BP....most certainly a brand, not a commodity club...

Read a post on Boing boing and it struck me that in my original post here I missed perhaps the biggest "brand" of all....

open source loo roll...

This is the new loo roll holder that's just been installed in the Dig for fire toilets.

Aside from pointlessly reinventing a piece of technology that didn't need to be made exponentially more complicated – and, ignoring the fact that this plastic monstrosity, not only visually pollutes my toilet visiting experience, but massively increases its carbon footprint - its proprietary.

I can only use this loo roll holder with the manufacturers loo roll. The makers have  designed the spindle (and presumably patented the design as it if were some sort of leap in scientific understanding) in a star shape – to force the user into a lifetime of loo roll monogamy (their loo roll incidentally is significantly less soft that the stuff we used to have).

So at a time when many of the worlds more progressive brands are going “open source” and adopting open standards - here is a one that is actively grabbing back idea "real estate". It might appear trivial - but nevertheless iIt is in congruent, anti-competitive, backward and inhuman – in short – everything that mega brands are always being accused of being.....

borrowed relevance...

Josh Bernoff published a report recently here talking about "boring" brands.

It resonated with me - a lot of the brands I work with at Dig for fire are what he'd define as "boring" - healthcare providers, banks, government departments, building supply merchants and educational institutions - brands that certainly aren't going to be adopted by users just because they're "cool" (I'm aware just using the term "cool" - means I'm likely to be anything but...)

As someone at the coal face of always on marketing, tasked with getting these sorts of brands to exist online, I can attest to the fact that a lot of the issues on a day to day level, come down to brands not being comfortable with "borrowing relevance".

Its not about "cool". Its about convincing brands to get involved with what people are actually talking about, as opposed to what the brand would like them to be talking about.

In other words - there is possibly too much getting stuck up on the relevance of the marketing tactic and not enough understanding, that so long as whatever the application or technology employed (the application, viral, widget, newsfeed, weird bit of technology) resonates with the brand essence - in most cases, that's enough to start.....

So long as they're contributing in a positive way, a brand in unfamiliar territory is something users probably take more notice of, at least initially. Removing friends from your facebook account has got precious little to do with eating burgers but it reinforced Burger King's playful, cheeky brand values. On the other end of the scale, Keep Britain Tidy publishing data in RDF format has nothing directly to do with picking up litter, but being seen at the cutting edge of web 3.0 means the brand can have conversations it could never have had, had it stuck rigidly to its push messaging plan and segmentation model.