Posts Tagged “brand”

Don’t you love it when over-caffeinated people get into screaming matches over how they think coffee should be served? As long as its not happening in front of me in line, I consider it a form of reality TV – it just serves to reaffirm that whatever my faults, at least I’m not those people.

Maybe you heard how a week or two ago, a guy tried to order espresso over ice at a coffee shop where such a drink was “really not ok” and this turned into a minor media flurry (I saw it when it first hit boingboing) and eventually degenerated into bilateral threats of arson and assault. See the original rant here, and a rantbuttal from the coffeeshop guy here.

Anyway, this got me thinking. The fancy coffee shop here thinks they’re enforcing their brand, a “coffee without compromise” brand, rather than a “have it your way” brand, which is what the customer thought was in force. (I’m at a Starbucks now, I wonder if there’s any permutation of the stuff behind they counter they won’t serve?) A basic failure to communicate, perhaps? Hardly an excuse for the level of verbal violence on both sides.

Elite, even prickly or hostile brands do exist and can succeed. Hardly anything is truly for everyone, and smart brands have to find ways to appeal to the people they want and to ignore or even drive away the people they don’t want. “Everybody” is just not an actionable target market. High prices and high pricing signals (like no price tags) are the most obvious way that brands drive off undesirable customers, but sometimes you want to segment on something other than price.

I met up with an old friend and colleague at podcamp last weekend, and he expressed some concern that he had developed a negative brand as “not for everybody” for being aggressive and opinionated. I agree. He’s not for everybody. Neither am I and neither are you. But if you’ve got a particular kind of problem, you need a particular kind of solution. This guy shouldn’t try to broaden his appeal, he should accentuate his specialization. Look at Listerine, Altoids and Moxie – they are strong and aggressive and not for everybody, and proud of it.

I think there’s room (maybe even a need) for a Murky Coffee in every industry – a strong and bitter dose of exactly what you need, whether you’re man enough to admit it or not, served up the right way, no substitutions – and that comes with the need to clearly communicate how and why your brand is so tough. And finally, there’s an obligation to be respectful of people as you steer them away to other, less demanding vendors.

When you run a web-based business and your site is down for maintenance, you might consider not doing what Linkedin did last week.   Here’s the screen:

Let’s leave aside the question of the wisdom of doing this maintenance or upgrade or whatever on a weekday evening and concentrate on the elephant in the room – there’s a big fat cartoon wizard up there.  What’s up with that?   Pointy hat, curly shoes, baseball on top of his staff?  He’s not the Linkedin mascot, at least I don’t think I’ve seen him before, although the has a big “in” on his chest.  I guess he sort of reflects Linkedin’s brand colors, but Linkedin is not in the magic business.   And I’m pretty sure that people into LARPs are more likely to use facebook.

Site maintenance is no excuse to deep six your brand. In fact, it’s just about the worst possible time to monkey with your brand, since while your site is down, that page is all there is in the world to represent you.

Take a look at Linkedin’s post-maintenance main page:

OK, I’m not wild about the flaming lunchbox either.  But why couldn’t this basic information about the purpose and benefit of Linkedin have been included on their “back soon” page? Even if the core engine of Linkedin’s functionality is down, can’t they make some useful static pages available?  Maybe take email addresses and send a message when the site is back up?  There seems little excuse for a lame page for planned maintenance.   Everybody knows that downtime is deadly to an online business; why add more injury to this injury by putting up a lousy temporary page?