Sounds like branding

So, it's vacation time here in Sweden, and that for me means a lot of reading.

I've just finished reading Sounds like branding, by Jakob Lusensky.

It's a book, that talks about how your brand "sounds" and how that affects your customers and can make them interact more with your brand. Very interesting, and I really like that he talks about lovemarks. Lovemarks is one of the reasons I actually decided to start blogging, because when I read about the concept, on a trip to New York some time ago, I got amazed and wanted to explore the marketing/branding world more. The word in itself is also what inspired me to name this blog (and my company) to LoveEvent.

Picture from Bokus.com.

Now this blog has come to be about a lot more than lovemarks, but nevertheless, the word means a lot to me. :)

Check out the Sounds like branding blog.

True Love?

This hoodie design is called True Love, and can be found on Zazzle.
True or false? Funny anyway! :)













Picture from www.zazzle.com

best YET

One of the two Swedish teams competing, stole the third price in the European finals of the newspaper advertising contest best YET. An article about the Swedish team, consisting of Philip Frendberg from B9 Advertising and Tobias Grönberg from Deasign, can be found here (Resumé), and also: the Swedish site for best YET. But I tried to find another (international) site about it, or something about who is behind the award, but I couldn't find anything! Strange! Anyone out there who know where to look?

Oh, and the team that won was from Belgium; Ross McCurrac och Arnaud Bailly, working at Saatchi. Saatchi & Saatchi is one of my favourite agencies (due to Kevin Roberts and his concept "Lovemarks", which is one of the catalysts for this blog...) (Find earlier posts about Saatchi here and here).

Branding agency Brandflight

Check out Brandflight, and their 4D brand model. Quite interesting, and "hands-on". They sort of take Lovemarks ideas a few steps further...

Emotions, emotions

As I wrote earlier, a few weeks ago I attended a seminar with professor Dmitry Repin.

It was a very interesting hour and a half that I spent listening to his research and to other researchers' theories. As I also mentioned earlier, his research is mainly about the stock market, but when I was there I could see the connection to Lovemarks and other marketing theories. They are all based on the answer to the question: "What makes a person (customer) choose one thing over another?"

Prof. Repin spoke about the Ultimatum Game. Terry Burnham did an experiment with the Ultimatum Game. He measured testosterone in the saliva of persons playing the game, coming to the conclusion that things that we might not be able to measure in everyday life (such as testosterone levels), effect people when making decisions. Repin also showed us the result from a study made by Anna Krivelyova and Cezare Robotti (Playing the field). They studied geomagnetic storms and the effect the storms had on people's moods and, in the prolongation, the trade on stock markets. Days when geomagnetic storms were present, the trade in stock markets was lower than other days.

An experiment carried out by Repin and Andrew W. Lo measured different physical factors at 8 traders at the Boston Stock Exchange. One of the traders did one transaction per second during certain time poeriods! Reason is probably not a big component when making those decisions, so one can assume that emotions have a big significance here. They also performed a study called "Fear and Greed in Finacial Markets", trying to map wether different personality types are "good" or "bad" traders, and also how the trading result effects the trader. I will not go into details, but check out a presentation of the studies here.

What is the most interesting is that emotions (of all kinds) and maybe other things such as "natural phenomenons" effect us when making decisions. They are very hard to measure, and very hard to model. So, we need to find ways on how to relate to them. How significant is this influence of the "emotional" component? Are emotional components sometimes more important than other components that effect us? In my opinion: yes, probably. But how do map them? How can we reach and effect peoples feelings, guide them in the direction we want? Lovemarks might be a step in the right direction, but I do belive we need to do more.

Lovemarks forever?!?

I wrote an earlier post with a link to allaboutbranding.com. I read an interesting, but frankly quite basic, article written by Kevin Roberts (about Lovemarks of course).

I also stumbled over another article from the same site, written by a Dr. Dan Herman.

Creating Enticing Brands, not 'Lovemarks'

Dr Herman uses more than half of his article to write about how bad Kevin Roberts is, and that Roberts has no clue about branding. After he is done with that, he writes about emotionally strong brands. He accuses Roberts of not being able to understand research, and that you can not disconnect emotions from logic, you have to have both. Herman writes about creating a social or psychological benefit created from the benefit of the brand. And also, he has some very interesting points about building an emotionally strong brand that people love. Try using "off-core differentiation" for example.

Lovemarks book review

Grant McCracken has written a review of Kevin Roberts book "Lovemarks".

Even though the criticism is quite harsh, I'm thinking about buying the book. Simply because I want to create my own opinion.

Grant McCracken's blog: This blog sits at the...

Emotional markets

So, in Kevin Roberts article about Lovemarks (link to my post about it) he is talking about emotions.
I'm going to a seminar by professor Dmitry Repin. He is going to talk about "Emotional markets and Emotional Traders". Since he is a finance guy, I guess his seminar is about stock market trade, but I can't keep myself from wondering wether his theories can be applied to "normal" trading?!?!
Emotions ARE important. A report will be posted after the 8th of May.

Toyota Prius

Well, it turns out Seth Godin drives a Toyota Prius. (At least that is what he writs in this post: You're right)

In my opinion the Prius is almost the best car in the world right now (yes, we own one). Almost the best car because you can not change the GPS while the car is moving. Safe? Yes. Good? Maybe. Annoying? Definitely! If you drive with a passenger, that person can not do anything either, you're stuck with the address you added from the beginning, even if you would rather stop somwhere on the road. I think I have to write to Toyota about that.

What is also interesting is that Saatchi & Saatchi (where Kevin Roberts, the creator of Lovemarks, happens to work), was, together with another advertising agency, the creators of the advertising for the Prius. (Saatchi & Saatchi News, at the bottom of the page).
I like it.

Kevin Roberts on Lovemarks

An interesting article from allaboutbranding.com, explaining Lovemarks a little deeper. (By Kevin Roberts)

Lovemarks

Lovemark(s) on the net

Some background information from Wikipedia and Saatchi & Saatchi (the advertising agency where Kevin Roberts, the "inventor" of Lovemarks, works)

Lovemark at Wiki
Lovemarks.com

What this blog is all about

Ambivalent is NOT what one would normally call me, but when deciding to start this blog I had no idea what to call it.

The purpose of the blog is to gather information on diverse subjects that interest me, subjects that I would like to learn more about. These subjects consist of, but are not limited to;
event management
marketing strategies (such as "guerrilla marketing")
branding strategies (such as "lovemarks")

Since I couldn't settle for one interesting subject and/or name I combined them: "Love" from lovemarks and "Event" from event management.