You say it best when you say nothing at all

Weiden + Kennedy in London have a nice blog. Worth visiting.

I just read an interesting post about Brand Voice - Could Your Brand Voice Please Shut Up?.
It comments on how the Malmaison hotel chain have peppered every point of contact (365 Branding?)with chatty, cute comments. Their own brand mouthwash Anatomicals Snog Me Senseless is a case in point.

I wonder if overtly 'saying' something misses the point of branding. What a product or service 'says' to me is my interpretation of the design, the experience or whathaveyou.

This morning I visited the Apple site to look at the new iMac that my brother had been excitedly telling me about. Apple's own blurb on the site seemed unusually spurious. No point telling me about a design's quality - I need to make up my own mind or listen to independent voices.

Sometimes understatement is the better choice.

Read the original W+K post

P.S. Malmaison seems like a strange brand name for a hotel - Bad House? - ah those crazy Poms.

Comments

Go figure

Took my daughter shopping tonight. We had dinner out. Got back home late. She laid her new clothes out in neat rows so she could choose what to wear for tomorrow. She's 5. I see her just every second weekend. How can such incredible errors of judgement (marrying my daughter's mother) result in such a wonderful little human being? Go figure

Why billboards must go.

The problem with billboards and advertising in public places is they are an invasion of privacy. Unlike magazine, tv, radio (etc) advertising you cannot choose to turn it off or avoid it. Nor does it offer anything in return. It is a medium that offers no benefit or advantage to the person it is inflicted on. At least television ads subsidise the programming. Without doubt some billboards are entertaining - I thought the anti GE poster for short lived MADGE activist group was particularly good. But most are rubbish. Literally. Badly executed. Nothing important to say. The debate has led to a great deal of hysteria - mostly from people with a vested interest in perpetuating the deployment of hoardings. Perhaps the idea that the issue at stake is 'property rights' is the creepiest. If you own a building you have every right to plaster anything you like on its external surfaces. Is that an antisocial point of view? I think so. In the UK you could have an ASBO slapped on you for si...

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St...

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog