Today Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection, a once great company is dying. In the news report I read it stated "there is really no value left in the kodak name". The company is doomed surly but I don't think that means the brand has to be, in fact to say it has no value is a pretty naïve point of view.

The brand Kodak is still an asset for the company as it still has a place in the minds of millions around the world, with its history and heritage still well known. This is brand equity, it maybe slightly faded after years of neglect but it's still there. Only a fool would think it has no value. Years and years of time and billions and billions of dollars have been spent lodging that brand into the minds of millions. The company maybe backwards and in massive debt but the brand still certainly have equity and therefore value.

History is full of clever entrepreneurs buying supposedly past-it brands. In late 1990s P&G dropped White Cloud toilet tissue in the USA, left the trademark unprotected allowing a small company to take the brand and relaunch it as a competitor to P&Gs own brands.

An old brand allows you to get space in peoples minds which costs billions to estbalish for a seriously cut down price. Reputations can be revived for less than it costs to launch a new brand, so maybe if you've got a spare few million the Kodak brand might be a nice one to pick up.

The supermarket value wars are raging, today I shopped at Sainsburys and for the first time got a tangible, in my hand saving. £1.92 off my next shop, as that was the difference between the Sainsburys shop and if I did it at Tesco or Asda. I really like it.

- encourages people to return
- doesn't rely on the customer to do anything
- is tangible, they're doing something not just saying that they are

Kia is quickly becoming my favourite brand. A couple of nights ago I saw the below TV ad, which from an initial viewing appeared to beg people to like them on Facebook (I thought they sold cars and were attempting to build a brand, silly me, it's all about Facebook likes).

Due to the "engagement" "driven" by the ad I couldn't resist having a look at the Kia Facebook page. And I'm glad I did. I got to read top quality content like this...

 

Kia Motors

Today, Kia Motors has made the breakthrough of reaching one million Facebook fans. Please leave us a congratulatory comment below. Thank you.

 

I am now happy, I've now been able to like Kia on Facebook and send them a congratulations message. I can't wait to tell my friends.

A lot of the reading I'm doing for my IPA course seems to point to the majority of advertising working in an emotional sub-conscious manner, indeed the most effective advertising working this way.

This is in direct contradiction with the industries current obsession with participation, asking people to actually do something. Fine if the thing is worth doing by itself, the problem is most of the time it's not. To get round the fact the idea is dull these participation campaigns often contain some type of give away or competition.

Both ways are practically paying people to interact with your brand because the brand isn't attractive enough to generate the interaction without some type of payment.

I've termed this type of activity Prostitution Planning.

-  The brand is paying for something it isn't attractive enough to get otherwise.

- It makes the brand look desperate. Like an old man who curb crawls, the brand runs ads saying please please interact with me, I'll even give you something if you do.

- The consumer who has taken part is often left with a feeling of being unfulfilled by the experience as often they don't win the competition or the activity has no depth or soul.

This isn't to say all competitions should be categorized as Prostitution Planning. There have been plenty of newsworthy interesting competitions which don't have a hint of desperation about them e.g. Quantas Win a kangaroo campaign (by Howard Luck Gossage), The Best Job In The World and the Audi New Scientist competition to win a trip to space.

All these competitions had one thing in common, they were interesting enough to generate considerable amounts of earned media, something many of the current participation campaigns could only dream of.

Upload your photograph, give us a like or tell us a story and you could win a holiday, a car, some money. Dull, desperate, lazy and if enough people paid attention damaging to the brand.  

There's a great post on BBH Labs about the vast majority of people having apathy towards brands.

In the comments Ed Boches looked to highlight the love some people do have for brands by pointing us towards a recent article in the New York Times about Moleskine celebrating their users by printing text from them on the front of their products.My problem is that it isn't really this so called 'love' that builds brands.

The truth is that Moleskine sold 13,000,000 products last year but only has 90,000 likes on Facebook which (although crude) is about 0.7% of buyers or 99.3% buyers who don't. The Moleskine brand was not built through love or trying to engage more deeply with consumers, it was built on two pillars:

1. The design of the product
2. A myth designed to enhance its reputation

Both were clearly identified by a different New York Times article back in 2004. The brand owners (Modo & Modo) created a myth that Hemingway, Picasso and Chatwin used the pad. In reality they didn't. They used a similarly designed pad but not a Moleskine branded pad. The brand was only established in 1998.

Moleskine fans have clearly drove the brand forwards not through liking on Facebook or love but by simply buying and using the product. People saw others who they aspired to be like using the pad so they wanted one too, social norms in action.

The only advantage of the special edition featuring users comments is it got the brand featured in the New York Times. Its actual effect on further building the Moleskine brand will be insignificant.

Nick Burcher recently wrote an interesting article on how paid, owned and earned interact with each other. It's good to try to think more strategically about these three elements and how they fit together. Too often you hear paid, owned and earned thrown out as if it's something new and insightful, in truth it's not, it's just a label for things which have always been. The benefit comes when we try to understand how they work together and how this can benefit brands.

Often you get a feeling from how they're talked about that paid, owned and earned are equally as important as each other. But they're far from equal in their ability to affect behaviour and change the perception of brands. I think we need to be clearer on the strengths and potential weaknesses of each channel.

Obviously strength is context dependent but we can make a few generalisations to create a broad ranking of influence as a thought starter.

The below diagram shows each media against 3 axis of trust, engagement and influence. As trust and engagement grow the influence per impression becomes stronger. Straight forward and over-simplistic but often when planning marketing communications earned media and the importance of generating it is not given the respect it deserves. Even though there is plenty of evidence of its superior effectiveness (the IPA study 'Marketing In The Era Of Accountability' concluded that campaigns which generate earned media are more effective and build more profitable brands than those which don't - it seems people want to buy brands which get talked about).

On the back of every iphone you'll find 'Designed by Apple California'. But what if Apple was from Wales?

I went to see Sir Martin Sorrell speak a couple of nights ago. It was really interesting to hear from such an important figure. I was pleased when he mentioned Levitt's Marketing Myopia and that it was still relevant.

Of all the stuff I've read so far on the IPA course its the piece that has spoken loudest to me. Although many people in advertising know the classic paper you wouldn't think they did.

We're still often too obsessed with messages and media that we start to lose focus on what really matters, solving clients problems, meeting business objectives, that is the real business we are in. No motor company really wants an ad campaign, they want to sell more cars and build a brand.

Ad agencies need to start to be solution neutral rather than media neutral, the answer isn't always an ad, an app or some content and we need to be creative enough in our thinking to see that.

I once read an article with David Droga in which he said he wanted Droga5 to produce solutions which were so interesting he could talk to his family about them around the dinner table and they'd be impressed. I think that's a great measure of the work we do, is it interesting enough to talk about with your family? If not why do you think it's interesting enough for anyone else to talk about?

I thought I’d note down some of the other ideas I had for my first IPA essay on the future of brands.

One thought was the need for brands to be easier in the future. Not just easier to buy but easier to desire.

In many ways we are entering the Easy Age, the Information Age with it's over powering volume of information is being sorted, personalised and generally made much easier to deal with. Search engines started the move towards a new age, and now software like Hunch and my6sense take it a step further actually picking relevant content for you judging from your previous choices.

But it's not just technology that made me think brands need to become easier in the future, there were really two key points:

1.       Human nature
Humans love easy. Further understanding of human nature has shown us it is built around making life easier and more convenient. Behavioural economics clearly demonstrates this through choice architecture, social norms, heuristics and habits – all of which make life easier. Brands need to be easy to benefit from the type of creature we are and the mind we all have. We don't like hard.

2.  Current social trends
The volume of information in the world is doubling every 2 years. There is too much data being created for humans to take, as I've said this will result in a move from the Information to the Easy Age. The Easy Age is all about making life easier, sorting information and personalising the output. People are looking for convenience in food with more ready made meals than ever being sold and bite sized media content is becoming ever more popular and dominant. If people are avoiding effort in content they pro-actively want to read imagine the situation for brand messages they may not be interested in.

What this means for brands?
“The consumer is loyal to the brand they can find”
JL Mars

Professor Byron Sharp has stated that the brands which grow most quickly are those that are easiest to buy. Ease meaning physical (e.g. distribution) and mental (e.g. brand salience) availability.

I think this can be built on. Not only is important for brands to be easy to buy but to be a successful brand and not a commodity they also need to be easy to desire. Both are important especially for strong mass brands. I’ve plotted a number of brands against these parameters below:

How do brands become easier to buy and desire?
I didn't really get to this as I took a different route with the essay but I imagine it will be about 3 key ways below:

1. Ingraining marketing in to the product
So all communication and interaction with the product build the right brand associations in the mind and all conversation created about the brand are focused on the product itself and not just the communications.

2. Constant momentum.
The Easy Age allows quicker improvement and product development than ever before, it’s easier than ever to create new products and distribution is much easier thanks to the net. Anyone can sell anything anywhere to anybody. Competition therefore gets more intense meaning successful brands will need constant momentum to stay ahead.  

3.  Being part of culture - focus on generating earned media
Brands become much easier to buy when people think they aren't being sold to and the brand just seems to become part of their lives, through either friends, the media or celebrity use. It's easier for someone to buy a brand if they know x, y and z all use it and they've seen and heard a lot about it recently. As Edward Bernays once alluded to the most successful selling makes the person being sold to feel like they've had the idea of buying the product themselves, they never feel sold to. Nothing can be easier than feeling you've come to the decision yourself.

To be successful in the Easy Age brands need to ask themselves two questions, how do I make it easier for people to desire my brand and how do I make it easier for people to buy my brand. The easier the brand makes it, the more success it will see.

The once king of mobile Nokia has created a competition asking for people to give them ideas for apps.

I wonder if this is what Nokia should be doing in its current situation.

I know this type of activity can be successful and has seen good results e.g. Dell and Starbucks.

But the crucial difference is the context in which Nokia have made this announcement.
 
Confirmation bias dictates that people find evidence that supports their current theories.

A lot of people currently think Nokia have no ideas, accordingly this move will only confirm that.

Sad really, if the same company had done it 5 years ago it may have been seen as innovative, another move forwards.

Now it appears me-too and potentially desperate.

I can’t help thinking would Apple ever do this?

No. I doubt they would. Apple lead.

With this, Nokia is positioning itself firmly as a follower.