The Art of Brand – The War On Clutter (Part Three - Podcast)

Marc says that your biggest enemy for effective brand strategy is Clutter.

Clutter is what gives your competitors a chance. Clutter makes you part of the crowd. Clutter confuses your customers and in this global marketplace there is more clutter around than ever before. But how do you target it? Well Marc says Simple equals memorable. Before we spoke about detecting and getting rid of clutter he invited me to review his ideas in a surprising location.

One of the things to think about with your business or if your starting a business or building a brand in particular a branding strategy is how to separate yourself from all of this clutter. Now Parramatta Road, if we think of this as a device, Parramatta Road is actually quite representative of the Internet. There is a huge amount of traffic that goes going up and down this road going to it’s individual destinations, going very quickly and not stopping to experience anything that is on it’s left or it’s right.

For your website this represents an obvious parallel. A lot of people will go through the main highway of the internet – that might be Google or Yahoo or a site like that – looking for a solution for a problem that day and once they actually find that solution they are only backspace away going away from your website back onto that highway to find the next website that will provide a solution to that problem.

So just spend a minute for me Angus and turn 360 degrees here on this famous junction and tell me what businesses immediately stand out to you.

Angus: Well I guess there is a pub which we can’t miss and a couple of real estate agents and then down the road is the ubiquitous McDonalds and there is a tyre shop over there which I have a story relating to. What am I meant to see?

Marc: Well that’s just it, what are you meant to see. If I were the owner of that small business there I would be hoping you’d seen me. If I were the owner of that tyre shop over there as opposed to the one you’ve pointed out I’d be hoping you’d seen me. This is one of the first things about branding and one of the things we mentioned in our first article. The sooner you realize that everybody has a really really short attention span the better it is for you. Because you will then understand that your ability to get your message across really is a snapshot within a blink of an eye. That actually relates to, not just to outdoor signage, trucks and bus signage it relates to your website as well. The level of maturity on the Internet now is that just having a website is not enough, so does everyone else.

Let’s talk about that tyre place that you mentioned. Strong colours, you knew there was a tyre vendor on this street. What’s the story?

Angus: Well I needed a new tyre for the car and I knew that there was one local. I went to look up that tyre vendor and couldn’t find their number in Annandale. I looked through the yellow pages, the white pages and the web and still couldn’t find it until I drove past again and realised I had the wrong company. The blue stood out so boldly that I thought it was Goodyear but in fact it was Beaurepairs.

Marc: So you associated the colour with the wrong business

Angus: Yeah I did

Marc: It’s quite interesting. That tells me two things, one, although you didn’t recognise the name of the business, the colour resonated with you. When you go up and down a busy street like this you do rely in primary signals because I rarely walk up and down here but I do drive all the time and your eyes are going to be the road and your destination.

That brings us back to the second point. Once you’ve identified you business and what it is and how you are going to be recognised the second thing to really be aware of is what now makes you relevant and you have to use that relevance in your brand communication. So if you don’t have a brand perception yet or you don’t have a way of making yourself instantly recognisable to the marketplace you going to have to work out what your brand perception is going to be. Your going to have to take every opportunity to you can to put that across without creating clutter.

Now, it’s interesting. We did the head spin earlier and the common denominators were clear signage, strong colours and a reasonably clear message and I think you can’t get away from those three things. If your brand or your website relies on the small print in order to get a sale it’s going to fail. If your message is simple, bright and clear you’ve got a much better chance of engaging your potential customer than if your message is drowned in clutter.

So, I’d like to take you to the office now if I can and show you a few things we’re working on and talk a little bit about how your website can be a tool for you not to sell your business but also to stay clutter free.

Angus: This is the Art of Brand and we’re speaking with Marc Iannacone. eBrands was established in 1998 and has extensive experience in the conception, creation and execution of successful online campaigns and business strategies.

Their clients include businesses in the IT, recruitment, property and real estate, retail, financial and legal industries.

eBrands operate from an office in the exciting Fox Studios back-lot where the next day I met the eBrands team.

Marc and I sat down in a somewhat less cluttered atmosphere and discussed his ideas for arming yourself with the weapons to help win the war on clutter and using your website to more quickly and effectively engage visitors with your brand.

Marc: If your going to take the brave step of tackling clutter in your business it’s really good to have an objective in the outcomes in mind. We talked in the previous issue of The Art of Branding regarding some of the key characteristics that your stakeholders have. The first one to think about is that short attention span that people have. It’s recognised that everyone has an attention span which is very quick and when we were standing on Parramatta Road yesterday we sort of explored the issue of how having so many brands in the one place.

The first step to tacking positively tackling clutter is having a strong visual identity. Now having a strong visual identity might come across in many ways. For example it might be the way that you’ve designed your logo. It might be the colours your use to support your business. It might be a key statement that you are know for, it might be an attitude that you are know to have, it might be a personality in the business it might be that the CEO of the company might be an outspoken person but what’s really important is to make sure that you don’t flood the market with lots of unnecessary messages but to focus on the strongest asset you have. So the first thing to do is to work out your assets and work out which ones give you the best mileage for developing that strong identity and then talk to a design company to help you make sure that identity is expressed visually.

The second point is to then work out what your core relevancy is. We spoke about the two tyre companies and how one was immediately relevant to you because of their association with another business and they were advertising, or could have advertised, a price. Your core relevance to your business is the one thing which is going to make someone progress beyond the recognition step to saying OK well I know what their name is to actually working out what that name stands for. Again what you are looking for is simplicity of message here.

For example lets say this was a company that was in the recruitment space, now there would be about 1000 recruitment agencies in Australia servicing different markets. Lets say for instance that your company was a specialist in the placement of healthcare professionals. In this instance we need to make sure is that the name of the business, the positioning of the business, and the colours of the business identify you as 1. as a recruitment agency but 2. put you in that right place so that people can understand you first time. For example if you give your business an abstract name you need to be prepared to spend money to help people understand what that abstract name is. Where as with Associate Healthcare Placements you have an advantage because people understand what you are.

Angus: Your third idea is that companies should make themselves understandable. Can you expand on that?

Marc: Not only do we talk about the fact that’s it important to identify yourself and then you going to have relevance. The message that you communicate has to be incredible simple. A good example there would be lets say our healthcare placement company decided that their core key value was the fact that they put people through extensive psychometric testing before they arrived at the clients site. So in terms of making that understandable it might be that you actually focus on the fact that you delivery a better quality candidate as opposed to talking about the devices you used to achieve the objective. Those devices could be supported in your marketing collateral but it’s not necessarily what you need to be remembered for.

In the course of our business as a design business we talk to a clients who seem to be undecided about what the key strengths of their business are. What’s really important at the end of the day is that the message that we support with the client with their brand and identity not only is that message representative of their core value but we need to adapt that to make sure it is clearly understood.

For instance, if we were talking about a software company who might have devised a brand new way of doing things by replacing an old systems or administrative model. But at the end of the day their core customer might be someone who manages inventory in a warehouse. Now that message for that customer might be ‘make your inventory management easier’ whereas you often find that the client goes into the minutiae of detail regarding specific feature and functions of the product and tries to incorporate that into their brand message. What your doing there is not really give a brand message your giving the customer much more information than they need to remember before they get into your sales cycle.

Angus: I’m assuming that most website have 10 to 15 seconds worth of the visitors viewing time to hook them in.

Marc: The latest stats indicate that someone will spend about 40 seconds on a page in order to try and understand what that page is about. So we have a couple of tests that run clients through before they select their branding.

The first test in the online space is a test that we call Thirteen. Basically what we do is whenever we prepare a website in terms of a design what we’re then asking the client to do is say OK, this is the story you’ve given us, would you be confident that a 13 year old boy or girl would be able to understand exactly what your website is about and what you do. By taking that denominator we’d basically saying “yes the information is clear and easy to use and everyone can understand it.

Angus: Thirteen is the same age that journalism and newspapers use as their yardstick.

Marc: Yes, a barometer. We find that 13 year olds are a lot more savvy these days but another way to quality check that is to make sure that the story that you tell on the home page of the website and what you say and what your supporting to make sure that your staff are also telling the same story.

Angus: Saying we have got our homepage visitors sticking around for more than 40 seconds, how do we draw them deeper into your offerings?

Marc: Good question. The idea here is that the process for getting someone engaged with a website is really about making sure the content is presented in as appealing and attractive way as possible based on your product’s relevance. The key thing to think about is this - your initial presentation of your website – your homepage. What you need to be really clear about is what you do and what your key benefit is because - we know this with certainty – your competitor is a back button away, they’re a Google search page away, they’re a yellow pages search page away, they’re a banner away on another website. So what you need to do with the initial interaction with the website is draw people in to engage with your brand. The more information that you give them upfront, the less that they actually need to develop a relationship. And that is really what the fine art of the brand is all about. You represent what you do, you represent what you stand for and you represent your value and quality with your visual identity and you actually sell your product with it’s features and benefits. So the real art of brand is not necessarily about making the sale from the first visit of the website, it’s just making sure that you are the website they come back to when they’re ready to purchase. That’s where people confuse direct marketing with branding. Because branding doesn’t necessarily equal a sale, but it does equal a share of someone’s mind.

Angus: This has been The Art of Brand and we have been speaking with eBrands strategy development director Marc Iannacone