Brand Girl

I thought i would blog about another speaker from the Future Trends Conference I attended a couple of weeks ago.  Barbara Kwasnicki, aka ‘Brand Girl’, Creative Strategist, Kwas Inc., spoke about Maximizing Trends. Intuition + Trends = Sales.  I have always believed strongly that in order to provide clients with successful projects, we need to fully understand them, their brand and the world they live in.  Brand Girl says…”Be aware, harness instincts and take action”.  Play to your audience and know what they need. How do you know what they need?  You don’t always know. It’s instinct.  It’s mining the headlines for clues, it’s being aware of cultural trends and it is understanding and researching the industry.  Cultural trends are the forces that impact consumers the most.  We see this especially in the tech industry – but it affects everyone.  We see even on this Blog how Trends are affecting communications – Twitter, Social Media, Widgets, Mobile Space….to keep up we need to interact with the brand at all levels.  Obama is a great example of this trend being very successful. He took advantage of every opportunity to sell his ‘Brand’ and targeted where it mattered most.  The genius – and challenge, is making the connections.  Trends must be turned into programs. 

Google saw a trend and has now created a program from it. Mail Goggles ’emailing while drunk’ is apparantly a problem of the connected times we live in. And Google is there to solve it.  Have you ever sent an email after getting in from a fun night out (sure…me neither!) and regretted it in the morning?  The program when activated, forces the user to solve math problems before the message will be sent, the idea being that if you’re too drunk to add – you are probably too drunk to be sending that email at 3:00am.  Sounds crazy and a bit unnecessary?  That is usually how innovation evolves into something tangible and worthwhile.  Cultural Trends + Industry = Sales.  Another trend that Brand Girl talked about was the blurring of luxury brands. To compete luxury brands are moving into mass market territory. They have to be where the consumers are. Where are they?  You will likely find them at Target.  Kheils is one high end product that is now seen on the shelves at Target. (or so I have read…sadly Canada still has no Target!).  Luxury is more about experience and time than products now…

Another big trend?  Cause related marketing.  Cause + Marketing = Sales. Corporations are now starting to build brands around kindness and generosity, demonstrating their corporate responsibility is now a priority.  Liberty Mutual has built an entire campaign around the ways people choose to do the right thing. and it has changed their business.  A spin off of this is their Responsibility Project, short video clips of people taking responsibility for making the world a better place. We have a lot of choices, consumers are educated now. and when we choose we want to choose for the right reason.

To those of you who read all the way to the end of this long post – thanks for indulging me! More to come…