I have to admit that what drew me to the article on Kelly Brook in the Sunday Times Magazine wasn’t the hope that I would get a lesson in brand building but that is exactly what I got.

“Kelly Brook is this thing I’ve created. It is me, but it’s not me.” She explained to Giles Hattersley

“So I sat down one day and wrote down everything I thought I would love in my fantasy life. If I wasn’t Kelly Parsons, who had to pay the mortgage and get the train, if I was Kelly Brook all the time, what would that life be? Where would I live? What car would I drive? Where would I go on holiday? What make–up would I like? I wrote lists and lists”

“Then you give it to these branding people and they create this whole world. Once you’ve got that model and you understand what this brand is, what type of girls are going to like the brand, what the demographic is, you can start thinking what products feed into that.”

So what was on those lists – “Polka dots, gingham, Marilyn Monroe flowers”  “being natural – I didn’t do eyelashes or anything like that. I’m naturally booby, I’ve got naturally big hair”

She also talked about her attention to detail and demand for the quality she wanted “ I can get really upset about things that haven’t been named correctly or colours that weren’t what I wanted… I get so passionate about stuff”

She may not look like your average professor of Marketing but she does talk a lot of sense.

With the imminent release of Skyfall kicking up a lot of fuss about product placement in movies, and Bond’s 50^th anniversary celebrating the idea of film-as-cultural-capital, the Museum of Brands and Inside Out festival hosted an exploratory lecture last Wednesday on branding and marketing within the film industry. ‘Branding James Bond’ was a lecture and question-and-answer session led by Finola Kerrigan and Daragh O’Reilly, of King’s College London and Sheffield University respectively, whose academic paper on the film brandscape is soon to be published.

As well as the lecture, the Museum of Brands’ after-hours opening was a really great opportunity to check out the impressive brands and packaging collection of Robert Opie; 12 000 artefacts from the Victorian era into the future of branding – meat packaging made from recycled meat, what?! – the collection whets the appetite of anyone interested in branding whilst bringing a tear to the eye of those who fondly remember cereal packets of the 1970s.

The evening started with a 007 montage, but Kerrigan and O’Reilly used Bond more as a case study than a theme, a springboard into the ‘film brandscape’, their academic tool to decipher the world of branding and marketing opportunities which surround and help to create a film.  Film franchises can not only endorse certain brands, but their intimate relationships with their consumers give them the DNA of brands in themselves. The brandscape of film is a complex one, as there are many components to be considered, requiring a delicate mixture of the current brand equities of each one. The actor-as-brand must be measured alongside the character-as-brand, and the current perceived brand personalities of the designer, composer, theme song singer, texts such as novels from which the film is adapted, locations used and many many more.  These internal elements stand for only 1/5 of the film’s brandscape. The finished product, according to Kerrigan and O’Reilly, is the hefty sum of its standing as a commercial brand, a cultural brand, a studio brand, and a vehicle for other commercial brands, each with idiosyncrasies and ideologies.

Shared social norms are vital to create every stakeholder’s understanding of Bond. It is the fact that the shared norms in Bond are rooted down so strongly that the film-as-brand has such flexibility. Bond platforms range from video games to auctions at Christie’s, and Kerrigan flagged up the character’s playful scenes with the Queen at the 2012 London Olympics as proof for the brand’s robustness and flair. Bond has become intellectual as well as cultural capital, and right now it seems that the brand can do no wrong. Needless to say, however, Kerrigan’s and O’Reilly’s diagrams grew increasingly frequent and frenetic branches over the course of the evening.

The lecture managed to meld a very logical and academic consideration of branding, focussing on communication and the need for a holistic message, with the emotional aspects of a film, and all the stakeholder media relationships. It is worth looking at a brand through the prism of the film brandscape, to consider every element, address every possible partnership and see the brand company as a film studio, with individual standards and ideologies which must be matched. Perhaps, if brands begin creating their own filmic content in the style of Red Bull, we will see more of this kind of thinking.

Ceefax switched off on Tuesday night which made me feel a little sad and nostalgic – perhaps because I grew in the 90’s with my Dad watching Ceefax for several hours every Saturday afternoon waiting for the Bolton Wanderers football scores to flash up… It seems that many of us have nostalgic memories of Ceefax – my boyfriend remembers screaming at Ceefax for several hours watching the 1995 Kent vs. Essex cricket league match score refresh every 30 seconds… my nan and granddad used it for weather updates… and below several members of The Value Engineers share their most favourite memories…

‘Ceefax has always been about Saturday afternoon watching the football scores drop in. Throughout the 80s that’s all me and my friends did.’ – Richie Heron

My abiding memory of Ceefax is looking for holidays with my parents, and then waiting with baited breath for my dad to get off the phone to see where we were off to! (Usually a caravan in Wales…). We also used Ceefax for TV listings, a market which has changed significantly over time – with socially-integrated, personalised online listings, all other forms of listing are suffering. The likes of Radio Times in print are now positioning themselves as listings-plus, with exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes and expert reviews.

And the craziest thing is that I sat for hours playing the quiz game Bamboozle – the pages took ages to load and if you got a question wrong you had to go back to the beginning. I guess as the world has sped up we have less time for these things…phone apps that do a lot of what Ceefax did allow us to check listings, look at sports scores etc. on the go – we can, and expect to be able to, multitask a lot more…. – Emma Barker

‘My memory is in the 80′s watching my uncle using Ceefax to scroll through lists of cheap last minute holidays…..then calling up to always find they had sold out…an early model for Last Minute .com perhaps!’ – Ken Wright

I’m sad about Ceefax going! I used to use it as a TV guide but it took forever waiting for the numbers to tick round and then you had to wait ages for it to get to the time of day you wanted to look at then start all over again with another channel. I can actually remember having a TV (we only had one at home) which didn’t have teletext at all. My friends at school used to play a quiz game on there, using the 4 coloured buttons and I thought I was massively missing out! – Rebecca Cook

‘Used to love watching the football scores update at my granddads place.’ – Will Butterworth

Cee you later Ceefax, we will cherish the memories!

Yesterday we had the pleasure of attending the Jump digital marketing conference organised by eConsultancy at a great venue by the Thames in London. With a packed agenda the organisers were trying to cover a lot of ground in a dynamic field. There were eight concurrent tracks dealing with everything from digital leadership to engagement and execution.

All the big themes found their place. There was talk of attribution strategy, multichannel and omnichannel, ROI from social and of using big data to provide a single customer view. What struck us was the dog that didn’t bark; brand.

Not for the first time it became apparent that a lot of discussion in digital marketing is driven by IT, with clients preoccupied with the micro level of marketing activities. It is evident in the language they use and the issues they choose to discuss that the focus is on execution and operations.

Not a single talk or panel focused on brand. This is both disappointing and encouraging. Disappointing, because it appears that too much attention and money is being devoted to the mechanics of jumping on the digital bandwagon. Encouraging, because it reassures us we’ve got a strong proposition at The Value Engineers which helps to address the central issue many people are not addressing.

Through our work with global brands we’ve been able to acquire knowledge of digital and multichannel marketing that goes beyond the technical and the transient. We’ve found that often the received digital wisdom doesn’t work and a proper, grounded, multi-channel view is required. For example clients’ assumptions on customer segments are often in contradiction with the multichannel reality. Where you’d expect to find older, more ‘analogue’ groups, you often find younger, more agile groups. Where you think a brand is great at digital delivery, it often owes its success to traditional channels. Where you think digital is the answer, actually it is just a sound strategy, with a properly crafted and integrated digital component.

Whatever your views on what should be the centre of attention of the digital marketing efforts, we believe the brand and the classic, grounded view of what’s required should be given its due attention.

But don’t take our word for it, you can ask our clients how our strategic marketing thinking helped them crack the digital/multichannel challenge.

Get in touch with Kamil Michlewski or Paul Gaskell if you would like to talk about how we can help.

Last week CoolBrands released their list of the Top 20 coolest brands in the UK. CoolBrands have been compiling yearly lists of the UK’s coolest brands since 2001, taking feedback from 2000 British consumers. There is also an Expert Council, this year including Gemma Cairney, Plan B and Carl Barât.

This got the TVE team thinking about how ‘cool’ works, how it is constituted, who decides, and what a little bit of cool can do for a brand.

CoolBrands makes ‘cool’ seem very easy, but the more we thought about it, the more difficult it seemed to define cool brands from those that had recently been cool, or were too niche to be called cool….yet. Cool’s problem is its own coolness, the exclusive ephemerality which renders cool by necessity a difficult group to join, but an even more difficult group to remain in. Almost as soon as a brand or product has been decided upon by the general population as cool, it becomes uncool, because cool’s coolness is in its difference, not in generic appeal or ownership.

Cool cannot be ubiquitous, and this is complicated by the fact that there are different cools for each consumer segment. No hip-and-happening person will agree with everything on CoolBrands’ list, but they might pick up on some, and that’s why CoolBrands is a great overarching guide to trends in the world of cool.

CoolBrands’ choices are not static – the brands chosen will go ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the fashion world over the course of the year. At TVE we think that throughout the year it’s important to keep your eye not just on the ‘cool’ brands, but the ‘hot’ brands. These are the brands which are being talked about, generating interest, suspicion and new fans, desirability and energy – even if their bubble might be burst by next week. Close tracking of what’s ‘hot’, and trying to decipher the reasons for their rise and fall is a great tool for current branding, and may even help us see into the future of cool!

Here are some ‘hot’ brands we’ve identified for 2012/3, drawn up into a map to show the factors which might be driving their ‘hotness’. Click on the images to enlarge.