Brand Jamming and PROMO Live

I too concur that Marc Gobe's Brand Jam luncheon held last week here in Rochester by RAMA was indeed marvelous! It took me a little while to get used to Marc's French accent to fully understand all he was saying but once I did I loved listening to him. He says that's it's "time to be audacious with our brands" and make them more "people centric" since it's the people, not corporations, that the brands really belong to.

The week before last I was invited to Chicago to be a guest blogger at an event called PROMO Live, sponsored by PROMO Magazine. I've been writing quite a bit on my blog, DonnasPromoTalk, about this event and noticed some similarities between what Marc was saying at the Brand Jam event and from what Jim McCafferty, President of JMP Creative, was saying at his "Powering Up Your Creative" session.

Jim shared with us some great examples to help increase creativity including some of the many images he's collected that he uses to get his team's creative juices going. He advised us to really look at projects in a totally different way in order to get people talking about them and he said that "sometimes you don't have to look outside the box but instead look in someone else's".

Marc also shared with us some of  ways in which he gets his team's creativity going, or brand jamming as he calls it. Marc uses the sense of smell since people see colors through smell. His team did a survey and asked what color came to mind when smelling a new fragrance Ralph Polo was planning to launch. The overwhelming majority answered blue, therefore, they named the fragrance Blue and designed the packaging blue.

Jim gave us some tools to use to help with our creativity such as IdeaFisher which is a software program designed to speed up the creative process by working on principles of association and memory retrieval. Marc gave us all a copy of his book, Brand Jam, which outlines his process of crafting brand emotions through narratives and images.

You can find out more about Brand Jam at Marc's website Brandjam.net. And please hope over to my blog and read more about some of the other speakers that were at PROMO Live. Between all this advice it should spark some creativity in us all for awhile.

Comments

[Martin Calle]

These are the types of research practices that keep marketers converging on the same positions as their rivals all saying the same things about themselves differently. If the fragrance had smelled like hickory would you have called it SMOKE. Had it smelled of butterscotch would you have called it SCOTCH or JEFFREY PINE. (the bark of Jeffrey Pines smell like butterscotch, but providing stimuli in the way presented would not have facilitated respondent's knowledge - hence the approaches' weakness.) These types of "insights" reallly don't get companies anywhere, but it does facilitate their leveraging of commodity ideas. That's why McKinsey & Company writes off the consumer packaged goods industry saying that "despite solid balance sheets...revenues are flat and [key] executives wonder where the growth will come from." This is also why Advertising Age Magazine recently promoted an article on the demize of market research within organizations. It is a subject on which I am soliciting comments on my blog MADISON AVENUE, one of Advertising Age Magazine's Power 150 Marketing Blogs. I am neither pro nor con research - but any salvos you wish to toss over the battlement are welcome. Care to ad me to your blogroll? Happy to do same!

[Donna DeClemente]

Thanks for your comments Martin. Yes, please add us to your blog roll and we'll do the same. I just wanted to point out that when referencing Marc Gobe he specifically said that people relate smells to colors. So his team asked consumers what COLOR the fragrance reminded them of, not what it smelled like. Both Marc and Jim gave examples of how to spark creative thinking, which yes there are many different methods of doing this. However what was unique about Marc is that he does use market research in branding, but he also acknowledges the limitations of it as well.