Online Branding: The Power of the Google Doodle

I’ve always loved the online branding power Google built through its Google Doodles. You know the…

Some people say that Google built its brand without traditional advertising.

Poppycock!

Putting aside its current use of traditional advertising to market itself…(ahem)

…Google also was smart as hell to create awareness of which search engine you were using by occassionally tweaking the presentation of its name. Along with other little proofpoints of differentiation like the speed and quantity of its results…

…this creative way of building good ol’ fashioned brand awareness and corporate identity is one of the secrets of its success. Something Yahoo, AOL, Netscape and others missed. And something that continues to be missed by even big online brands today like Facebook.

(It’s also a great example to point people to who believe “no, our logo and corporate identity is carved in stone” point. It shows when and why you can play with corporate identity can be played with.)

Now comes some facts (more…)

Bad Ad of the Month: Toyota

I don’t usually like to bad mouth other people’s work (lord knows the road to branding greatness is littered with ad wrecks) but when an ad is this “huh?” I have to award it my Bad Ad of the Month.

I mean what is (more…)

Online Branding Case Study: The Toronto Ski Club

We were absolutely thrilled to see some of our recent branding work was profiled as Logo of the Week by Australian-based Logo Chief. Since the snow has now melted and there’s a couple of facts to set straight we should provide our own profile of this successful case study.

The Marketing Challenge

The Toronto Ski Club is one of the oldest ski clubs in Ontario. And, along with the Collingwood Ski Club, owns about half of the ski hill at the popular Blue Mountain Resort in Collingwood, Ontario. It’s private clubhouse sits at the base of Blue and was built in the 50’s after the founding members had strapped on their skies and discovered the superior skiing north of Toronto.

But the clubhouse needed a little work. About $3 million worth. And, in order to fund that, the club needed to put on a push for new members.

Example of Publicity for New Clubhouse courtesy of Escarpment Magazine

The Branding Strategy

The club had a lot of assets.

• A great membership base famous for its warmth.
• A rich and colourful history in pioneering skiing in Canada.
• Access to the best ski resort in Ontario and, through it, potential exposure to tens of thousands of skiers and potential members.

But the club, despite its proud history, had been under-marketed and the research we conducted found that 40% (more…)

Sharp Example of Branding for Top Chefs

You know those little dividers in the grocery store that separate your meat from someone else’s potatoes?

Came across one yesterday that converted it from a regular, everyday item into an awareness-building medium. The Food Network in Canada is launching our own version of the hit U.S. show Top Chef. Some clever marketing folks found a way to promote it that interrupted an ordinary moment in a shopper’s day into a relevant little bit of interruption marketing.

Marc Tellier, a friend and CEO I worked for in rebuilding the Yellow Pages and Auto Trader brands, called this ‘getting clever points’: the magical little moments that reward the consumer for the interruption and uses storytelling to stick to the brain and create FAME for the brand.

In a world where the power of traditional media has declined and fragmented it’s a branding strategy that’s becoming increasingly necessary.

Got any you’ve seen? I’ll profile them in an upcoming post on ‘small ways to create big brands’.

Measuring Branding via Google & The Captain Morgan Pose. Arrrggh.

“It’s branding! You can’t measure it.” they say as if branding is some sort of magical dark art.

As a brand-builder I hear this a lot by people happy to defend what I do but “hold your hippogriffs!” because, while maybe it was true in the past, it’s no longer the case these days thanks to online search tools.

I spoke last week at Seneca College to a group of great Brand Management students from here and abroad and showed them how you can use free Google tools to measure the impact of your branding activities using the Captain Morgan Pose campaign (more…)

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