Branding a Students' Union

Put your flat white down, pause Angry Birds and disappoint your twitter followers for a few minutes; the hottest new brand has just arrived:

Sidney Sussex Students' Union.

We may not have the pervasion of Innocent or Apple just yet, but we are well on our way with our new communications.


Having decided that our college students' union was misunderstood in a tragically teenage way by both the students and the fellows of college, members of the committee set to do something about it. After a 3 hour creative session with the president and vice president, I was able to get a sense of where the union was at currently and where we wanted it to be. In a workshop with the rest of the committee, I asked difficult, probing and downright annoying questions to garner a sense of our shared values and perceptions of the union from those who work to build and maintain it. Through questions like, "What does SSCSU do best?"to "What would SSCSU be if it were a building?", I collected a range of illuminating responses.

With a handful of useful post-its, on which the committee had contributed their thoughts, like speculations that SSCSU would be a converse if it were a shoe and a family home if it were a building, we came up with some conclusions. Our personality, we decided, is open, inclusive, transparent and thoughtful, amongst other things. Our beliefs include such credos as the statement that every student has a voice and that change is achievable through democratic efforts.

After collecting such great input from the committee, we opened up the questions to the rest of college to broaden our understanding of our role within the community. Combined with the concrete messages of what we believe in and what we aim to achieve, we began to develop a general picture that we were perceived as doing valuable work, but not everyone knew exactly what this hard work entailed...

So with the help of two designers, Georgia and Dave, we created an image to help portray best our brand and explain exactly what it is that we are here for. The output of all this work is an evocative, vibrant and eye-catching graphic that, along with our stated values and personality, helps to define and ground the important work that we do for the students' union. Check out the following and watch this space, because SSCSU's brand has arrived.

Keeping Communications Down to Earth

I am just back from a whistle-stop tour of Morocco, where dizzying displays of wares hung from souk ceilings and camels slunk along one by one, dotting the barren views from the highways. Yet the one thing that repeatedly struck me was not the cries of the spice-sellers or the persistent smell of camel-leather and the chronic presence of heroine chic-thin cats, but some very pervasive advertising. McDonalds and Starbucks haven't arrived in Marrakech just yet, and there is no "Tesco Lotus" as there is in Chaing Mai, Thailand. Instead the brand dominating the scene in Morocco is Earth Cafe. This little cafe served up vegan and vegetarian meals at Westerner prices and had three restaurants in Marrakech and one in Essaouira. Everywhere I went in the city, the sign popped up (in all likelihood a reflection of my sense of direction, rather than their marketing). Yet the small chain seemed to dominate the outdoor advertising space in Morocco: emblazoned on red stone walls in remote locations; scratched onto Berber houses up the mountainside and most attention-grabbing of all, daubed into the ground near Marrakech's airport in ten foot high letters.

This latter attempt to draw meat-avoiding holiday makers was scrapped when the restaurant was reminded that this wasn't particularly eco-friendly. Neither is intruding your brand in places of natural beauty, or persuading people to let their homes become advertising. Yet it definitely caught my eye, so much so that I'm dedicating blog-space to them. So can the proverbial adage of any publicity being good publicity hold water? Or is it merely the desperate last words of soon-to-be sacked PR executives? If the publicity in question directly conflicts with the brand's core values then its communications must be self-defeating. People would pay attention if Greenpeace started daubing messages on melting ice-caps with seals' blood; but they probably wouldn't be any more inclined to join the cause.

This mis-firing advertising prompted me to consider the other brands who have challenged conventional perceptions of themselves in their marketing.

In the above examples BMW and Absolut have pushed the boundaries with provocative adverts rejecting home values and familiarity to raise a smile and hopefully a profit margin. Earth Cafe Morocco may not have the weight of a communications team behind them that Absolut and BMW have, but there was something about the recurrence of the name in bizarre locations that implied a mischievous, Banksy-esque nature; even if it left a few vegans shredding hemp in fury.

Can a Knock-Off Ever Be a Tip-Off?

All over the world we see pervasive brands chewed up and reconstituted so that they retain familiarity but are nonetheless unsettlingly wrong; the process of creating knock off items widens up the pool of potential consumers by making premium products available to all. Some of these products are so far off the mark that they are hilarious; their extension of a brand's vision into new and previously unconsidered territories appears ridiculous. Yet can they ever be insightful? Can the scattergun approach of distorting and manipulating an existing brand lead us into unchartered innovative waters?

Knock offs target a vast stretch of society, yearning for the security and status of branded items but unable to possess them due to financial or geographical limitations. These people show us that brands seep into all corners of society all over the world and that a life without a knowledge or attachment to any kind of brand is a rare one, no matter where you are.

Brand-mimics such as the spread to the right, wonderfully titled, "Unbelievable- This Is Not Butter", show us that even everyday items that we would distance far from desirable luxuries have a place in the knock off industry. "This Is Not Butter" tells us that buying the right butter may not be a nostalgic recall to childhood meals that were laced with buttered toast and jam, but a social statement. What is in your butter dish might just be a sign of whether or not you have made it.

Another intriguing interpretation shown by a knock off is the Sonia headphones pictured. The producer is not only drawing on the Sony brand to create a confidence in the product, but also feminising the offering. The creation (or attempted creation) of a sister brand for Sony may be more insightful than we first thought. Have Sony ever considered that their offering is phallocentric? Televisions, cameras and phones may be targeted at both genders but perhaps Sony need to reconsider their communications strategy and asses to what extent it is accessible to women.

Sony's latest advert for its new tablet features the dulcet tones of Louis Armstrong and the flouncing vitality of several female burlesque dancers at the beginning. As the advert progresses a man unravels the marvel of the new tablet, watching high-octane clips from an action film and gaming on the device.

This boys-only club atmosphere of Sony's communications is something into which the creators of Sonia headphones may have unwittingly tapped.

Apart from the communications strategy, knock offs may illuminate the mucky waters of market research for big brands.

        

"Johns Daphne", "Hike" and "Johnnie Worker" may give as perceptive insights into consumer thinking as the most stringent research agency ever could. If Jack Daniels were aware that their "Tennessee" branding could be so easily transposed with "Tenderness" would they rethink their segmentation? If a corner of the world associate the deep south with gentleness and a caring attitude then the real JD could do worse than to bottle this and try to communicate it globally. Similarly the Jonnie Worker brand shows us that the whiskey may fulfil the need state of afterwork drink all over the world; Is this something that can be propelled further or is this the sentiment of a niche that can be targeted with a more budget offering? "Hike" is I think the most interesting piece of brand-sabotage. The term demonstrates that the brand resounds with echoes of physical effort and  prolongued energetic expenditure, yet this is maintained on a leisure wear item. The vulgarizaton of Nike shows us the extent to which a brand can extend beyond a product and encapsulate a state of mind, rather than a possession.

In fact that is surely what all of these imposters are doing, showing the value of brands for their innate properties rather than their individual products. Some brand-borrowers may not provide the same level of clarity however:

This reworking of fashion house Dolce and Gabbana produces no quick answers but shows us that sometimes our brand desires just can't be unpeeled.

The Language of Branding

Why do some brand communications take off and others flop?

We're told that today's social-media savvy youths are a generation of image-hungry consumers, starved of literary input and awaiting their next online fix. Whether it's a video game, a 3D film or Angry Birds, kids today don't know and don't care about language.

Or do they?

Socail networking, surely the media phenomenon of the 21st Century, laid its foundations in the word; only Pinterest has tapped into the potentials of visual communications; surely others will follow but for now verbal equates with social. There is no clearer definition of personal branding than the 145 characters provided for self-expression by Twitter. Brand linguistics are as vital today in modern communications as they were in early 20th Century propaganda: "Keep Calm and Carry On" is as poignant a piece of advice for modern brand managers with a penchant for the verbal as for the nation's morale seventy years ago.

Marketing's overarching end goal is persuasion: persuading the consumers to buy and persuading the clients to listen. Luckily we have a particular tool for exacting this persuasion in our language: rhetoric. Rhetoric is the portmanteau term for devices and techniques that help to construct powerful arguments; some are used by us every day and will ring bells that haven't chimed since English GCSE and others are less familiar.

Here are some of the most effective devices used in advertising:

Tricolon

This means very simply the use of three:

Triangle structures seem to appeal greatly to the human brain and it reoccurs in literature, art, architecture and many other mediums. We are brought up to expect beginnings, middles and ends and tricolon offers this grammatically. In the English language tricolon echoes the simplest sentence form: subject, verb, object. For example MacDonald's' ubiquitous “I’m lovin’ it” offers a complete grammatical unit expressing the sensory delight experienced when munching down on a Big Mac and fries.

Placing the verb in the middle is where we would expect it to be in a descriptive statement. In contrast to this, Carly Rae Jepsen’s song (now virtually a brand itself) places the verb at the beginning, making her statement imperative. This is however moderated by the “maybe” at the end; Carly's blend of sexual confidence and insecurity is perfectly captured by her rhetoric, it is this vulnerable forwardness that has made her such an icon.

Rhyme

Rhyme is a controversial one. We are socialized to respond to rhyme and it is embedded in our education as well as our culture (think nursery rhymes to pop-songs) yet because of this it can have an immature quality (think bad poetry or limericks). Today it can carry a gimmicky tone to it, meaning it is unsuitable in speech or formal writing but useful in punchy advertising slogans. There is a finality to rhyme that lingers on from literature of the past: after all there's a reason why Shakespeare ended every scene with a rhyming couplet.

Rhyme used in something like “Beanz Meanz Heinz” is effective because it presents a kind of memorable mantra for children and Mums; the semantic progression of a=b (Beanz=Heinz) is reinforced by the rhyme, cementing together the association of baked beans with Heinz.

More subtle variants on this are seen in half rhyme, “Get the Abbey habit” and “I'd walk a mile for a Camel” both have a gentle echoing quality issuing from the mirrored sounds. Internal rhyme is when the syntactical units rhyme, for example: "Du pain, du vin, du Boursin". This particular one is so catchy because the first two elements are monosyllablic but the lengthened “Boursin” makes us linger over the word.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a device in which the sound a word makes reflects its semantic meaning, e.g. "bang" or "crash". These words tend to appeal to a more primal part of our understanding and directly communicate sense through sound, hence why they are so common in science fiction. Yet they can also work on a more sophisticated level; words like "lugubrious" and "unwieldy" have echoes of their sense in their sound. The following slogan from Alka Seltzer uses onomatopoeia to a brilliant effect:

The phrase "Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz" demonstrates the sensory numbness produced by a hangover. There is a suggestion of the regressive state to which we are reduced by the overindulgence of the night before. The combination of the sounds with the following rhyme, "Oh, what a relief it is!" make this slogan somewhat childish- a humorous take on the way in which grown adults are demolished by raging hangovers.

Alliteration

This is when the same sound is repeated at the start of a word, for example: “Bring on the Branston”. The idea is that we will link the two in our heads; we’ll never want to “bring on” any other condiment other than branston because it just won’t sound right. Alliteration can make memorable sound bites in this way, but can sound jangling if overused, like in AOL's "Welcome to the World Wide Wow".

Assonance

A repeated sound within a sentence, this is similar to alliteration but often much more subtle, “Don’t give up the ship” is an example of the gentle chiming it can create (give/ship).

Parataxis

Parataxis is the balancing of clauses, providing equal grammatical importance to each, as in, “I picked up my mother and I met my daughter”. If we compare this to “I picked up my mother before I met my daughter”, we can see that the former implies an equal significance to both mother and daughter, whereas the latter prioritises the mother. It implies that all elements of a larger structure share significance and this can be expressed without conjunctions, as in eBay's "Buy it. Sell it. Love it".

This classic paratactic structure mimicks Caesar’s “I came. I saw. I conquered”. No link word between the individual clauses is required and the absent subject implies an invisible yet accepted community, in this case the eBay community.

Isocolon

This is the repetition of words at the start of a sentence, as shown in Churchill's famous speech:

"We shall defend our island, whatever the cost

may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall

fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in

the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the

hills; we shall never surrender."

The resultant effect is emphatic and didactic and we can't help to feel roused by Churchill's booming rhetoric. There is a certainty and a confidence in the repetition that allows for no doubt as to our own resilience. The isocolon conveys extremely effectively the sense that we all start in the same place, "we shall", but we all end up somewhere different, nonetheless fighting as a united front.

A similarly inspiring British institution, Butlins, also tapped into this powerful rhetoric device with, "Come to life. Come to Butlins". This use of isocolon cleverly plays with the varying meanings of “come to life” as being revived and “come to” as heading for a destination, combining emotive experience with physical place.

The Imperative

This is when we make a command, for example: "Don't do that", "Stand up please". We usually find the verb located at the start of the sentence:

Both of these are commands, however they are non-threatening, encouraging us to self-improve. These brands show us how they will change our lives and the imperative tone provides little room for doubt.

There is a hidden world of rhetoric lurking in the depths of our own language, harnessed by advertisers but unknown to many of us. An ability to decode these devices can unlock language and reveal subversive intentions. By conquering the basics of linguistic aerobics we stand in a position to persuade like advertisers do; underestimating the importance of language in branding is a mistake most marketers do not make twice.

Divine Innovation

Frank Cottrell Boyce, author and screenwriter, said that “Chocolate is poetry for the mouth. And poetry is like chocolate for the brain.” These words were a response to the entrants whom he was judging in Divine’s latest marketing campaign: a poetry competition.  Boyce’s words may be more saccharine-drenched than the chocolate, but his statement aligns with Divine’s brand positioning perfectly.

Divine was launched in the 90s as a way of channelling the produce of a Ghanaian cocoa-farming co-operative, Kuapa Kokoo, into UK markets. The result is the only Fairtrade chocolate company which is 45% owned by the farmers, ensuring that they receive a better deal for their produce, a share of Divine’s profits and a stronger voice in the cocoa industry.

Divine position themselves as “a heavenly chocolate with a heart” and from the narrative enthusiasm they apply to telling their story to the native symbols on the packaging, representing values such as interdependence, democracy and harmony, they are undoubtedly the chocolate bar that’s good inside and out.

In a £4billion UK chocolate market such integrity may not be sufficient to share a slice of the highly-sought offerings. Divine’s fraction of such a vast market is not supported by profligate advertising campaigns; indeed many of its competitors will spend around 10% of their revenue on marketing, a budget on which Divine remains much more tight-fisted.

Instead of pricey print campaigns the chocolatier focuses on more unusual methods of improving its brand’s awareness. The poetry competition received thousands of entrants when it asked people to imagine they owned a chocolate shop. Their online presence is also extremely promising: they have 13,000 followers on Twitter and over 4,000 likes on Facebook, compared to a paltry 1,000 for Galaxy. Pinterest especially seems to be the mainstay of Divine, where recipes and serving suggestions abound. The brand which so passionately supports social values seems to have found a home in social media.

So is it working?

Divine saw profits in its fledging year of just over £600,000; in 2011, 5 years on, they have nearly trebled that sum to £1.7million. Their awareness of growing concerns surrounding the production and labour involved in creating the foods we love and their closeness to their consumers allow this small Davidian brand to compete with the chocolate goliaths out there. Divine’s heart throbs throughout its products and at its heart is the wellbeing and value of those who grow it's staple ingredient. This little chocolate bar has found the key to a huge market, ripe with opportunities.