Original flavor, please

With the arrival of summer, it’s difficult not to notice the increase in foot traffic, even here in the busy city streets of Manhattan. In this transition between spring and summer, citizens and tourists alike wait in abundance outside frozen yogurt shops, only to increase the city’s congestion. Alongside brand leader Pinkberry, a dozen or so fro-yo copycats have emerged, like Red Mango, Yolato, Kiwiberri, Berri Good, Yogurtland, and Flurt.

From a brand perspective, the fro-yo war in this city is a tasty example of the potential pitfalls that come with copycatting. What copycats fail to realize is that mimicking the leader, not only in product offering but also in look and feel, lands you in the ‘me too’ brand category – and fast. And this leads everyone to believe that you’re only second best to the original. Without the ambition to go above and beyond best-in-class practices, and aiming instead only to match them, these other yogurt chains are neglecting to lead. Not only are brands like Red Mango declining to differentiate themselves, but they’re also up against Pinkberry’s strong cult following.

With greater attention to brand than the competition, everything about Pinkberry looks, feels, tastes, sounds and smells like Pinkberry. From the Philippe Starck chairs and Le Klint lighting fixtures to the Alessi-populated shelves and pebbled floor, Pinkberry has chosen each element of its experience – online, environment, collateral, packaging, PR and community – with brand delivery in mind. As for the mild success of Pinkberry’s copycat predators, I would argue that the business they capture is made up mostly of the spill-over from Pinkberry.

After all, if the beloved Pinkberry line is too long, most will take off across the street to Red Mango, because when all is said and done about brand, second best fro-yo tastes better than none at all.

30 June 2008, posted by Eliza Blank

Invisible brands

Recently I’ve stumbled upon some of Rob Walker’s work in prelude to his new book “Buying In”. In one of his write-ups he talks about invisible badges. According to Walker, badges are signals that suggest a tighter relationship with the brand producer and the brand consumer.

Walker observes that people no longer buy stuff to impress others, rather to impress themselves. This means that logos are becoming less important indicators of status. Look no further than the high-end fashion industry where logos are shrinking.

Christian Louboutin has made red soles the staple of his shoe line. Bottega Veneta bags are identifiable by their intricately weaved patterns. Rolex is known for the weight of its watches and Armani for the slender rounded shoulders of its men’s blazers.

Intended for small affinity groups rather than mass markets, these companies are creating brand undergrounds where consumers need to be fully indoctrinated in the brand cultures to fully understand their subtle signaling.

This is a liberating trend for brands with strong belief systems like Zappos that pays their employees to quit or Gourmet that believe that there is no conflict between mixing high fashion and streetwear pieces. Companies with substance can now start to tell richer brand stories through the product themselves.

Moving forward the miniaturization of logos will become more prominent, where embedded clues, colors, fabric and materials will become the main brand identifier.

25 June 2008, posted by George Crichlow

Power to your people

NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, recently produced a policy briefing on innovation in services. As you would expect from a policy report, it has a host of ideas of what governments should do to foster innovation – a bottom-up understanding of needs, open and flexible markets, better leadership, skills development and funding for start-ups. All good, if obvious, stuff.

Where it really hits the nail on its head is in a section titled ‘Services businesses innovate differently from manufacturers’. This difference can be summarised in one word: people. Service innovation depends less on some geniuses having aha moments, less on R&D, less on secret endeavours behind closed doors and more on creative front-end staff, flatter hierarchies and rewarding relationships with partners and competitors.

Service innovation happens in real time and each transaction is an opportunity to create and own new types of services. The best people are those who know the customer best – the staff on the sales floor, the nurse in the ward, the rep at the end of the phone. When brands understand this – as they do at First Direct, American Express and Disney – they give their employees not just the tools but also a philosophical platform that equips them to literally make it up as they go along, and deliver real innovation in services. They give their employees real power. Leveraging those innovations in the organisation then becomes a matter of having the right sharing and memory processes (including external sources), and humble management that recognises and celebrates ideas from the edge.

Of course, many businesses don’t do this – NESTA points out that retailers, hoteliers and restaurants lag behind traditional manufacturing in innovation. Crazy really. It might be they have the wrong people – not at the edge, but in the middle. It is more likely they have the wrong philosophy and have failed to equip themselves with a brand that drives through a culture of creativity at the edge, where each person understands the difference they can make in people’s lives.

Without that kind of power, front-line service providers become mere cogs in the wheel, instead of an army of innovators, daily creating and sharing new services that make real money for the organisation.

NESTA’s policy briefing Innovation in Services was published in March 2008. More at www.nesta.org.uk

16 June 2008, posted by Ije Nwokorie