the 4Es

"Many of us grew up with the Four Ps of Marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. Do you know when the Four Ps of Marketing were invented? In 1960, by Jerome McCarthy. They were made leading-edge by Philip Kotler in his book Principles of Marketing in 1967.

The Four Ps thrived in a different world. It was a wonderful fantasy world. Marketers were king. Product differences lasted. Big, obedient audiences could be reached with big, efficient media.

What is the world of marketing today? The consumer has seized control. Audiences have shattered into fragments and slices. Product differences can last minutes, not years. The new ecosystem is millions and billions of unstructured one-to-one and peer-to-peer conversations. (...) We need a new framework. And a new tool kit.

from Product to Experience
from Place to Everyplace
from Price to Exchange
from Promotion to Evangelism."

From this article by Ogilvy & Mather. Worth taking a look at. The overall concept is extremely valid, despite one or two annoying buzzwords.

consumers vs. commensals

O que é Branding 3.0 / What is Branding 3.0 from Tatil Design on Vimeo.

I really like the idea that we’ll no longer be consumers, which is very reductive, almost as if our main condition on the planet was that of consuming. It’s almost like we are termites here. We’ll have a more interesting condition, like “commensals”. We’ll enjoy what objects have to offer, but we won’t need to possess them because owning things creates a huge environmental impact.

Eu gosto muito da idéia de que nós vamos deixar de ser consumidores – que é essa coisa reducionista, quase como se a nossa condição principal no planeta fosse de “consumir”, quase como se fôssemos cupins aqui – por uma condição mais interessante quase de “desfrutadores”, onde a gente usufruiu do que os objetos têm para nos oferecer, mas nós não precisamos possuí-los. Isso faz uma diferença enorme porque possuir coisas gera um impacto ambiental enorme.

the proof

Marty Neumeier. We even rode the same elevator!!

a personal jesus

I'm meeting him on Monday. In person.

seeing type differently / type factory

Absolutely stunning branding project work done by University College Falmouth student, Huda Abdul Aziz. Type Factory is a fictional typographic museum in South Kensington, London.

"The concept revolves around the theme of deconstruction. The brand values of the Type Factory identity are informative, engaging and dynamic. The brand promise is about seeing type differently. The design solution includes the logo, a booklet to promote the venue, advertising and applications within the museum."

28

I was rightfully accused today of neglecting this blog once again. The thing is there is just not enough time in a day to do all I've been trying to do lately and still maintain the decent amount of posts I used to.

So, to correct this absolutely awful scenario, here's my 28th birthday. Today! Yay me! How wonderful is it that I spent 7 years away and I get to come home and gather in one room all my old faithful friends and a few more who I'm growing to adore like family?

Turns out that the right mixture of the friends, family and Lexapro actually works wonders for me. I'm pretty damn happy.

virgin: a passenger complaint letter

Here we reproduce a complaint letter sent to Sir Richard Branson, which is currently being emailed globally and is considered by many to be the world's funniest passenger complaint letter. [via]

"Dear Mr Branson

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it:

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:

I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn't custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on:

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.

Yours Sincererly

XXXX"


* Paul Charles, Virgin’s Director of Corporate Communications, confirmed that Sir Richard Branson had telephoned the author of the letter and had thanked him for his “constructive if tongue-in-cheek” email. Mr Charles said that Virgin was sorry the passenger had not liked the in-flight meals which he said was “award-winning food which is very popular on our Indian routes.”

on "target audience"

"But what should we expect of someone who wants to hit us, who sees us only as a target? Targets don't interact, they are passive. They just sit there, waiting to be stabbed or poked. Nobody respects a target; it's there as an exercise, to count the points of a competition, just so one person can win and the others lose (of course the target never wins). A target is bidimensional, it has no refinement or originality. Nobody wants to know what the target thinks, feels, or wants. It's cruel and tasteless. I don't know about you, but I hate being seen and treated as a target. We urgently need new ideas."

Mas também, o que esperar de alguém que quer nos atingir, que nos considera apenas um alvo? Alvo não interage, é passivo. Fica quieto, só esperando ser espetado ou furado. Ninguém respeita alvo; ele está lá só como exercício, para contar pontos na competição, para somente um ganhar e todos os outros perderem (claro que o alvo nunca ganha). Alvo é bidimensional, sem nenhum refinamento ou originalidade. Ninguém quer saber o que o alvo pensa, sente, ou quer. É cruel e de mau gosto. Não sei quanto a vocês, mas eu detesto ser vista e tratada como alvo. Precisamos urgentemente de novas idéias.

by Lígia Fascioni. Read full text here (in portuguese).

CURRYOKE

"To celebrate Christmas, Gavin Martin Associates decided to hold a Curryoke party - an evening of curry and karaoke - and asked Purpose to design the invitation. Purpose subverted popular Karaoke songs and the iconic Indian take away container to create a memorable invite.

The invitations where delivered in a brown paper bag containing a number of curry containers, each with a different song message scrawled on the top. Songs include: ‘Murder on Dhansk floor’, ‘Love me tandoor’, ‘Rice rice baby’ and ‘Naaneater’, amongst many others. Hidden away on the flipside of the lid are the event details foil blocked onto mirror board."

cultural literacy and the "i'm a PC" campaign

Here are some excerpts of a brilliant post by one of my favorites, Grant McCracken, on the Mac vs. PC phenomenon.



Our culture has long been predicated in a simple distinction between the mainstream and the avant garde. This construction helped us understand the bourgeoisie as a group of people committed to convention and la doxa. They are, so the stereotype tells us, nervous nellies who are most reluctant ever to depart from their slavish conformity. Thank God, says the stereotype, for the avant-garde. These are risk takers who care nothing for convention or materialism, who bravely throw their personal comfort and safety to the winds in pursuit of artistic truth and social justice. (...)

Sometime in the 1990s, something happened. Our two-part system exploded. Now in the place of an inside mainstream and an outside avant garde, there was a great fragmentation. The mainstream lost its ability to police the tastes and believes and behavior of most people. The avant-garde lost its ability to control the restless, experimental margin. Both hegemonies lost their coercive power. (...) In the place of our founding duality, there were many groups who deferred neither to the center or the margin They simply went their own way. Yes, of course, they could hear the impatient scolding that came from center and edge, but, no, they weren't much interested. They were now prepared to go their own way. Respectable? Who cared? Hip? Who cared? The distinction was dead. (...)

What I did not see was that there was a cultural opportunity. I did not see it, at least, until Crispin Porter + Bogusky rolled out there "I am a PC" spot. But of course. Why didn't I think of that! There was a third position, created by the great cultural flowering of the 1990s. If Apple was avant garde, the path was clear for Windows to be the new alternative to the alternative. It could step out of the old contest that left it a clueless and bumbling mainstream play. It could embrace the great cultural efflorescence that emerged of the1990s and make itself a brand too concerned with real difference to care about merely hip difference. It could embrace real diversity instead of the single, predictable difference that comes from being cool. It could embrace authenticity instead of a pose. (...)

This is what cultural literacy is good for.

coffee drinkers, engage thyselves!

You may have seen this before, but if you haven't you should take a look. Starbucks has a site called "My Starbucks Idea" where it gives users/consumers the chance to contribute with ideas in order to improve the company's services, products and brand. Starbucks has put together a team called "Idea Partners", a group of employees from different areas of the company, to dedicate themselves to reviewing what's submitted to the website. Brad Stevens, marketing VP, is also part of the team.


The project includes the "Ideas in Action" blog, where users can keep up with the status of the suggestions given. It is divided in four main categories: Under Review, Reviewed, Coming Soon, and Launched. The "Idea Partners" talk about the suggestions, if an idea is feasible, how it would be feasible and when they will be available.



Here are some suggestions I found particularly interesting:

"Cup Discount - I'm psyched that Starbucks has started using more environmentally friendly, partially recycled cups -- but isn't using travel mugs the best way to reduce waste? Encourage customers to reduce & reuse by reimbursing them for the money they save by using their starbucks travel mugs."

"Free wifi - do it."

"Personalized Ordering - Since most people order their coffee the same particular way every time, I think it would be a good idea to create a database of customers and how they like their coffee. This way when they order they would only have to say their name and the sticker would print out how they like their coffee. It would save time for Starbucks to ask what the customer wants, when most times the customer orders the same item the same way; and it will save the customer from the repetition of repeating their favorite drink every time they visit the store. If the customer wanted something different than they normally get, they would just order normally instead of giving their name."

"Starbucks iPhone app - Apple sold over 1m iPhone 3G in 2 days. It would be great to have a Starbucks' ordering app - for free - so we all can order our favorite bevs without having to stand in line. I'd like to be able to have a favorite, use the GPS - or a list of my favorite locations - and just order it. Funds can be subtracted from my Starbucks card. A win for all as I'd use Starbucks a lot more if I could order this way vs. standing in line."

"Tip jars - please remove the tip jar from the counter. seriously, i just paid almost 3 dollars for a cup of coffee in a recession. the last thing i should see is a tip jar."

some things you should believe in without being able to see

(click on the image to see it bigger)

(I put this together primarily to put an end to the question: "so what is it exactly that you do? What kind of designer are you? Oh, so you create logos, right?")

(Eu fiz esse gráfico à princípio para acabar com aquela pergunta: "o que exatamente você faz? Que tipo de design? Ah, então você cria logos, né?")

Based on a diagram developed by Luciano Deos, from GAD'.

they keep me inspired

Marty Neumeier, Joe Duffy and Thomas Gad are the embodiment of every reason why I do what I do – while loving every minute of it.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design brand)

i'm embarrassed but i must tell

Below is the screen shot of the summary of a lawsuit filed with a Electoral Court in Brazil. The site might be down because the huge number of visits today's incident caused:


"PT, BRAZIL WORKERS PARTY (the President's party!), WANTS TO TAKE TWITTER OFF THE AIR.

The Story
Somebody created a fake profile of Luiziane Lins, one of PT's candidates standing in the election for Mayor of Fortaleza, Ceará. She filed a lawsuit in order to remove the profile from Twitter – which is a legitimate right she has.

But she went beyond.

As if removing that specific profile wasn't enough, she filed a lawsuit in order to TAKE TWITTER OFF THE INTERNET. That's right: the WHOLE site. Something like taking the whole MSN Instant Messenger system down, or even Facebook, Myspace or Orkut because of one fake profile.

Sickening.

To make matters worse, that lawsuit was combined with the lack of "internetical" knowledge of a magistrate, causing what we saw today: an approved order to take TWITTER OFF THE AIR.

The Absurdity

- The lawsuit asked the justice system to take the WHOLE site down, not just one profile;

- They approved such request;

- The Regional Electoral Court of the state of Ceará took off the air a BLOG WHICH SUBJECT MATTER IS TWITTER, not Twitter itself. It's bizarre not only that they actually went forward with the lawsuit request, but they also suspended a BLOG.

- Twitter is not a national site. Because of that, the order of the Court in Ceará will never reach its servers. Just like it happened with Youtube once in Brazil, maybe the "solution" is to determine that EVERY SINGLE NATIONAL INTERNET PROVIDER should remove forwarding service to Twitter's URLs - check out the size of the problem."

Beautiful, huh? Being from here is so fucking embarrassing sometimes.

[this post was translated from this post here, of Imprensa Marrom. I wish you all knew portuguese, because he's brilliant]

+++++++++++++

The imature 13 year-old kid that lives inside of me couldn't be stopped. So here it is:

LOSER!
(she said it, not me)

lame alert!

So Walmart (not Wal-Mart anymore!) is launching a new logo this coming fall.

Personally, I think it's lame. I can't stand their attempts to be more like Target and totally disregard for the fact that they still remain the most questionable place of employment and with the worst environmental and social practices.

But -hey, who cares?! Let's pretend we care and just change our logo!!

I was reading about the identity "revamp" here, and loved this comment:


(Click here to see the gif - I can't figure out how embed it in the body of the text)

embrace the dash

You Should Do It Now - a campaign by Converse

volvo is thinking outside the box

Click on the image to watch the video.



"The Volvo C30 Design Concept Car has been developed with young, successful urbanites in mind. This is a group for which brand and style are particularly important.

When designing the C30 Design Concept, the Volvo team experimented extensively, borrowing ideas from the fashion industry. The shape of the windows and even the C30 Design Concept color palette were partly inspired by sporty sunglass models."

ask me how much I hate carnaval

- How much do you hate carnaval?
- A WHOLE FUCKING LOT.

It starts tomorrow and ends in 4 days.

I wish I could be unconscious in the meantime.

PERSONAL BRANDING...

IS NONSENSE.

READ HERE!

Henry Ford

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."