This anecdote came to mind after lunching with Chris Lindland of Betabrand, where he talked about the impact of so-called “Hoodie Gate” on his business. (for more on Betabrand see here )

Mark Zuckerberg favors the hoodie as his go-to fashion item — the hoodie is to Zuck as the black mock turtle was to Stephen P. And so a few weeks back Chris and team decided to make an Executive Hoodie cut from classic chalk-stripe (read Wall St) suiting material to help celebrate the Facebook IPO.

It fit perfectly the way they think — start with the story, then think of a product — and they knew they’d be able to draft off the incredible amount of coverage the IPO would generate. It’s a classic piece of Challenger behavior — spot a big trend, try like hell to attach your brand to it to put yourself into new conversations. (Note: Kulula airlines is particularly good at this as this interview and their latest ad shows.

Betabrand had high hopes and even a sense of the long term plan this story could contribute to (see video for details of the new West Coast clothing vibe is he is trying to create), but they could not have predicted that would happen when Zuck got into a spat with a Wall Street type over whether it was appropriate to wear his signature on the IPO roadshow.

Suddenly, the Executive Hoodie was the hottest item at Betabrand and sold out immediately. There’s now a waiting list of 6 weeks while production ramps up and Chris announced this will be their best month ever, which is saying something coming on the back of double digit growth each month since he started.

Chris tells the story of the Hoodie to Mark over a damn fine cup of coffee

Was he lucky? Of course. He couldn’t have foreseen the furor that Michael Pachter’s comments created. But Chris practices hard at looking for stories to insert his clothes into and that earns luck like HoodieGate.

So, sometimes it pays to start with the story. As I was saying to my friend and Lark COO Shannon McClenaghan the other day, perhaps more marketing departments — especially those of start-ups — should think and act like a newspaper, with a daily editorial meeting in the AM to review all the stories they are pursuing with the only difference being trying to understand how to insert their brand into the stories of the day.

And if a daily deadline seems a little harsh for Marketers, consider that Betabrand now launches three products a week.

In fact there is a case to be made that many of the most brilliant pieces of communication in the world have been product demos.

From, for instance, the Oh-so-slow pace of:

…to the entrepreneurial genius of deciding to drink your own battery fluid to instantly disarm every sceptic.

…via an elegy for British manufacturing:

…to my favourite ad of all time:

But if there is one thing better than a product demo, it is a product demo that brings a headline with it. It is no secret that Hyundai are a company to watch; outside Europe their relentless energy and gradually improving product has made huge ground on even apparently dominant players like Toyota, and of course in the US they have been most famous for the Assurance Program which gave them a 14% growth at the height of the downturn, while the rest of the industry dropped 37%. But in Europe they have so far failed to match the impact they have had in those other markets.

So it is interesting to see them upping their game here as well. The papers over the last few days were full of, well, a product demo.

Are your children baboons? Mine neither. But there is a certain familial resemblance. And I take the point: if the car can survive 10 hours with a troop of baboons, it can certainly manage a four hour drive to the beach and back.

So am watching Hyundai. And the thinking feels right to me for the UK – building their product credentials, but quickly and imaginatively, in a way that makes me think of the brand as having a little more humanity and flair.

So a tip of the hat to HMC. A flash in the pan, or a challenger coming through?

Let’s see what’s next.

Last week I was lucky enough to attend the series of ‘Beauty in the Making’ talks from It’s Nice That  (in conjunction with paper company GF Smith – many thanks for the amazing notebook).  Friday’s  talk was a double bill entitled ‘The Senses’ with Fabian Riggell of Future/Secret/Other Cinema (more to come on that one) and Sam Bompass, from Bompass & Parr.

Bompass & Parr are the duo behind such genius food installations as the Architectural Jelly Banquet, The World’s First Chocolate Based Climbing Wall, Alcoholic Architecture- a pop up bar which was in essence a ‘walk in breathable cocktail’ and the soon to be open Crazy Golf Course made of cake.  Sam spoke of creating what can only be described by a brilliant German word - Gesamtkunstrek  - meaning ‘a total work of art’, and how they achieve that through a combination of outrageous ambition and extreme innovation.

Through talking us through their Voyage of Discovery event (created for the launch of Truvia Sweetener in the UK), he explained the eight stages involved in creating a an experience “which is more than the sum of its parts” (I scribbled this down so apologies if i misquote). They are:

1. Anticipation

Build the excitement before the event

2. Storytelling

Use storytelling to start to build a feeling of trust

3. Enclosure

Use space to create a feeling of ‘immersion’ away from the real world

4. The Unknown

Embrace the fear of ‘what’s round the corner’…

5. Reveal

…show them ‘what’s round the corner’

6. Risk

Introduce an element of risk (in this example the guests had to walk through a waterfall to get to the other side)

7. Reward

Always reward those who embraced the ‘risk’ (in this case by getting a free cocktail on the other side of the waterfall)

8. Reflect

Provide an area for them to spend time with the experience (rowing boats on an emerald green lake).

In implementing these eight steps in the most theatrical ways, Sam explained that they always try to achieve one thing – to not just create an experience that someone would tell their friends about the next day, but to create one that they could talk about engagingly for a full five minutes. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but just try it.

So, as Challenger Brands needing to be talked about, whether we’re creating a magical mystery tour for a launch, a customer’s physical journey through a service, or virtual one through our website, what would our version of the eight steps be? And how long would our conversation test last afterwards?

*Bompass & Parr are hoping to bring the aforementioned floating pineapple to London during the 2012 Olympics so look out for it.

All images stolen from the Bompass & Parr website.

Cranium of Cranium inc. was a ‘game’ changer in the board game category (tee hee). They flipped every convention; distribution, audience, Christmas… the list is never ending.

It really was wonderful- so much so that I got excited reading a story about it 14 years on (although for different reasons that i liked it back then, I was a pre-teen so mainly just enjoyed the purple dough).

Cranium Inc.’s mandate and every employee’s mantra was the acronym CHIFF= “clever high quality, innovative, friendly, funny.” From every innovation, through to every small piece of comms, to what kind of chairs were in the office, every decision had to go through -

Is it clever?

Is it high quality?

Is it Innovative?

Is it Friendly?

Is it Funny?

Is it CHIFF? If the answer is yes, then go forth and produce!

It’s not the best acronym, they aren’t necessarily the most compelling set of words of intent. But they did something really cool, cool enough for me not to feel ashamed about mentioning something that happened whilst I still owned a Barbie and a school uniform.

Whit Alexander, one of the co-founders, was working on a new concept for a board game piece. It was going to be pretty elaborate – so it was going to need its constituent parts glued together. He started to explain to the manufacturer in China.  Before he was interrupted with…

“It’s not CHIFF!”

…the supplier halfway around the world chastised the Co-founder of Cranium for not being brand aligned, and he was right! Glueing bits of plastic together wouldn’t be high quality or innovative. Instead the manufacturer made suggestions to make it ‘CHIFF’ and helped develop the design- openly sharing his expertise and adding value far above and beyond the relationship required.

When we help people develop Challenger Lighthouse Identities we always ask the team to think of the effect their brand identity will have internally, because it is so important that every person understands that a brand identity is more than an image, it acts as a filter for decision making.

Often a brand identity starts as words on a page, but it is when the people who make up the business embrace it as a beacon of behavior- that’s when interesting things happen and the untapped potential is discovered.

Story found in the book Make it stick by Chip and Dan Heath (I know – again!).

When Virgin effectively reinvented the meaning of status for travelers in the 1980s, their insight was that not every status-conscious traveller was the same. There were some, financiers and CFOs perhaps, who would always prefer their status straight up, no banter, but there was also a new breed of traveller who would respond better to a different kind of aspiration. Virgin’s experience was strikingly imaginative (a bar you could sit down at, in flight), constantly refreshed, and brilliantly balanced great product and service with little touches of humour that both projected their identity and spoke to the human as well as the high flyer in you. Clearly balance was everything – one still wanted respect, and enjoyed the emotional as well as the physical elevation. But that was not the sole definer of who their Upper Class market was. Mutually enjoyed wit suggests a different kind of discernment in one’s customer, and a different kind of flattery (‘even though you are successful, we know you don’t take yourself too seriously’).

So it was interesting to read the press coverage about Apple’s Siri in the iPhone 4S having an unexpected  sense of humour. Because a part of me wondered why it had taken so long. While some other high end categories, like hotels, have splashed wit as well as imagination into their relationship with status conscious travelers and, for a generation under 40, depositioned the establishment brands in the process, other kinds of premium categories have ignored it completely. Cars, for instance, seem to believe that as soon as you want to spend more than $15,000 on a car, you lose any sense of wit or emotional warmth.

A quirky one-off for Apple? Or the beginning of a new era of status lightening up?  Perhaps it is the beginning of premium experience brands discovering what Virgin discovered almost 30 years ago.

Follow @eatbigfish

This article first appeared in Campaign Asia Pacific

But what we do understand is that sleep competes with the endless joy of your distant friends status updates, catching up on Mad Men, trying to level up on FIFA, watching TED talks from 2007, mining the new Jamie Oliver app for a recipe to impress your spouse, plowing through all the kindle books you absent mindedly downloaded to your new iPad, getting your 7-minute abs sorted, creating your own dynamic personal brand via your bloggy blawg, just finishing off that one email, indulging in a bit of parenting . . . oh you get the point. Sleep, by comparison is just so sleepy.

This is the challenge faced by Lark, whose device not only is the least alarming alarm clock on the planet, waking you with gentle vibrations at the appointed time, but is also out to make sleep the most powerful secret weapon of all of us who crave accomplishing so much. If you’re well rested, the rest of the list above is easier.

See, the data is in on sleep. It helps you lose weight, do more reps at the gym, concentrate better at work, have better sex, and listen. Wow. This should be easy.

But it’s not, as Julia Hu and her team at Lark are discovering. Sure, they’re off to a flying start — Apple just agreed to stock Lark in all its stores internationally after a successful US test — but there’s a long distance to travel between geeky gadget for the life-hacker crowd and performance enhancing tool of the masses.

The first step is giving people a glimpse into that unknown third of their lives. It’s a classic case of how Challengers need to Make the Invisible Visible.

Lark tracks how long it takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake up (26 times last night!) and the quality of that sleep. Insight into the mystery is the first part of understanding, and understanding the first step in behavior change and the long-term adoption of yet another gadget crowding your bedside table.

It’s early days for the project, but one we are proud to have been involved in from the beginning. We just interviewed Julia Hu at length about the inception and first year of Lark and it is a compelling story that we’ll parcel out in delicious bite-sized pieces over coming months and at length in the new book we’re working on. But for now, Julia gave us the opportunity to announce a worldwide exclusive on our site. Here’s that clip:

In the London offices we have a very literary bathroom fairy that regularly curates a collection of inspiring books for those moments of solitude and relaxation. A book called ‘Made to Stick’ by Chip & Dan Heath turned up last week and I was so absorbed.

Among many riveting examples of ideas that have stickiness is a lovely story about an old local newspaper with a great Challenger Lighthouse Identity. Have you ever heard of the Daily Record in Dunn, North Carolina? Ever even heard of Dunn? Most likely not.

It looks pretty sleep but lovely- with a city motto “It’s alright here” and with a population of around 10,000. The Daily Record is the local paper, nothing remarkable.

Nothing remarkable.. until you learn that it has a 112% readership in relation to the population of the town. It’s not just that EVERYONE is reading- but other people, outside of the sleepy little town,  are buying it too.

Why?

Well, they are for ‘relentless local coverage’. Because that is the big national newspapers just can’t offer.

Hoover Adams the founder often quoted a friend (Ralph Delano) who lived in the neighbouring town to illustrate his point around the office about being locally focused.

“If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson. “

Great, everyone can align around that- flower show on the high street yes. Presidential election- probably not, unless of course Airforce One lands slap bang in the middle of the town square.

This is where Adams pushed this viewpoint further though and made it much sharper and specific to the Dunn Daily Record. Which has been the mark of its success when small town papers have crumbled and died.

He made the Daily Record about “names, names, names”. Adam was tirelessly committed to this point and it gave everyone working on the paper such a wonderfully clear sense of intent that they never faltered, not since 1950. What stories do we cover? What pictures do we lead with? Easy names trump everything, beautiful photography, prose, inter state relations… Heck I imagine that the flower show would lose out unless they could tell us exactly who was there and what was the gossip among the geraniums.

This was so successful that  they have a higher number of consumers than your total target market, and its been happening since 1978! This is old but very good news. It is such a wonderful story of steadfastly sticking to your viewpoint. Letting it guide you and the success that can bring. Adams had a very simple idea (the best ones often are), but in the simplicity it stuck and now the curtain twitchers (ie everyone) of Dunn know and love their local paper.

Everyone in the office I promise to return the book soon. If you don’t happen to have a literary bathroom fairy its well worth buying.

Here Perry gives his perspective on how to build brands without advertising and explains Big Fish’s concept of ‘Pack-vertising’ whilst looking at how it was applied to their work on Dorset Cereals.

I get it. If you have product this good you just get the ad-BS out of the way and do a great demo. I’ve had no problem with that approach for the last few years as iPhones, MacBook Airs, and iPads came thick and fast.

In fact Apple’s approach has been a God-send in my work as it has helped get us out of the ‘brand image’ trap and elevate the conversation about product back to the top where it belongs, and to make those conversations more honest, i.e. spend more money on the kind of product development that creates its own word-of-mouth, rather than trying to gin up mediocre product in flashy social media.

But looking at Apple’s comms over the last few years it’s hard not to conclude that it’s all getting a bit dull and formulaic. How many more “thinner” “faster” “more powerful” claims can we hear before it becomes all noise and no signal? Pity the poor creative department that has to turn this out repeatedly.

Credit = apple.com

I find it all a bit puzzling given Apple’s rich advertising history. Who didn’t love 1984 and admire the entire gestalt of Apple that it conveyed? Or The Crazy Ones manifesto and what and whom it celebrated (somewhat cheekily, presumptuously, perhaps). Or Mac vs PC, which, though it was still a side-by-side product demo, made a larger point and had great charm to it.

And, of course, the iconic dancing silhouettes for ipod were so good they spawned lots of imitations — I think of them every time I see the credits to Mad Men — while making it really clear what the true benefit of 10,000 songs in your pocket really was.

And I personally thought the FaceTime campaign pulled very effectively at heartstrings — it got me using it.

So why do we now seem largely stuck on the white seamless with the disembodied swiping finger? Why do so many of the scenarios the ads are built around seem so hum-drum? It’s not even as if Apple needs to tout product features in its advertising. Every newspaper on earth carried the specs of the new iPad in their editorials, along with Apple’s own rich site. And the fan boys wrote tons of reviews online with hours of launch. That data is not hard to find.

Could it be there’s an aversion to ‘marketing’ at Apple now? Rumor has it Jobs banned the word ‘brand’ around the place a few years back lest anyone get deflected from creating a design and engineering triumph. Has that mindset stifled the creativity of some of the most creative marketers on Earth who don’t want to out-shine the real hero?

Or is the sheer scale of ambition for iPad — replace all PCs everywhere — leading them to act like conservative mass-marketers whose desire to appeal to everyone and turn-off no one is creating some kind of race-to-the-bottom creatively?

Now, Apple’s device and iTunes ecosystem is so much of a fortress these days that they have plenty of inertia in the model to ensure continued success without needing better comms. And the store experience seems to just get better and better and probably creates far more brand goodwill than any ads might.

But let’s assume the worst for a minute. Let’s assume that iPhone 5 has about as much wow as 4S, and that Samsung, who made the screen that seems to be the big idea behind iPad 3 make their own retina display tablet; and that the Android app ecosystem continues to gain steam; and the other ‘phone’ device manufacturers pull their fingers out and make a comeback on a number of fronts; and that, as seems somewhat inevitable and may already be happening (Foxconn etc) that some kind of backlash gets rolling. Then what? It sure would be nice to have the best-loved ads on the planet as part of your arsenal.

So it’s time for Apple to use advertising as a source of inspiration for what these amazing products can do to benefit humanity, rather than just demo them.

There’s a line in the film they used to launch the new iPad, “We believe technology should be invisible. When you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not what you’re doing it with.” Fair enough. So show us what people are doing and make it great. Show us how the world has changed as a consequence of using all this gear. I know it’s changed my career and life immeasurably.

Jobs was the ultimate Marketer and clearly knew how to use communication to stop the world for a moment. It would be a tribute to him for Apple to raise its game now and show that side again.

Bring back the crazy ones. Blow us away.

Follow @markcbarden

Thumbnail image – copyright Help Scout

One of nine newly designed "Dove" A319 planes. Photograph: Geoff Lee/British Airways

Yesterday British Airways and artist Tracey Emin unveiled the first of a set of unique Olympics-inspired plane designs to mark London 2012.

The outside artwork of the nine ‘Dove’ aircraft has been designed by Pascal Anson, from Brighton, who has been mentored by Emin.

The design of the plane, which will be in service for a year, involves using the cockpit for a beak, fuselage and wings for the main body, and the tailfin as a tail. The aircraft will be painted white with gold strokes of paint to represent the feathers.

Painting parts of a British Airways aircraft is nothing new. BA has a history of altering the design of the tailfin and famously upset Margaret Thatcher in 1997 when it redesigned the tailfins without the Union Jack.

It is the first time in their history they have painted the entire aircraft however.

One of the few airlines in the world to consistently paint the entire aircraft is Kulula, the low cost South African airline and subsidiary brand of British Airways.

I wondered firstly, how much of this idea was inspired by their sister brand Kulula originally using their planes in such a way? And secondly to what extent the idea was validated by the success they had had with the idea in the past?

It could all just be coincidence of course, but I’m always interested in this idea of parent brands allowing their subsidiaries to go out and be the Challenger, take risks and experiment, and ultimately validate ideas for their more cautious parent.

One brand who do deliberately use a subsidiary brand to extrapolate learning is O2. You can watch Gav Thompson talking about O2’s relationship with sister brand giffgaff here.