Where do you stand on buying a fake brand?

Well the answer is a no brainer really. Those of us in the business of building brands are horrified by the ever-growing masses of ‘rip off’ brands that are out there. When a small business has to employ someone to monitor and eradicate fake products being sold around the world, it’s a sad state of affairs.

As many people will have seen, Turkey’s tourist areas are home to a massive brand rip off industry. The traders proudly advertise ‘genuine’ and ‘genuine fakes’ which actually differentiates between really well made rip offs and their poor counterparts. Because of the level of the activity, it could be argued that there is unlikely to be a loss of sales for the originals but surely it must damage the brands.

At the risk of being cruel, Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts that on 5th Avenue are modeled on sculptured, buff torsos, do not have the same appeal when stretched over a beer belly and are complemented by homemade tattoos.

There is nothing hidden or under the counter about fake brand retailing in Turkey, it is open, unashamed and treated with a degree of humour by all but the discerning brand lover.

It’s easy to avoid the badly made copies, shoved in your face with a three for ten pounds offer but it’s less easy to resist when coupled with sales skills that would have Mary Portas impressed. A glass of water, a coffee, or a beer, a comfortable seat and a charming assistant, coupled with extremely well made products skillfully sold to you, makes it hard to stick to your principles.

Some might believe that the big brands with their expensive labels and huge margins, have got it coming to them but you have to spare a thought for the smaller businesses whose brands are being copied, that can neither fight it nor brush it off. Basically, I see it as ‘genuine’ theft – don’t you agree?

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We have recently completed two projects for charities, the subject matter being close to our hearts. For golf mad John, The Botham Clarke Celebrity Invitational is held on the wonderful golf courses at Archerfield Links each year, in September. We created the identity and the literature to support the event, which this year raised over £400,000 for Sir Ian Botham and Darren Clarke’s chosen charities.
www.archerfieldgolfclub.com

For horse lover Kay, involvement with Muirfield Riding Therapy led to Agrada assisting with a rebrand and then working on a fund raising calendar. East Lothian photographer John Archibald took the photographs that celebrate the horses, people and landscape that contribute to making Muirfield Riding Therapy such a great charity to be involved with.
www.muirfield.org.uk

In these frightening times of economic downturn, where every positive line of action to protect investments appears to be blocked, I firmly believe that doing nothing is an inherently dangerous course of action to take.

I totally agree with the financial advisers when they say that people should hold onto shares, if they can, until the markets begin their inevitable recovery. I also agree that people shouldn’t sell property for a while, unless absolutely necessary.

As far as the commercial world goes, this, in my opinion, is a time for action. The cake may be smaller but that is a greater incentive to want a bigger slice of it. Most businesses, whether small medium or large have hungry machines to feed, in terms of their staff, premises and equipment costs. Under this kind of pressure, companies will need support, they will need to join forces with ‘like minded’ people and they will need to think laterally about how they stay in business and go forward.

I am not advocating throwing massive budgets at marketing communications but I do feel that, with a little creative thought, companies can open up new opportunities or make more of existing ones.

Business plans are useless if they are written and then confined to a desk drawer to gather dust. What I advocate, is an ‘action plan’ that lives up to its name. A plan that identifies what the company needs to do to feed that hungry machine and to ensure its growth and prosperity. It must have clearly described objectives, action deadlines and clear lines of responsibility for each individual action. Everybody in the business should be encouraged to sign onto the plan and it should be re-visited at regular intervals to ensure that it is being implemented. If the plan is not working – change it.

I have not logged the time I spent waiting for impossibly large files to download, but I guess I could have designed quite a few other things in the time I waited. I suppose I could have found other things to do, like making a cup of tea, popping out to the shops (in Glasgow) and walking the dog (if we had one) or I could have continued to become more and more frustrated.

A few of the sites I used failed to manage the size of the files – we are talking in excess of 100MB.

It seems crazy to me that as the resolution of cameras increase, and in turn, the size of the required files, we end up with something way beyond what is actually needed. For an A4 magazine, we do not need image files that even exceed 10 MB. Downscaling the images, also takes time for the photographer, the media bank manager, or the end user.

In conversation with the photographer on one shoot, she admitted that it was a problem for photographers too, as they have to keep finding more and more file storage.

Cloud storage is an obvious storage solution, but it does not eliminate the downloading problem. The current situation makes the whole exercise extremely time consuming and passing files around very cumbersome.

It seems to me that technology has given with one hand, but taken away with the other

It's obviously difficult, in a one hour television programme, to cover all elements of the proposed transition in detail, however simply declaring a new name to a client and saying "trust me it is right', misleads people into believing that new name generation and in particular re-naming, can be successfully achieved without the input of the business owners.

The conclusion that the existing name of a business is 'wrong' must come through discussion and analysis of why it is wrong and it must involve collaboration with the client.

Getting the name generation process right and bringing the client along with the development stages, is critical to the creation of what will ultimately be the foundation of a new brand and more importantly will promote acceptance and ownership of the brand, within the client team.

The FIXIT Factory name was ultimately rejected and it is a matter of opinion why that was. If the client had been involved in the important stages of the re-naming process, I believe that he would have either signed onto it and stayed with it, or the team would have generated a different, possibly more appropriate name that answered all elements of 'the brief', which may have been written by the consultant but would have most certainly been signed off by the client.

Brand name creation is not an 'add on' to a retail or other business concept it is a fundamental part of the business plan.

For designers working with brands, it was music to our ears to see how critical, not only getting the brand essence right was, but it’s physical application, research and attention to detail. The professional advisors had already picked the two contenders, because they reckonised clear USPs and good products and built on that.

And how they built on it, fabulous designers, amazing introductions and wonderfully experienced advisors, making great TV (apart from the unfortunate, frequent slide into XFactor dramatic effect).

How many independent producers must have watched with envy at how both companies had their paths made smooth by this gold plated help and wondered how they could do the same.

Usually financial assistance is not given to create a brand, although it is normally given for websites, employment and premises. But the brand has to come ‘hot on the heels’ of a quality product or idea. Get that wrong and little else matters.

So, putting aside the green tinted glasses that many will have been watching through, it was a great programme promoting the message about branding, research and presentation. Looking forward to the next ones.

High Street Dreams

Mr Sing’s

Muddy Boots

The internet is overflowing with vital information on how to build your brand and business and a critical part of that is that everyone is being urged to not just Twitter but to 'blog'. The statistics to back up this 'call to action' are scary; to quote an online article "people are making 500 billion influential impressions on one another about products and services every year."

There are simply not enough hours in the day to run your business and read properly and thoroughly what is relevant, let alone write regularly yourself. Do we really have such interesting and informed things to say? I doubt it, and yet it takes the readers masses of time to sift through the chaff to find the wheat, and who truthfully has the spare hours to do that, and at what cost? It is much easier to sit at a computer and fire out some words to, at times, an unknown audience, than to grind out a marketing campaign and put it into face-to-face action with a known audience. My own feeling is that we are at a tipping point, where much of the online information is becoming wallpaper, especially now that everyone is 'an expert' online, with strong opinions, and resulting blogs.

I'm no exception, of course and this piece, in itself, is part of the whole tsunami of words out there. I fully admit to finding it difficult to step back from it all – hence the admission of addiction. If I'm not careful, my life will disappear down whichever vortex my beloved iphone decides to create, unless I learn to be more discerning, disciplined and determined not to lose weeks of my life, surfing the relentless waves of information eroding our time and energy.

This time last year, I took up Saga's offer to insure my flat. I paid the 387.75 premium with my debit card and relaxed in the knowledge that my building and contents were covered for another year.On the 16th November this year, I noticed that Saga had taken 540.76 (my renewal premium) from my current account and on the 17th and 18th, my wife and I had telephone conversations with them about it.

The renewal date is the 4th of December and using my debit card details retained from last year, they had taken the 2009/2010 premium, 23 days early, without giving me the opportunity to decide whether or not to renew.When challenged the first time, they simply apologised and agreed to credit my account with the 540.76 taken. Incidentally, the renewal documentation arrived on the 18th.

There are two issues here. They had processed a renewal that was a 39.5% increase from last year, without discussing it with me and taken the funds early, potentially putting me in an overdraft situation. What worries me, is that this could be a deliberate policy of the company to both improve the cash flow position of the company and, more importantly, to commit 'older people' to inadvertently renewing their policy, which could go unnoticed until it is too late. And at a 39.5% increase in cost too.

To compound the problem, when I put Saga under pressure to explain why they felt they could take the funds, as they had, they said that on the 9th November, they had discussed the renewal with us on the telephone and that we had been happy with it, No such telephone call took place.

I have asked Saga to arrange for the person who says he/she called us on the 9th November to call me again. I am still waiting for the call and the refund.

Please warn your parents and your grandparents that Saga may not be all that it claims or seems.

It is a brand manager's nightmare though – isn't it?

Our days on holiday were long, my shoulders never ached and my eyes didn't
smart – of course it helps if you have a spectacular view. We sat each evening as
the sun went down and simply watched it and talked.

We are all so attached to our screens that we live our lives through them, if we are
not careful. How many times have we held long email conversations to resolve an issue,
when picking up the phone would have been the quickest and most direct way to deal with it?
We think we don't have time to actually speak to someone but if we add up the time taken to exchange emails, we may find that it would have been quicker and more effective to talk.
And how come we have less time? Is it because the 5 minutes we plan to sit down to check something or look something up has suddenly become an hour or more?

We are always contactable, wherever we are, and we seem to feel the need to record
every aspect of our lives, and tell everyone, by text, by Facebook or by Twitter.
We were at a Coldplay concert recently and noticed that people were more focussed on photographing the ants that were Coldplay on stage, with their phones, than just
sitting back and absorbing the atmosphere!

Thinking about the amazing developments in communication techniques.
Do we really communicate more clearly and effectively, or do we just communicate more?
The lessons I have learned from my week away are to talk more, to listen more and to
get out and smell the coffee, not to just photograph it for Facebook!