Weave
Announcing Brand Dialogue
UPDATE: Fan us on Facebook, please!
SEPTEMBER 14, 2007 - For the last six years, I've run a marketing consultancy out of Seattle called SoundPrinciples. The company created branding, brand strategy, marketing consulting and materials for companies from California to Virginia, helped launch a number of companies and products, and won three top honors for excellence in branding, integrated marketing and print ads from the Business Marketing Association.
I named the company in 2001, in response to the flighty, excess-filled days of 1997-2000. So much has changed since then, but nothing more drastically than the field of Marketing.
For decades, Marketing was about talking about your value, interrupting people's business, "being heard" and being glitzy. The higher-end your Marketing, the more successful your brand must be, right? Companies, particularly my former Fortune 500 clients, invested hundreds of millions in promoting their brand in a noisy marketplace.
All that has changed, and through the power of Search and the Internet, customers' voices are as loud as those of marketers...often, they're LOUDER. Which means that marketers now can only influence the dialogue around their brands. There is no more tightly controlled message. And the more that open, honest dialogue by real people is out there, the more marketers sound like phony biased hucksters, whether they are or not. Very few marketers get this!
Consequently, Marketing must evolve and become something new. It still needs to tell the initial value story for a company, but it also needs to listen, interact, coach, guide and engage its market. It's not a monologue anymore, where the size of the megaphone determines market position. It's about reputation, conversation, openness, transparency, honesty and accountability. It's about dialogue.
So it's time to shift, once again. I am pleased to announce that SoundPrinciples LLC is now Brand Dialogue. My new focus will be on helping companies transition from being hucksters to being engaged members of their markets. I will continue to craft initial outbound marketing identities to give the market something to react to, but will also be equally focusing on providing brands with the tools, processes and technologies that will help them engage in dialogue: blogging, podcasting, social media, social networking, etc.
The thought behind the design
Creating corporate aesthetics is one of the most difficult exercises imaginable. First, everyone's a designer, right? But also, people react differently to aesthetics for a million different reasons. Quantifying tastes is incredibly difficult. Because of this, all design should be driven by strategy and grounded in a lot of smart thinking.
Dialogue should be energetic, so the brand colors are the colors of energy, the shades of fire: terracotta and maize, with a contrast color of slate.
The icon presented another challenge: how to represent dialogue? First, you need more than one voice. Secondly, they need to be interacting. Third, it should be an upbeat conversation where both parties get value. Fourth, both parties should be of equal size, implying equal importance. Finally: speech balloons have been done to death.
My solution was these two "Pacmen", which also form a BD. With one more rounded, and one more angular, they represent male and female. With them being different colors, they represent multiple races.
The two characters visually suggest quotation marks, as well. There's also an interesting arrow created by the negative space between the two characters. And when placed within the wordmark "Brand Dialogue", they become the two Ds: one at the end of Brand, one at the beginning of Dialogue. Where brand ends, dialogue begins.
Typeface: Gotham Book - for elegance, timelessness and strength.
I welcome comments, opinions, questions and reactions.
Announcing Brand Dialogue
UPDATE: Fan us on Facebook, please!
SEPTEMBER 14, 2007 - For the last six years, I've run a marketing consultancy out of Seattle called SoundPrinciples. The company created branding, brand strategy, marketing consulting and materials for companies from California to Virginia, helped launch a number of companies and products, and won three top honors for excellence in branding, integrated marketing and print ads from the Business Marketing Association.
I named the company in 2001, in response to the flighty, excess-filled days of 1997-2000. So much has changed since then, but nothing more drastically than the field of Marketing.
For decades, Marketing was about talking about your value, interrupting people's business, "being heard" and being glitzy. The higher-end your Marketing, the more successful your brand must be, right? Companies, particularly my former Fortune 500 clients, invested hundreds of millions in promoting their brand in a noisy marketplace.
All that has changed, and through the power of Search and the Internet, customers' voices are as loud as those of marketers...often, they're LOUDER. Which means that marketers now can only influence the dialogue around their brands. There is no more tightly controlled message. And the more that open, honest dialogue by real people is out there, the more marketers sound like phony biased hucksters, whether they are or not. Very few marketers get this!
Consequently, Marketing must evolve and become something new. It still needs to tell the initial value story for a company, but it also needs to listen, interact, coach, guide and engage its market. It's not a monologue anymore, where the size of the megaphone determines market position. It's about reputation, conversation, openness, transparency, honesty and accountability. It's about dialogue.
So it's time to shift, once again. I am pleased to announce that SoundPrinciples LLC is now Brand Dialogue. My new focus will be on helping companies transition from being hucksters to being engaged members of their markets. I will continue to craft initial outbound marketing identities to give the market something to react to, but will also be equally focusing on providing brands with the tools, processes and technologies that will help them engage in dialogue: blogging, podcasting, social media, social networking, etc.
The thought behind the design
Creating corporate aesthetics is one of the most difficult exercises imaginable. First, everyone's a designer, right? But also, people react differently to aesthetics for a million different reasons. Quantifying tastes is incredibly difficult. Because of this, all design should be driven by strategy and grounded in a lot of smart thinking.
Dialogue should be energetic, so the brand colors are the colors of energy, the shades of fire: terracotta and maize, with a contrast color of slate.
The icon presented another challenge: how to represent dialogue? First, you need more than one voice. Secondly, they need to be interacting. Third, it should be an upbeat conversation where both parties get value. Fourth, both parties should be of equal size, implying equal importance. Finally: speech balloons have been done to death.
My solution was these two "Pacmen", which also form a BD. With one more rounded, and one more angular, they represent male and female. With them being different colors, they represent multiple races.
The two characters visually suggest quotation marks, as well. There's also an interesting arrow created by the negative space between the two characters. And when placed within the wordmark "Brand Dialogue", they become the two Ds: one at the end of Brand, one at the beginning of Dialogue. Where brand ends, dialogue begins.
Typeface: Gotham Book - for elegance, timelessness and strength.
I welcome comments, opinions, questions and reactions.