We do a great deal of work on innovation with a wide range of clients.

A few just get it and are constantly looking for new ways of pleasing customers and growing their businesses.  Some really want to but struggle to bring great ideas into the world – big banks are often amongst them.

At The Value Engineers we believe doing things differently is one of the few ways to truly innovate.  Finding a way to Zag when others are Zigging can bring huge rewards.  In fact, we go further and agree with the immortal words of one of our innovation idols, Frank Zappa. ‘Without Deviation, progress is not possible’.

Which is why it is such a delight to bring your attention to FRANK, the new banking scheme launched by OCBC Bank in Singapore.

• No account fees and no minimum monthly balance (for customers below the age of 26)
• Over 130 debit and credit cards styles to choose from (and change whenever you want)
• Discounts at popular online retailers and fashion blog shops
• A free and wacky laptop sleeve when you apply for an account and free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream when you sign up for an account with 4 friends
• Dedicated FRANK Stores (as well as access to accounts at the traditional OCBC branches

We’ll let you guess who they are targeting.

Take a look for yourself here

In brand management a key component of communicating a brand promise is providing clear ‘Reasons To Believe’.

A simple way to do this is to make specific ‘claims’ about a product – for example the often used TV spot of two ladies in a kitchen, usually with one winning (with brand X) and one losing in some way.

However, this world does not stand still and even in the world of consumer packaged goods engineering a claims roadmap that will increase brand value over several years can be extremely challenging.

For products and services that are more technical or just more complex the challenge is even greater.  Take the world of music and sounds systems in particular as an example.  How do you demonstrate something that is largely intangible?  More practically, how do you ‘prove’ a superiority of brand when your audience is almost certainly going to be hearing your message on someone else’s product?

I think Philips have come up with some pretty good answers to these questions with their ‘Obsessed With Sound’ campaign.

On the website you can watch the music video directed by Rob Chiu (The Ronin), accompanied by the Interactive Orchestra. A click of the mouse will highlight a user’s musician of choice and isolate the specific instrumental track, giving an unusual way to hear every detail throughout the composition.

You can also find out more about each musician, from their musical preferences to the precise number of musical notes they play in the piece. Each musician also has a personal playlist with links to their personal blogs and Twitter feeds.

The campaign works from the viewpoints of musicians and producers and builds on the company’s heritage and technical capability.

I think the combination is extremely powerful and has huge potential.  However, as always, the execution is going to make or break the plan.  I really hope it works.

Check out the campaign on Facebook

Link to the “hear every detail” tab

Last week we took the formal step of ‘wetting the head’ of the new Manhattan office.

It was a small but auspicious step. We had visitors from the UK offices of all of our hub companies, as well as from Cello head office (grilling us over budgets for next year and pushing for even bigger and better things).  The office houses teams from The Value Engineers, Insight Research USA and Leapfrog in America, all of whose comings and goings amplified the buzz of activity. To add more excitement we were greeting clients, running workshops and interviewing for more staff at the same time.

Jenny, our amazing office manager, managed to keep everything running smoothly and the much threatened state of too many meetings / not enough rooms never actually arrived.  We did run out of chairs but people were moving so much I don’t think anyone actually noticed.  We do, however, need a bigger coffee machine, to ensure jet lag caffeine demands are fully met.

Hopefully this will be the first step in many in the US.  It certainly set the office feel we’d like to keep.

Actually, to make sure we take at least one more step, we are going to invite all friends, associates and clients to a drinks party on the 2nd December.  If you happen to be in New York then feel free to drop by and raise a glass. It’ll be even better than last week as the group FD has promised to send us real champagne glasses!

To contact our New York office get in touch with Simon Dannatt or Alex Waters.

Recently the New Yorker magazine featured an article explaining that most successful vendors in many product categories are the ones at the ends of the market.

In this case ends means either the ‘far better’ high priced end or the ‘aren’t bad low priced end. Companies in the Big Middle, where most of the customers were, are suffering, squeezed from both sides.  It’s an article that, when you stop and think about it, raises lots of questions about segmentation and the benefit (or not) of market share gain strategies, but that is a whole other blog.

Sandwiched in this otherwise interesting article was an observation that left me open mouthed:

‘ Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately.  The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones.’

Brands matter less!? In a world of (often contradictory) information overload brands matter less?  In grocery stores where purchase decisions are measured in 100th’s of seconds or less brands matter less? 

You have got to be kidding – I would argue that the need for shorthand is going up not down.

Granted there is an awful lot of information out there and true, if your brand doesn’t stand authentically for something that differentiates you from the competition, you are in big trouble.  You will be found out, more quickly today than ever before.

This doesn’t mean brands matter less.  It means that brands matter more and it means that whatever is promised by the brand will have to be delivered far more robustly than ever before.

We live in branded world.  As professionals we advise on brand strategy.  As people we see, touch and buy brands every day.

We probably think we know what ‘our’ brands stand for.  The ones we care about or buy into or work with.  We also probably have some sort of reaction to most of the logos or mascots we see in our dail lives even if they are not for us.  We can sort the good from the bad, poor execution from out of date positioning, clear promised delivered or adrift from the target market.  We have that world under control and understand what is going on around us.  Of course we do.  We are experts in our field and advisors to brand giants.

Then Logorama comes along and in the words of my 10 year old son, we are reminded to ‘get real’.

It’s a 16-minute action picture set in the not-too-distant future when every car, charachter and building is branded with corporate messaging pieced together by producers Nicolas Schmerkin and French film collective H5.  Arguably it is a vision of brand hell.

Ronald McDonald stars in Logorama as a psychotic criminal (how did they get away with that?) roaming through a hyper-commercialised landscape where even the story’s rebellious punk servers as a walking, talking advertisement for the Bob’s Big Boy hamburger chain.

It’s worth investing the 16 minutes to watch just for entertainment value.

As you do, think about how many logos you don’t recognize (there are over 2,500 in the piece), how immune we must all be not to see these in our daily lives and how very very hard it really is to get people to understand what a logo, and the brand behind it, really means.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.