Brands, brands which have for decades defined how to build, manage, extend, and maintain a great brand make mistakes.

Take this can of diet Coke I photographed this weekend.

Notice how it has the phrase “Live Positively” along the side of the can? This same phrase can also be found on the current versions of other sizes and shapes of diet Coke found here in the US at present.

I wondered, what happens when you do a Google search on the phrase “Live Positively”?

Turns out you find a mix of self help sites and for the most part, sites for people who are living with HIV. This phrase has been used for a long time now by HIV support groups here in the US and indeed around the planet.

For diet Coke it was, I think, intended as part of their packaging and branding around support for women’s health and in particular a focus on healthy hearts which is the current main focus for diet Coke’s advertising on TV.

So I went to the diet Coke home page. I thought I might find some more information on this phrase at the official site, however I was wrong. Couldn’t find it. The home page is mostly tracking codes for various scripts and a primary and almost entirely flash driven graphical site. You can view the current diet Coke TV ads, can download a few images of posters, and can get some information about the myCokeRewards program which currently includes an offer for a red designer dress which diet Coke has had made as part of their support for healthy heart awareness in women.

Reading over the site I noticed that the entire marketing and branding present in the site had a built-in assumption that anyone interested in diet Coke was a woman. So apparently a male, such as myself, was not at all the target audience for any of diet Coke’s brand messaging.

More to the point, though historically Coca Cola has built some great examples of Slow Brands, brands driven by an iconic imagery, consistent and patient messaging, and living up to and exceeding brand promises and expectations for decades upon decades, with the rise of the internet at least the diet Coke arm of Coca Cola does not appear to be getting how to invest in a brand in a digital world.

Getting back to that phrase. Though it is present on the diet Coke cans, I have not been able to find any official diet Coke presence than explains it or makes reference to the phrase. One article from the Beverage Institute mentioned a “Live Positively team” but I can’t find any other reference to the team and diet Coke on the web.

A number of bloggers have noticed the phrase on their cans and bottles of diet Coke but even these discussions are in the search engine results interleaved with other sites which were focused on HIV/AIDS but happened to also mention diet Coke on a given page.

Today any Brand should take the time to search on the other uses of messages which will be a part of your Brand messaging offline and online and see how your messaging ties into the existing uses of a given phrase. While it perhaps is not diet Coke’s intent, perhaps Coca Cola should have made some donations to and given support to some HIV/AIDS support groups around the globe perhaps as part of an overall campaign to help people, likely emphasizing women if indeed diet Coke is intended to be branded mostly for women consumers. In that case the overlapping meanings of the phrase would have echoed the Brand messaging.

As a consumer while some parts of the soda industry have remained iconic and slow, the packaging and marketing of the core products has often seemed to no longer be consistent or slow. Seemingly every time I am in supermarket today (at least here in the US) the packaging and marketing for both Coca Cola’s family of brands and Pepsi’s family of brands seems to have changed, on a nearly weekly basis.

In fact I noted that I could tell that the little corner store near my house had bought the soda they were selling a long time ago because the packaging on it contained contests which had ended months prior.

I am highlighting diet Coke here because it is an example of an iconic Brand, a great Slow Brand of the past, which I think is not entirely succeeding in the new, online driven world.

What other examples of historically great, Slow Brands, can you think of which have stumbled online?

My post about What is a Brand Anyway prompted my friend Arthur Einstein to write an email to me where he took issue with the simple, and I agree it is too simple, definition that a brand is a promise.

The formula which Arthur offers in place of that simple definition is:

Your Brand = awareness + expectations + engagement + experience

Awareness is simply the knowledge that you’re there.

Expectations pretty obvious. It’s the promise you speak of.

Engagement is the quality of the interaction that turns a consumer into a customer

Experience is the customers perception of how his/her expectations have been fulfilled

(and continue to be fulfilled over time)

What’s important about this view of branding is that each of these quantities can be measured and each of them can be managed.

My personal and favorite definition is “A Brand is a promise”.

At the most basic level a good or service which is “branded” has an implicit promise that it is, in fact, from the owner of that brand and they (whether a company or an individual) stand behind their product. In most cases a branded good or service is also promised to be consistent, if you get the same product again it will again meet what has been promised.

This does not, however, always mean that every time you buy that product it is the same - some brands might promise uniqueness or constant variety, while also maintaining other promises - quality, taste, service, fair prices.

An error made often by companies is having a brand for which no clear promise can be ascribed. Frequently the promise is summed up in the tag phrases that accompany the Brand marketing and advertising - many companies today change these messages rapidly often using many different phrases and promises.

This is not to say that a Brand has only one promise, many brands offer a range of related promises but most great brands, Slow Brands, usually have a clear and dominant promise associated with their brand. Historically, for example, Volvo = “Safe”. Perhaps with the additional promise of “safe and a bit boring”.

And yes, this meant that Volvo’s did not tend to attract young, single males as buyers. But for Volvo’s primary audience of families (and more typically usually mothers) “safe and a bit boring” was quite compelling.

Recently a new site, Brand Tags has launched which asks people to tag with a single word or phrase a variety of brands.

Take a look at how Apple has been tagged.

Now compare that to how Dell has been tagged.

Which company would you rather be?

A Slow Brand is a brand which has been invested in over time, a brand that has made promises and kept those promises many, many times.

A Slow Brand is a confident brand sure of what it stands for as well as what is not in keeping with the brand.

Brands are a promise. Whether a personal Brand, a corporate Brand, or the Brand of an entire country, great brands stand for things, have consistency and are backed up and built up through the accumulation of messages.

Most Brands today are not Slow Brands. Companies and individuals rarely, today, invest the time it takes to have a Slow Brand. Instead many Brands change their messages and the promise of the Brand rapidly. Making different promises to different audiences in many cases and all too often using very short term measures to signal when to shift messages yet again, changing messages and promises with growing frequency.

This blog will focus on Slow Brands, what they are, on examples of Slow Brands, and on both the specific messages of individual brands and on the techniques they use online and offline to build, maintain, and enhance the value and import of their brand.

Where does the phrase originate?

The phrase “Slow Brand” is an homage to the Slow Food Movement which since 1989 has celebrated local, heritage foods and the art of eating and living a slow, thoughtful life. The transformation of regions around the world and the preservation of cultural heritages embodied in regional foods has been and is an incredible achievement. As a serious foodie, and long time fan of the Slow Food Movement, my awareness of Brands have been shaped by Slow Food. Both in my own cooking and when I dine out I now look for brands not (typically) from large international corporations, but the brands of local, slow food producers.

This blog will illustrate the concept of Slow Brand often by looking at some of these local, slow food inspired companies and individuals.

Disclosure - the business of Nearness Function, the ad network focused on Brand Advertising which Shannon Clark is a co-founder of, is helping brands invest in building their brand via the long term support and sponsorship of rich experiences and passionate communities.