Vessel conceptual product rendering

Strong Concept + Strong Visualization

Creating a Personalized Beverage

According to their tagline, The Greener Grass.org is “Collaborating to design a better future.” With that and your health in mind, they created the Vessel concept, a system of components and options that would allow you to customize a drink to fit your personal tastes as well as your health and lifestyle needs.

With these three main bases and countless options, it’s about as far removed from today’s mainstream beverage model as you can get.

Bases: Nutrients to fit your lifestyle and demographic needs such as iron and calcium for women, or zinc and saw palmetto for men.

Flavors: Organic extracts to sate your specific tastebuds—everything from chocolate to wheatgrass, mango to mocha, or any imaginable combination in between.

Agents: Active ingredients like vitamins, minerals, and energy boosters for functional benefits—you name it, proteins or taurine, caffeine or ginseng—whatever you need.

The concept includes a reusable Vessel Lexan™ container strategically designed for optimum ingredient agitation.

Making the Concept Count

Programmatic design, packaging and convenience count in brand marketing. Whether or not the Vessel line ever comes to fruition, the concept is far more believable and supportable when visualized as a fully-branded product rendering.

Strong concepts become real through strong visualization.

Miss Irresistible (Nice Teeth)

Meet Miss Irresistible, the new spokesperson/avatar for P&G’s Crest product line. A self-proclaimed “irresistible babe,” she’s helping brand giant P&G enter the realms of Social Media.

P&G’s Social Media Exploration

Miss Irresistible invites visitors to send a naughty—or nice—personalized e-card from her MySpace site—very “You.”

However, 80% of the real estate on the MySpace page seems designed for a Parent’s magazine print ad—predictable and less “social” than you’d expect.

Although the effort still needs some work, P&G is making the right move. Adopting a Social Media plan, sidestepping potential legal department concerns and institutional resistance to change is a critical move forward for the corporate behemoth.

As quoted on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website, P&G global marketing officer James Stengel said:

“Consumers are right now very dynamic in their media habits. If you stay in touch with that and you want to be relevant in their lives, obviously, a lot of things change … It’s the same reason we got into television 60 years ago.”

New Media, New Lessons

Some large, less nimble corporations stumble a bit as they grapple with how to enter the Social Media market space.

In a move that drew fire from new media experts, Sears Canada recently launched a so-called Consumer Generated Media (CGM) site—a glossy Flash for Flash’s-sake basic voting booth where visitors could choose one of four catalog covers.

The fear of reprisal isn’t limited to corporate legal and marketing departments. The Internet is rife with examples of traditional corporate Public Relations (PR) handling and mishandling of Social Media events.

Something to Smile About

None of these companies has been ruined by its Social Media experiences. In fact, if embraced and acted upon, each Social Media corporate headline event presents an opportunity to learn and change.

Traditional approaches to marketing, public relations and legal issues can be disconnected in the Social Media marketing space.

Taking time to affirm that the people and firms with whom you’ve aligned have a demonstrated understanding and breadth of experience in the Social Media arena is a proactive step toward making your brand irresistible in a sea of free-flowing Social Media dialog.

Minding the Crowd

The backbone of any social network is participation, and comments and conversations are the vertebrae. But efficiently tracking the data trails of ever-shifting collective opinion has been an elusive exercise.

coComment.com now provides a single resource for accessing and tracking all the latest online conversations–yours as well as others you’re following. You can track top commenters, articles and posts as well as who’s commenting on the same conversations you are–coComment subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

Anticipating Critical Mass

Imagine a repository of social media conversations reflecting current collective attitudes and views, accessed by topic. On-demand data parsed to reflect the pulse of socially networked opinion is invaluable market intelligence for any business looking to establish, advance or protect their brand.

According to coComment.com CEO Matt Colebourne in an interview with MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider:

“If I am Coke and I want to know I am being talked about, that is an easy measure in a database. But how do I find out if I am being talked about positively? That is exactly where we can offer something that at the moment we don’t believe anyone else can. You need to have all of those stored conversations.”?

Beware the Backlash

Social networks are leery of being measured, tracked or marketed to. Their sting can be swift, severe and unexpected, their lauding and accolades, equally surprising. The behavioral analysis and insight provided by coComment.com can help businesses anticipate shifts in market preferences, buying habits, trends and public opinion, thus mitigating the downsides and maximizing the upsides of fickle-willed social media realms.

The Future is Now

Few brand marketers are taking the time to thoroughly understand the Web 2.0 nuances of Social Media Marketing (SMM). Any institution could benefit from the type of information coComment.com purports to offer.

That is if “You”? and “GenMe”? allow it.

On June 11th, Brainstorm Principal Jim Wolfe will conduct a presentation for university admissions professionals at the North American Coalition for Christian Admissions Professionals (NACCAP) 2007 North American convention held at Biola University in Southern California. The session will focus on Web 2.0 and the cultural implications of online social networking when marketing to GenMe individuals.

“This presentation has been in great demand primarily because institutions and corporations alike are becoming increasingly aware of the potential dangers and opportunities of the social networking phenomenon,” according to Wolfe.

Admissions professionals will learn how to leverage Web 2.0 techniques and engage with this illusive demographic.

For an in-depth exploration of how Web 2.0 can affect your enterprise, contact Brainstorm. For a download sample of the Brainstorm higher education presentation, click here:

Brainstorm Web 2.0 | 52KB pdf

Second Life—the self-described 3-dimensional online digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents—is a community in nearly every sense of the word.

With the addition of an estimated 20,000 residents a day, Second Life is booming. Measured in Linden dollars, its virtual economy— up more than nine times in the last year—would be one of the fastest growing in the real world.

Think only GenMe millenials hang out in virtual worlds? Think again. As the pie chart shows, about one-third, or over one million of January’s 3.1 million participants are 35 and older; nearly 360,000 of them are over 45.

The following figures are taken from Second Life Statistics* for January 2007:

• Virtual Economy: The number of user-to-user transactions increased 37% to 6.1 billion
• Virtual Area: Land mass expanded 23% to 361 square kilometers
• Real Time: Logged user hours increased 47% from 7.3 million the previous month to 10.8 million
• Real Trade: Buyers and sellers traded goods and services worth just under USD $5 million
• Real Citizens:
  United States 31%
  France 12%
  Germany 10%
  United Kingdom 8%
  Netherlands 6%

Fortune reports many large corporations are investing a portion of their 2007 budget on marketing in Second Life. IBM holds meetings there.

Still think it’s a virtual world?

*Source: Second Life.