The Pepperspective

Before we ever opened our doors (and every day since), we set our culture as our company’s top priority. A decade later, we now have a service to help you prioritize yours, too.

It’s called Environmental Branding, which is essentially the act of carrying a brand’s distinct characteristics throughout a physical space.

In other words, it’s how you make a place actually feel like the brand that lives there.

After all, you wouldn’t expect to visit the Disney offices without seeing bright colors and vivid imagery, inspirational quotes from the mastermind himself, and a hefty amount of wall art and figurines that capture the rich history of our favorite childhood characters.

Likewise, you can imagine that a tour of Apple would reveal a minimal aesthetic with plenty of open space and a very limited color palette. (And it hopefully smells like New Mac. Mmm.)

This space-as-branding concept is more than just a nice touch, too. It’s the biggest opportunity a company has to express its personality, values, and beliefs to the people who need to believe it most – employees.

Because, like today’s most successful, innovative, and meaningful companies have proven, a brand simply won’t flourish out in the world if it doesn’t first make its way into the hearts and minds of those who work with it every day.

With environmental branding, we can tell a brand’s story throughout every inch of a physical space using color and light, objects and open space, art and signage, and other principles of interior design and architecture.

As a result, employees can actually feel their brand at work, can see its beliefs on the walls and its values in the objects around them. And customers can understand a brand promise simply by walking through the front door.

The most grave mistake made in marketing is, perhaps, the practice of playing it safe. These days, brands that avoid conflict or lack an element of social tension are like a political figure without a party.

Brands that create tension tend to be “stickier” and more relevant than brands that avoid rocking the proverbial boat.

There’s a day between the Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, an unassuming little box on the calendar that usually gets short shrift in terms of attention.

 As lifelong fans of the underdog, we pinpointed that day (March 16th), gave it its own holiday name (DragonMaid Day), and have now focused an enormous amount of energy to making it a day we’ll never forget. 

Here’s the plan: we’ve divided the whole company into six special task forces, each commissioned to gain major headway on a heretofore secret project by DragonMaid Day. 

While many brands are gobbling up oodles of precious time and money gunning for Google’s coveted, number-one, unsponsored, search result listing, a handful of progressive, pioneering brands are moving on to the next thing-a thing so new that it has yet to become an acronym.

As 2012 approaches, I encourage you to get one level deeper when it comes to understanding what your customers really want. There are many opportunities for your brand in the minds of your consumers.

Are you selling pink stuff, when they really want super heroes?

Next Wednesday, two of Nashville’s best minds in marketing (and myself) will spend a morning sharing career insights about how to build brands, connect with audiences, and understand the ins-and-outs of modern marketing. It is sure to be informative, interactive and inspiring to all who attend.

The day will begin with Courtenay Rogers, Marketing Coordinator for Bone McAllestar Norton who will show how marketing means something different for everyone, setting us free from the tyranny of a single definition.

Creative Director and CEO of Werkshop Marketing will follow with a robust lesson in brand building, providing tools and understanding for constructing a proper brand.

I’ll have the pleasure and challenge, like the rug in “The Big Lebowski,” of tying the room together, which I will attempt to do by giving attendees a concrete model that can be immediately applied to any marketing situation for improved results in marketing to (or rather “with”) the 21st century consumer.

Admission is only $99 and comes with a subscription to the Nashville Business Journal, which you can keep for yourself or pass along to someone else.

I believe I speak for everyone when I say, I hope to see you there.

Good marketing to you, always.

Imagine, if you will, the scene in the movie Titanic where Jack and his friend Fabrizio are perched on the ship’s bow. Now, imagine if Jack were to have remained in that spot until the ship reached its final destination, after averting a catastrophic collision with an iceberg, of course.

As the ship docks, Jack is still waving his arms in the air shouting “I’m king of the world!” Only his ravings aren’t an emotional response to the exhilarating feeling of his exalted position. Rather, Jack is taking credit for the entire journey while completely ignoring the behemoth marvel of a ship beneath him that actually did all the work.

Recently, I read an article that compared social media to a dinner party. This illustration keeps coming to mind, and I find myself drawing parallels to how we, as retail marketers, play host at the social media table. 

My experience with social media engagement and customer perspective comes from my work with Kirkland’s, a specialty retailer for home décor items. Kirkland’s has an active fan base on both Facebook and its MyKirkland’s community site. Listening, and interacting with these customers daily through social media has helped me shape an understanding of what they expect and desire from the Kirkland’s brand. These customers’ expectations support the “brand as dinner party host,” metaphor in several ways:

I’d like to propose a rule of thumb that you should always consider when developing offers and incentives specifically for retail brands: the rule of narrow and deep. This rule proposes that whatever your offer/incentive/promotion may be, first start with a simple core idea and then add as many layers as possible. 

In a recording studio fashioned out of a cavernous work shed in Bozeman, MT, Jake observes in wonderment as Patrick works his magic. Jake, is a formally trained and talented mid-western touring musician, teacher, philanthropist, recording studio owner/engineer and producer. Patrick is his new mentor. Or so he hopes.

While Patrick’s name isn’t very well known to the masses, his list of accomplishments is about as monumental as it gets.

If you’re going to stand up to the burgeoning competition for the attention of the next dominant wave of consumers, there are a few things you should know.

First, the generation most commonly referred to as “Gen Y” or “Millennials” is a generation of individuals who have never had to make up their own mind about anything. In fact, 68% of them ask friends before choosing a restaurant.

The most interesting man in the world says, “I don’t always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. Stay thirsty, my friends.”

Now hear this. He’s not real. But you probably already knew that. You may also know that there’s no such person as Juan Valdez, the iconic coffee grower or Ann Taylor, the phantom fashionista. Still, we can identify with these “people” in some way that relates to our self-image. Which is part of what makes them authentic.

What do a baby giggle, a vibrating phone and a cash register have in common?

According to a study by Elias Arts, a sound identity company, these three sounds are more capable of eliciting physical responses than any other sound in the world. The only sound as capable as these of triggering cellular, ocular and neurological responses is

Here’s one for ya. Your brain’s functional capability is no more developed than that of a newborn baby. Really. A newborn’s brain is as fully formed as an adult’s brain in terms of its ability to absorb and process information. And the implications of this recent discovery are of great consequence to people in the advertising industry.