Imagine, if you will, that historic moment in time. The place is Sweden. The moment is the brand birth of one of the world’s most famous icons. It’s the place I would ‘most like to have been in another time’. It is the creation of IKEA.
Explore our historical blog articles for nuggets of wisdom (and random musings) from our crew.
Deciding whether to use a .com or a .com.au domain suffix is one of the questions we have to field from clients who are making their first foray into the World Wide Web.
Most client are savvy enough to know that .com suffixes are predominantly found on the end of global URLs as well as sites from USA, while the .com.au is strictly reserved for Australian websites.
As a strategist, I often recommend that clients embark on the development of a document called a ‘Style Guide’. In the advertising industry they can be called many things: ‘Standards Document’, ‘Brand Manual’, ‘Logo Requirements’. But what makes one so important? Why do we recommend them so strongly?
Last week I set a challenge, of which the response was overwhelming (said with sarcasm), but it at least highlighted (to me) how important it is for grocery brands to brand themselves first – before selling the product, the taste, the quality, the range. Branding is number 1.
So you’ve got a flash new logo. It has cleverly defined your corporate culture, your direction and positioned you in both the right market place and the mind of your targeted consumer (either that or you got your brother’s new girlfriend who has a flash new iBook with a desktop publishing program on it, to do it for you in exchange for a cheap bottle of Vodka) nevertheless…you have a logo!
Passing the local HBF branch on the weekend, I noticed a change in their branding. The big, bulky, capital letter HBF brand has been replaced with a flowing, lower case version, accompanied by a distinctly feminine and friendly, corporate style.
So little is understood about the mysteries of an organisation’s culture, is it any wonder that business today shakes it head and simply decides to dispute the existence of cultural issues. As strategists we have no choice but to acknowledge its existence because we see its effects each and every day.
Understanding culture in your organisation, while onerous, is never the less, an essential ingredient to success and a failure to recognise or understand its ramifications is nothing short of dangerous.