Olfactory Branding

Quite contrary to the common belief, verbal and visual brand identities are not the only effective branding alternatives. Scent is an intrinsic memory trigger. Even those who claim to be ignorant of olfactory branding are constantly exposed to it and experience it insentiently.

Scent marketing is typically used either to fill the space with a targeted smell (ambient scenting) or as a brand signature (scent branding). Since people sense smell first and send that information to the very primitive brain centers of emotion and memory, olfactory branding works well for marketers trying to connect emotionally with customers. It differentiates your brand and helps customers remember your brand distinctively. In one of his studies, Martin Lindstorm, branding’s most original and innovative thinker, analyzed that Play-Doh’s fragrance was not only easily identified by the young individuals.

Olfactory branding is the heart of marketing strategy of brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, Bloomingdale's, Jimmy Choo, Ashley Furniture, Williams-Sonoma, Volvo, Lexus and Hugo Boss. Although some brands choose to make their scent consistent throughout their stores around the world, other brands such as hotels and restaurant chains choose to alter their olfactory campaign per the geographic location. Yet, some chose to differ – William-Sonoma for one is identified by it's signature vanilla and clove. Majority of the hotels have been using scent branding for the better part of the last decade. Just about every hotel chain has a signature program – Westin Hotels has its signature White Tea fragrance. St. Regis uses an elegant blend of rose, sweet pea and pipe tobacco. Hotel Monaco in downtown Baltimore has a soft citrus and green tea, the spiciness of black pepper and cloves wrapped in musk. Studies have shown that retail and hospitality sectors experience the most positive results with olfactory branding. However, products like Play-Doh are well associated with a consistent odor throughout the world.

ELLE magazine featured an article titled “Fragrance by Design” where they investigated olfactory branding within the fashion industry. Like music, fashion shows also use scent to establish a connection between the brand and audience. Abercrombie and Fitch was one of the first brands to use olfactory branding as part of their marketing campaign. Needless to say, no one across the United States and Europe can miss identifying an A&F store.

From Roosters Men's Grooming Centers in Northern California to San Diego’s real estate agency Brett Bastello at Dannecker & Associates, Canadian book publisher Oblonsky Editions, every possible business is moving to this next big marketing technique. But it’s not all that glittery. Olfactory Branding comes with it own set of problems. Some scents could be too dangerous for the population suffering from asthma or allergies. It could trigger throat closure, burning eyes, headaches or other discomforting reactions. At times, the smell you chose can not only distract your customers, but you might also end up losing them if you chose the wrong scent.

Ignoring your customers?!

"It isn’t whether you are really ignoring your customers, it’s about how they feel!"

I was at a retail outlet when i realized that these are a perfect example of a place for a customer to feel ignored - a basic mistake almost every department store does, thinking it's addressing the otherwise most commonly committed mistake by it's competitors around. I'm sure everyone reading this would agree that shoppers do not like to be interrupted or "hovered upon" by the sales staff, but at the same time want assistance to be available when needed.

I conducted a survey to understand and validate what forms the basic content of this  article. My sample department stores were mostly the ones which did not have high-enough-to-boast sales. Most customers in such stores complained that the staff was too busy among themselves to pay attention to them. Customers had to excuse themselves to get help, after which, the staff (in most of the cases) went back to being busy amongst themselves.

I too had a similar experience once and that store lost me forever! As a customer you want to be heard and be treated well. The last thing you want is a rude staff making you feel ignored. This kind of careless behavior from the staff makes a customer feel hurt, rejected and unwanted. It's a huge loss not just in terms of repeating (let alone loyal) customers and retention, but also in monetary terms, because of customer defections and abandoned purchases.

The problem doesn't end here. Another side of the same coin is the stores which have sales people hovering over a customer as soon as s/he enters the store. They keep following you trying to sell as many products as they can, making you uncomfortable. One will have to think twice before entering such a store ever again.

Clearly, there’s enough room for improvement and bridge this gap between these two acute practices. This presents us with an opportunity to gain a real competitive advantage by maintaining a perfect balance between these two extremes.

Brand Personalities - What's yours?

There are two different schools of thought who advocate the above statement in two entirely different lights. One sect is known as the Incremental Theorists and other as the Entity Theorists.

Now, Incremental Theorists believe that their personal qualities can be affected (or improved) through their own efforts. It doesn't matter to them if they use a Visconti or a Parker, for them they are both just pens. However, it would make a whole lot of difference to an Entity theorist who believes his personal qualities to be pretty static. Brands most definitely impacts his amour propre. Most of us fall into this category.

Researchers from University of Minnesota discovered from a survey that women walking in a shopping mall carrying a Victoria's Secret bag feel more confident and glamorous as compared to those carrying a simple shopping bag. Same holds true for an MBA student who considers himself more intelligent and has a high self-esteem as compared to a History Graduate. 

In most of the cases, Brands do change the way one feels about himself. In fact, some incremental theorists too have a brand preference, either because they identify with the brand personality or in order to send a message across (to others). So it doesn''t really matter what school of thought your target customers belongs to, as long as your brand endorses the personality he wants to be associated with!

LOGOS – as they speak!

1.   FEDEX:

It's an amazing work of design that brings two fonts - Univers67 and Futura Bold, together to create a subtle piece of perfect arrow between "E" & "X". It's a very smart act by Landor Associates NOT to make the arrow so prominent in any way and make it a cliché amongst the audience where "Arrow" is the most widely used symbol to depict delivery and speed

P.S. - The fact is, that when Landor Associates presented this logo along with the other 4 logos (out of the designed 200), FedEx CEO Fred Smith was the only one in the room full of executives to notice this arrow. FedEx logo is also considered a clever logo that doesn't reveal its own cleverness because though it's a brilliant piece of graphic branding, most people fail to even notice it.

2.   8 FISH:

8 Fish was a sushi restaurant in LA, California. This logo is designed by Jerron Ames and is one of the best logos that make an exceptional use of the negative space.

3.   5.10:

Five Ten makes footwear for the world's most dangerous sports. It's a smart logo that blends "5" and "10" in a unique way.

4.   Amazon:

It's an extremely clean and a simple logo that gives you a little insight into the philosophy of the brand. The yellow arrow from a to z represents two facts in a very subtle manner –

1.     Amazon sells everything from A to Z.

2.     It also represents a smile that reflects happy and satisfied customers, thus making it a friendly and approachable company

5.   Eight:

This logo of "the Eight Group" musicians is the most cleverly designed logo ever. It's designed with a typeface where every letter of the word "eight" is a variation of the number 8.

6.   Baskin Robbins:

This logo beautifully incorporates "31" in the initials if the two-word brand name, highlighting it in pink color. This "31" stands for what Baskin-Robbins is famous for, it's 31 flavors - one for each day!

7.   Apple:

This logo symbolizes apple from the Adam and Eve story, where it was represented as the fruit of "Tree of Knowledge", with a pun on “byte/bite”. However, Rob Janoff designed this logo with a byte simply to avoid this apple look like a cherry tomato. However, it's also considered to be used in remembrance to Alan Turing, one of the fathers of Modern Computing, who killed himself by biting into an apple laced with cyanide

8.   Eighty20:

It's one geeky logo where the two lines of squares represent a binary sequence, blue squares representing 1 and grey representing 0. This combination comes out to be:

1.     1st line - 1010000 representing eighty

2.     2nd line - 0010100 representing 20.

9.   Museum of London:

It's not just a bunch of colored shapes trying to shadow each other. They are the representation of evolution in the London's geography as it grew over time.

10. The Pittsburgh Zoo:

This is a perfect logo for a zoo, where the white spaces on the sides of the tree make up a monkey and lion staring each other.

11. Sun Microsystems:

Stanford University's Prof. Vaughan Pratt's design of this logo contains four interleaved copies of the word "sun". It is one of the most famous ambigrams that may be read as one or more words not only in its form as presented, but also from another viewpoint, direction or orientation. It's designed in a way that one can read the word “sun” from any direction, and appears to stand on one corner.

12. Goodwill:

The lower case 'g' not only stands as the initial of the brand, but it also represents a smiley, thus giving the customers/viewers a subconscious positive perception of the company.

13. Sony Vaio:

This logo represents the transition between the analog signal (formed by the wave between "V" & "A") and the digital signal where "I" & "O" looks like 1 and 0

14. Audi:

Each of the four rings here represents the four companies that were part of the Auto-Union Consortium in 1932 - DKW, Horch, Wanderer and Audi. AUDI itself stands for Auto Union Deutschland Ingolstadt.

15. Mercedes-Benz:

This very simple logo depicts a lot of power. The star in three corners represents the brand's dominance on land, sea and air.

Starbucks acquires Teavana

With its first shop at Seattle in 1971, selling coffee, tea and spices, standing true to their words, Starbucks has since continued to expand their consumer-goods segment-both organically and through acquisitions. Last year they bought Evolution Fresh Inc. for $30 million and announced its own single-serve espresso brewer, Verismo along with the coffee capsules earlier in March this year. They also bought the Bay Bread LLC for $100 million followed by $8 billion 60-calorie energy drinks, Refreshers, made with fruit juice and green-coffee extract. What took me by surprise was the latest $620 million feather they adorned their hat with. They already own a tea brand, Tazo. Then why toss in a second brand of tea in their kitty, especially when the brand association is with Coffee more than tea. Is it simply because Teavana has a better brand recognition than Tazo? Or is there more to it? Ironically, it has not yet been decided if these two complementary brands will be sold together in the Starbucks cafes.

Starbucks strategizes to add a high-profile environ store concept to hasten Teavana’s domestic and international marks. Sure I understand that retail being Starbucks' core business Teavana store concept will add to their advantage by providing them immediate access to prime storefronts and thus cater to an entirely new consumer base. But the same core business is defined exclusively by the experience they craft in their stores! And as far as the customers are concerned, this acquisition will build a different customer experience and business opportunity for Starbucks, delivering instant value to the shareholders, thus complementing their Tazo brand, giving them the prospect of creating a two-tiered market position.

Looking at their expanded segment, dropping off the word "Coffee" from their logo last year was a smart move but dropping off their Brand Name from its symbolic identification is so not cool! Of course Starbucks is a brand that doesn't need to sanction their name on the logo, but with the rapid and the kind of products being added to its portfolio, am not sure how far can they stretch it.

Since 1995, Starbucks has also moved into the aisles of grocery stores by selling coffee flavored ice cream, packaged coffee, bottled drinks and Tazo brand tea. CEO Howard Schutz plans to uphold the revenue growth with instant coffee, energy drinks, juice, a single-serve brewer and food to sell in its shops and in grocery stores. He aims to take Starbucks beyond coffee and namesake shops and expand Teavana’s current mall-based store pattern with a widespread strategy to include Teavana vicinious locations.

Lets focus on Teavana. Teavana is a specialty retailer offering 100 plus assortment of premium loose-leaf teas and other tea-related merchandise like authentic artisanal teawares, etc. It has more than 300 stores in the US, Canada, Mexico and recently, Kuwait. Along with selling Teavana in the grocery stores, Starbucks also intends to sell these Teavana products in it’s own StarBucks stores as well. It'll leverage by integrating its core competencies of real estate, design, infrastructure and store operations with Teavana’s top-notch tea influence, global sourcing potential, merchandising and best-in-class retail store unit economics. The acquisition of Teavana might not really help Starbucks' grow by entering new categories or with new products, but it'll certainly add to their existing distribution channels.

Starbucks’ investment in Teavana is matched by its commitment to continue to grow the Tazo business — giving Starbucks a two-tiered market position for tea. Its plan is to define a new elevated platform of tea experience and education, and for both-Teavana and Tazo brands to grow and complement one another while at the same time uplifting the entire category through a permutation of expertise and assets.

With it's recent acquisition, Starbucks not only intensified its portfolio but also have plans of entering new, high-consumption tea markets around the world. There is a tremendous expansion prospect in developing nations like India and China, where Tea is consumed more than coffee. Growth potential in China for tea is much better than that of coffee. Starbucks has recently entered the Indian Market in a Joint Venture with Tata Global Beverages Ltd., with their first cafes in Mumbai in October and another one to be unwrapped in New Delhi early next year

If we have a quick look at this process of strengthening their foundation brand by adding more brands to widen their core offering, Starbucks' added their Juice line and better-for-you food with the intention of pursuing health and wellness. Tazo and Energy Drinks were all a part of their plan to get healthier, thus contributing towards their within-the-company mission to look at health and wellness. With the increasing concern on High-Calorie foods amid a national obesity epidemic, they too have been trying to improve their image, exactly the way McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts did. 

Starbucks’ true value and growth latent lies in its brand and 91% of their revenue still comes from its cafes. Hope they don't lose the sight of what's important and get distracted from their true profit and revenue driver 

USING E-COMMERCE TO FUEL RURAL MARKETING IN INDIA

The contours of ‘RURAL INDIA’ have been changing continuously and rapidly. For an ancient Indian, ‘RURAL’ is a synonym for extreme poverty, agricultural farms, laborers sweating hard under the scorching sun ploughing the emaciated bullock carts to earn meager incomes just enough to meet their ends. However, today this is considered a distorted caricature, effacing the huge potential lying in the rural households. Gandhiji's ‘swadeshi’ dream was all about local self-reliance on the village level to revitalize rural India. E-commerce is a fuel to propel this dream. It’s a high time for the small scale industries not to depend on sales entirely through government subsidies. It an essentiality to generate a new class of entrepreneurs. So instead of rural India coming to urban marketing centers, the reverse phenomena has to take place and e-commerce can successfully pioneer this movement.

Post liberalization, tech boom has anchored India’s growth lifting the country above the level of an impoverished third-world giant. Ironically, the same tech boom holds the blame for widening the digital and economic divide between the rural ‘aam aadmi’ and the urban elite.

E-commerce though a relatively recent phenomenon, has already had a profound impact on life in rural India. Breaking through the tyranny of distance will cause unprecedented changes, opportunities and threats in many key areas, marketing being the major one

Some Myths Of Rural India

Rural India is not ONLY agricultural. More than a third of rural households in India derive their income from services or manufacturing and not from farming.

According to the 2007 Census, 45% of rural Indian households avail banking services strengthening them financially and economically.

Where Indian cities are struggling for transpiration, housing and other infrastructure, the economy is still based on suburbs and the scope of rural suburbs is immense.

IIT-Madras’ Prof Jhunjhunwala with his team have come up with several low-cost innovations to serve the rural market, which includes a Rs 27,000 worth ATM, compared to a normal ATM costing Rs.7.2 Lakhs, a low-cost internet cafe (at Rs 50,000) offering telephone, net, multimedia, a PC with web camera, printer and power back-up. According to the E-Readiness Assessment Report few months ago, this kiosk which is up in many villages of Tamil Nadu achieves close to break-even revenues of Rs 100 per day. But the question that haunts us is…”what do villagers need the net for?” well, one of the ,many answers to this question is: Videoconferencing between the farmer in the village to a learned person in the city for reasons numerous, thus saving on the valuable time and money to go to the for the same.

Initially, when marketing was headed for a dotcom with business plan to help companies build brands on the net, PC penetration was a major constraint. Hence internet penetration was very limited. However, now part of the population of 600 million rural Indians have access to the net through such low-cost kiosks, and that owning a PC is no longer necessary to use the net immediately shows the potential that each rural internet kiosk has to provide eyeballs or ‘netizens’. The aggregation of demand from all these users will make it necessary for companies to start using the net as an integral part of their marketing strategy because it will be commercially viable.

Another aspect of technology is that agriculture is vital to India, producing 23% of the GDP and feeding a billion people, and employing 66% of the workforce. India's agricultural productivity improved to the point that it is both self-sufficient and a net exporter of a variety of food grains. This is credited to the Green Revolution. Yet most Indian farmers have remained quite poor.

One of India's foremost private sector companies with a diversified presence in tobacco, hotels, paperboards, specialty papers, packaging, agri-business, branded apparel, packaged foods and other fast moving consumer goods, initiated e-choupal in 2000. The effort placed computers with Internet access in rural farming villages. The e-choupals serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of information and an e-commerce hub.

Spurred by India's need to generate foreign exchange, ITC's International Business Division (IBD) was created in 1990 as an agri-trading company aiming to "offer the world the best of India's produce". Initially, the agricultural commodity trading business was small compared to international players. In 1998, after competition forced ITC to explore the options of sale, merger, and closure of IBD, ITC ultimately decided to retain the business, challenging the IBD to use information technology to change the rules of the game and create a competitive business that did not need a large asset base. Ultimately, what began as an effort to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp, and other cropping systems in rural India has also created a highly profitable distribution and product design channel for the company. E-choupal has also established a low-cost fulfillment system focused on the needs of rural India that has helped in mitigating rural isolation, create more transparency for farmers, and improve their productivity and incomes.

These e-Choupals formed the center on a network serving both as a social gathering place for exchange of information and an e-commerce hub. A local farmer acting as a sanchalak (coordinator) runs the village e-Choupal, and the computer usually is located in the sanchalak's home. ITC also incorporated a local commission agent, known as the samyojak (collaborator), into the system as the provider of logistical support. Further, ITC also have plans to saturate the sector in which it works with e-Choupals, such that a farmer has to travel no more than five kilometers to reach one.

Modern information and communications technologies (ICTs) and web based marketing of agricultural produce hold great promise for the socio-economic development of rural hinterlands in India. However, if they are to serve the `unserved’ and spawn innovation at grass root level their implementation must be carefully localised.

The ‘anytime-anywhere’ advantage of e- marketing leads to efficient price discovery and offers economy of transaction for agricultural trading. This attracts any rural developmental agencies to deploy websites for marketing agricultural produce.

The advent of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as telephony or the internet hold unprecedented opportunities for rural development. Researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs alike frequently claim that ICTs represent one of the most powerful tools in the struggle against poverty.

The significance of the Web in disseminating information and communicating this effectively to the targeted user has been sufficiently debated. Most experts agree to it that the Web will have a great impact on the way rural marketing would be conducted in the future. Several studies have set out to assess the current performance of agricultural websites in some key areas of information provision through such websites maintained by government departments and agencies, private profit-motivated as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and to identify the barriers to communication. The results offer significant implications for researchers and practitioners interested in development of portal information structure for Web development, multi-dimensional communication, electronic commerce networks and e-commerce trading platforms for rural marketing.

One further idea for the Digital Mandi that evolved was Virtual Telephones or village voice mail systems, as have been set up in Brazil. These can provide individuals with their own telephone number and access to a voice mailbox. In other words, the individual need not possess a telephone but can receive calls to a voice mailbox using his/her personal PIN. Extending this idea to text e-mail access, a South African company assigns e-mail addresses to every Post Office box address in the country, thereby providing electronic mail indirectly to around eight million South African households through public internet terminals located in post offices which users can access with a personal identification number. The Postal Department in India has now taken up a similar programme.

However, there are some challenges to agricultural website usability for rural marketing in India which arise mainly because of the highly specific local needs and the great diversity in local conditions. The major challenges include:

• Poor literacy rate – low use of textual information
• Remote village locations - physical distances compounding problems of lack of proper price information and habitual dependence on middlemen.
• Absence of alternate media for dissemination of info.
• Absence of info in vernacular languages and multiplicity of languages.
• Cash crunch of farmers, immediate cash transaction system and reluctance of banks to provide soft loans to farmers

Economic, low-cost solutions - any technology solution aimed at benefiting the masses in rural India must be affordable and low-cost so that the perceived economic benefits of such an endeavor are much more than the cost of switching over to a different technological solution

In the absence of timely and correct information about prices, arrivals and market trends, compounded with the problems of low cash-at-hand and proper advice, farmers are forced to sell their produce at lower-than-expected rates. The result is that the benefits of the ‘green revolution’ have not really percolated down to the farmers.

Another good example of the creation of relevant local content are the ‘Infoshops’ in Pondicherry, India. After information requirements are identified during a trial period, volunteers from the village create a local database comprising government programs for low income rural families; cost and availability of farming inputs such as seeds and fertilisers, grain prices in different local markets; a directory of insurance plans for crops and families; pest managements plans for rice and sugar cane; a directory of local hospitals, medical practitioners and their specialties; a regional timetable for buses and trains; a directory of local veterinarians, cattle and animal husbandry programs. All these preceding experiments contributed to the Digital Mandi design.

However, Digital Mandi has shown that the presence of a number of desired features in a website leads to higher user satisfaction. Such features are broadly aimed at satisfying one or the other of the following immediate user objectives:

• · Ease of access.
• · Up-to-date content.
• · Layout, design, consistent themes.
• · Easy navigation.
• · Higher interactivity.
• · Access through multiple media.
• · Higher use of non-textual information.
• · Multiple languages.
• · Lower cost of transaction.

It was assumed that each of these factors contributed to higher user satisfaction.

The Digital Mandi project now wants to integrate an ethnographic approach with flexible systems methodology to focus on the communication design issues for web-portals specifically devoted to rural marketing in India.

In the Mandi, the following operational process was followed: Inbound logistics > Display and Inspection > Auction > Bagging and weighing > Payment > Outbound logistics. Hence, E-choupal brought about a strategic chage to the process: Pricing > Inbound logistics > Inspection and grading > Weighing and payment > Hub logistics

The e-Choupal model has shown that a large corporation can combine a social mission and an ambitious commercial venture; that it can play a major role in rationalising markets and increasing the efficiency of an agricultural system, and do so in ways that benefit farmers and rural communities as well as company shareholders. eChoupal, in one-line, is a glue binding ITC's rural retail foray with Choupal Sagars, currently 28 across nine states.

ITC's example also shows the key role of information technology - in this case provided and maintained by a corporation, but used by local farmers - in helping to bring about transparency, to increase access to information, and to catalyse rural transformation, while enabling efficiencies and low cost distribution that make the system profitable and sustainable

Whether rural India will thrive or even survive in the future will depend on how successfully they make the unavoidable transition to being part of a new global economy

BRANDiNG – enforced or earned?

Everyone is talking about branding and how significant it is to (and for) a business. It’s projected as the MOST IMPERATIVE driving force behind a thriving business. I don’t refute its importance, but I do not concur with the plug either! My question is, do YOU, as the Father, brand a product and launch it in the market, or the PRODUCT “EARNS” a brand for itself??

Did Steven Paul Jobs, eminently known as Steve Jobs, hyped “apple” or the products earned the branded fame? Another iconic example that “earned” the brand, is Adrian Zecha’s AMANRESORTS, one of the finest luxury brands in the hospitality sector, coming from Asia. It’s the best luxury resort brand in the world, renowned for its ultra premium service, luxury, sumptuousness and magnificence, glittering high profile clientele and the most exotic locations.

Amanresorts did not tread the rugged and traditional trail of “building a brand”, but the service (product) was strong enough to “earn” it. However, I don’t deny that like most of the other iconic brands, this too was steered by a well formulated, premeditated business strategy. Strategy certainly has its own importance, but is NOT the ONLY important factor, so as to put the others on the back seat. Today, maybe, not all know about Amanresorts, but then its not a brand meant for everyone either! It’s targeted to the most elite cream of the world, and they not just know it by name, but are its core clients as well.