Hotel Brand Shows Best Side

Best Western Hotels has produced an integrated marketing campaign that taps into consumer interest in authenticity and individuality. The campaign, encompassing direct mail, email offline ads, features members of staff from Best Western Hotels across the UK and aims to communicate the message of exceptional service with photography of key members of staff.

Tim Wade, Best Western’s Head of Marketing commented: “The key differentiator for Best Western is that whilst part of a global brand all our hotels are individually owned and managed each offering that personal level of customer service. Instead of using models or actors to front the campaign, we decided to feature the real people that work in our hotels.”

A sporting chance

The first product in a new strategic partnership between adidas and Samsung will be miCoach, a mobile phone with an integrated personal training system.

With former Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho as its launch brand ambassador miCoach is communicating the idea of a personal coach that travels with you and helps you to perform sportingly. This claim’s basis rests on the personal data it collects and turns into individual training plans based on fitness level and specific goals.

A carefully thought out brand collaboration, the system’s five key components include the miCoach Samsung phone, a heart-rate monitor, a stride sensor chip to fit all adidas running footwear, compatible adidas apparel and the miCoach website to create tailored training programmes.

Mark Mitchinson, VP Samsung Mobile UK comments on the tie up with a sports brand: “This is ‘blue ocean’ stuff. The ‘red ocean’ stuff for mobile phones is music and camera but no one has taken enough notice of sport and being healthy.”

Flexible brand identities

Brand identities are essential to represent what a company or product does, and should go some way to communicating values. But branding can be restrictive – stemming the creative juices, especially when marketing guidelines dictate that a logo has to be in a certain position and a particular size.

In the March edition of Brand Strategy, Ben Wolstenholme, creative director at agency Moving Brands, makes an interesting point in his brand paper: ‘The never ending story’. He argues: “The rapid development of technologies means a truly successful identity must now be able to respond to a world of constantly changing platforms and attitudes. They have to be adaptable – living, even.”

This thinking has been applied to the development of a new visual identity for telecoms company, Swisscom. The logo marks the change for the group from a technology and information company, to a consumer facing firm offering applications and content via PC, mobile phone and TV. The red and blue marque has been designed to be adaptable with a moving element. It can respond in real time, so for example, the marque changes shape depending on how many people are active on the Swisscom website.

You can see the moving logo by clicking here.

Exclusive blog article: Martin Sorrell calls for end of ’super consumption’ era

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, warned today that companies needed to stop encouraging ’super consumption’ in their customers and find more sustainable ways of doing business. Picking up on a trend identified in Brand Strategy magazine last summer, his speech at the Added Value Branding for Good forum told businesses that it was time to stop adding to waste and environmental problems by adding to unnecessary consumption.

Sorrell spoke of how he had initially been a cynic about issues such as climate change and its importance to the business community but is now a real convert. He said:

“Consumers are used to the aspiration that you should consume more, the aspiration that you should have a bigger car, the aspiration that you should have a number of holidays, bigger houses, multiple houses…in other words, it’s a lifestyle we’re encouraging them to make.”

He added that Apple, which is: “one of the most successful, …maybe the most successful….[of] iconic consumer brands, if you think about one of the things Apple is doing, it’s encouraging consumers to buy a music player, an iPod, for about $200 and that is an instrument that the consumer will jettison after a year. It’s encouraging people to buy these things, then trade up and consume more. The environmental issues of getting rid of that stuff are very considerable.”

“All our habits of clients, agencies, media owners is to encourage people to consume more – super consumption. That is still embedded in the consumer’s psyche, so we’re going to have to respond by doing things differently and making sacrifices if we’re going to deal with issues such as climate change.”

Brand Strategy’s editor Ruth Mortimer had a chance to question him more about this topic. She asked him about issues concerning consumption and whether being good was still an idea seen as being a nice-to-have, expensive, luxury proposition rather than something truly mainstream.

Sorrell said:

“We’ve tried to educate consumers to the idea that ‘more is better’. Part of the message here is that ‘more isn’t better’. Take cars for a minute, we have been in the habit of driving bigger and better cars, live in bigger and better houses or consume bigger and better electronic products. What we’re having to do is say: “No, that’s not necessarily right, you’ve got to have more environmentally-friendly products and services. And that is difficult.”

“It is a fundamentally different philosophy, we’re used to ‘more is better’. So when you talk about Apple and the iPod, it’s an incredibly successful company but when you think about the waste and encouraging people to jettison things….20 or 30 years ago we used to joke about those products with built-in obslescence. We don’t joke about it anymore. You can try and build in obslescence but this is countering it. I think it’s about super consumption and people will behave in different ways. Younger people already do; they are doing things in a more responsible way as they build their lives and careers.”

As usual, some fascinating observations from Sorrell and many thanks to Added Value for inviting us along to hear them and ask him about them. What do you think? Is ’super consumption’ an important business issue for you? Any ideas on how brands can curb it?