United, one of three identities (see below) developed by Brainstorm for Abraham’s Oasis

“We’ve developed brand identities for many Fortune 100 companies, but this had immediate brand impact—potent and direct.”

- Jenni Roberts Associate Creative Director, Brainstorm

The Oasis

In a tiny village in the arid and often perilous region of Ethiopia is a refuge called Grace Village, which was featured on NOVA’s A Walk to Beautiful. It is one of several initiatives of Abraham’s Oasis, an organization focused on farming, health and childcare projects in Ethiopia.

At Grace Village, dispossessed women—women labeled social pariahs—find significance in raising abandoned or forgotten refugee children. It’s a symbiotic relationship that offers the children a nurturing and sustaining resource sorely lacking in their lives.

Karin van den Bosch, the driving force behind the village, is emphatic that these are not outcasts and this is no forgotten outpost; it is an Oasis. She doesn’t intend for the women and children who live there to simply survive; she wants them to thrive. But ensuring that happens is a challenge.

“The uniforms and identities Brainstorm provided help the youth ‘belong to a group,’ to be able to play a sport and forget about their problems for a while, giving these children hope and a way to turn their frustration and pain into joy.”

- Karin van den Bosch Abraham’s Oasis

A Hedge Against Uncertainty

Another childcare project of Abraham’s Oasis is a refugee camp, where they are protecting, clothing, feeding and educating nearly 700 minors who fled Eritrea without relatives. With 1,500 more on the way in the coming months, their budget is stretched thin despite funding from UN’s UNHCR agency.

Soccer, Cows and Schoolhouses

During a speaking engagement in the US, van den Bosch was asked whether the children of Grace Village might be rescued by adoption. She replied, “We do not export Ethiopia’s most valuable resource.”

When asked what Grace Village needed most, her reply was “Prayer.” Eventually she was cajoled into disclosing more tangible needs and their relative costs.

“The milk of a single cow currently meets the village’s needs, but two or three more cows would allow us to meet the ongoing operational costs of our schoolhouse facility,” she said. “That and uniforms for three village soccer teams at our refugee camp: Athletic, United and Oasis.”

Athletic. United. Oasis. Brainstorm’s identity designs for the new faces of Abraham’s Oasis soccer teams.

If a Thing’s Worth Doing

Brainstorm wanted to get involved. Our experience in sports branding and connections to soccer made designing logos and providing the teams’ soccer uniforms seem like the perfect first step.

“We’ve developed brand identities for many Fortune 100 companies, but this had immediate brand impact—potent and direct,” said Jenni Roberts, Associate Creative Director at Brainstorm. “We felt like the Abraham’s Oasis refugee soccer teams deserved identities of the same caliber as our corporate clients. Brand identities either add to, or detract from, any organization’s brand equity value. Large or small, we want to do it right.”

A Measured Significance

Playing before an audience of villagers, goats and milking cows, the Abraham’s Oasis soccer teams measure their brand’s significance by the confident smiles of their players. How do you measure your brand’s significance?

For more information or contributions visit the Abraham’s Oasis contact page.

Free to Brand Entertainment

Chanel tells a romantic tale in this 2:22 video entitled Night Train. It’s a familiar story, the same one Chanel’s been telling generation after generation.

No longer constrained by rigid 30 or 60-second ad models and fee-based, one-view, network television slots, Chanel is free to produce branded video content in various lengths and portable formats. They can post that content across an array of distribution channels on the Internet, free of charge—just like every other brand, large and small. And so can you.

There are a million ways to market a product. But I suggest you not try all of them.

-Tim Siedell Fuse Industries

What Price Value?

Quality content and production values still count if you hope to engage your audience and rise above the 10 billion monthly YouTube views. Expertly filmed, cast, scored and produced, the Chanel video is classic branding aimed at maximizing emotional engagement and memorability—right down to the final love-to-logo-to-product morph brand punctuation.

But proper distribution and promotion still rule the day. Television provided an expensive, reliable, direct and proprietary fee-based conduit to customers. And while today’s brand marketers are blessed with many relatively inexpensive options to reach their audience, they also shoulder all the responsibility and cost of standing out amid a crowded in-bound and social media marketing free-for-all.

What Price Strategy?

This multitude of options places a premium on integrated strategies even for the Chanel’s of the world as they compete with every brand under the sun, including yours. Of course, not every brand benefits from an opulent brand equity, a product men love to smell and women love to wear.

But Night Train’s nearly half a million YouTube views to-date proves proper product planning, positioning and promotion strategies are still the best way to create real value out of an ocean of on and offline marketing and medium options.

Videos, blogs, SEO, email, podcasts, microblogging, fan pages, micro-sites, proprietary online communities. As you plan your next marketing foray into these new frontiers, don’t neglect the benefits of integrated strategy, planning, content and production values.

High production value printed Case Statement and architectural fly-through package developed by Brainstorm for Bryan College’s one-on-one campaign meetings (featured in Graphis).

Support the ask with well-designed materials that clearly explain the institution’s needs and the benefits that will be realized—both institutionally and personally.

A Capital Idea

It’s an exciting time—the feasibility studies are complete and pre-campaign gifts have been committed. Now you’re faced with the equally daunting task of managing a public capital campaign, one that inspires each of your varied constituent groups enough to convince them to contribute to help reach the institution’s end goal.

Like any marketing initiative, strategy and planning are critical.

Do I Know You?

Different audiences—think recent graduates and retirees, for instance—are inspired to action by different inputs. From functional presentation to cultural considerations and aesthetic, your content and appeal must be relevant to your audience.

It’s important to understand the psychographic as well as the demographic data. What interests and inspires them; where and how do they spend time; and in which technologies and mediums are you most likely to engage?

“Dreams. Discovery. Direction.” A short highlight video (visit the site)

Tailor your message and deliver it in a medium that’s familiar and comfortable to each audience whether it’s one-on-one meetings or direct phone calls, the traditional Case Statement, a community or microsite, an email campaign, direct mail, iPhone app or a campaign that integrates these components and others.

Inform and Inspire

Capital campaigns must convey value to the institution as well as a personal benefit or return on investment for the donor. Offering information about tax benefits for younger donors or estate planning and endowment giving for older prospects can creates a philanthropic, emotional and financial return for the donor.

Audience Appropriate

Brainstorm designed and developed the Dreams. Discovery. Direction. site for Anderson University’s $110M capital campaign. Utilizing an emotive storyline and tiered audience appeal, the site engages visitors with interactive features and rich media elements.

Highlights include videos from students, faculty, and notable alumni; and secure online giving with campaign updates, milestones and time lines. Anderson directs potential donors to the site and uses it as a presentation tool for in-person meetings.

The site debuted at the public capital campaign kick-off gala and metrics proved that nearly every gala attendee visited the site that very night. A major gift was received via the secure online giving area soon after.

Integrated Initiatives

A Dreams. Discovery. Direction. subsidiary campaign dubbed UMatter was developed to reach young alumni. It emphasizes participation over the amount of donation and presents an underlying, “This is your campaign too,” message aimed at engagement now, and inclusion in the future.

Look Like a Million Bucks

When you’re asking for millions or even billions of dollars, be sure to look the part. Support the ask with well-designed materials that clearly explain the institution’s needs and the benefits that will be realized—both institutionally and personally—from a successful campaign.

Bart Caylor Brainstorm Principal, serves on the Anderson University National Campaign Cabinet and is a strategic communications advisor to the institution.

Eventually, your logo becomes
a touch point by which your audience
either recognizes or mocks your brand.

The Struggle

Many businesses struggle through the development of their business or product logo because they believe the logo is their brand rather than understanding it is but one representation of their brand. No logo can carry your brand without additional context and meaning.

The Context

Context is built in the way your brand conducts itself out in public—obviously frequent and consistent exposure in target-rich environments, but service, quality, aesthetics, ethics, price points, messaging and human and online interaction—in essence, everything defines your brand. That’s your logo’s context for representation.

The Paralysis

Often a sort of paralysis sets in as those uninitiated to the development process wrestle with how to cram an entire brand into a logo mark that has no brand yet. A common inclination is to use a design-by-committee approach and crowd source it by inviting the opinion of anyone and everyone.

Of course, if you ask fifty people for their opinion you’ll get fifty opinions. This method can further confuse and often derail the process resulting in delivery delays and unsatisfactory results as typically, elements from a number of logos are mashed together into one design to appease everyone’s input.

The Summation

A logo is one symbol of your brand, so it’s critical to get it right. Weigh, assess and classify your input, then discuss it with your design professional. If you’ve hired the right firm, they’ll have the demonstrated experience and expertise to take into account all the pragmatics and issues involved with properly deploying not just a logo, but an entire brand.

Eventually, your logo becomes a touch point by which your audience either recognizes or mocks your brand. It is important to get your logo right, but don’t expect it to be your brand from the outset.

We’ve identified five focal points of opportunity for 2010. They’re not an end-all priority list for brands, nor predictions, but rather initiatives, items born of trending behavior and emergent technologies being embraced by consumers.

1. Mobile-based marketing

Smartphones are fast becoming the center of consumer experience for work, home and play (see: Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile?). A device capable of connecting people, places and things via text, voice, social networks, apps, tools, email, video, and images is a powerful medium. And the medium’s delivery mechanism is already in your audience’s hand, on their belt or in their purse. Smartphones are a direct way to connect with your audience and influence their behavior each time they use the device.

2. Location-based marketing

Aligning cultural trends and consumer behavior with location-based kiosks mobile and social apps can elevate your brand from relationship marketing to direct sales. Online and mobile apps such as foursquare combine locale, social game play and entertainment with information and tangible incentives. Geo-based marketing can deliver the closest, most highly-rated businesses, directions to get there and real-time incentives to entice a visit.

3. Brand design

Design continues to differentiate, now more so than ever. In a world deluged with cookie cutter applications and off-the-shelf adornments, consistent, appropriate and user-centric brand design compels and communicates amid the cacophony of visual noise.

4. Branded Edutainment

YouTube had more than 120 million viewers and 10 billion video views in August 2009 according to a September 2009 ComScore report. With the proliferation of on-hand, video-ready, mobile devices and a broad array of storage and sharing sites like Hulu and YouTube, online video is becoming ubiquitous.

Video is a powerful and potentially amplifying medium for your messaging when produced, integrated and distributed properly. But, it must be engaging, relevant, interactive, easily-consumed, readily-shareable, educational and/or entertaining for full effect.

5. Strategic Integration

There are many ways to reach and influence your audience—perhaps too many. Just because you have more options to extend your media mix doesn’t mean it needs to be less strategic. In fact, to penetrate the noise and stand out, strategy is more important than ever.

Facebook has hundreds of millions of subscribers. So what? Citing large numbers isn’t a strategy. And developing stand-alone initiatives without an integrated and targeted plan risks losing your message in a sea of irrelevant noise. Be it a person wearing a sandwich board on the sidewalk or an online video, your marketing efforts must be strategically integrated, well-planned, consistently branded, distinctively designed and metric-driven.

This year, don’t obsess over New Year predictions or resolutions. Assess, and act.

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Is Your Mobile Presence Brand Immobile? [.think]
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Foursquare’s Marketing Potential