Swarovski is a well known brand for jewellery around the world. The great marketing idea of applying techniques used for diamonds to glass made the company big and rich. These “techniques” are not only technical but also marketing skills. They sell you low cost glass at a high value by giving it the touch of exclusivity. They sell not only jewellery but also figurines and much much more – from beautiful to awful everything is covered.
Now I for myself don’t care much about the Swarovski hype – I don’t like much of the design and the associated prices – but I respect the marketing effort and how well they constructed their brand over the last 50 years. About 15 years ago they opened their “Kristallwelten” (crystal worlds). A sort of museum with works by famous artists inspired by the crystals. Andrè Heller was the curator of this magical place and everyone was delighted.
I will list now in a few words why this “Kristallwelten” is dismantling the brand of Swarovski:
It’s expensive – you pay 9.5 Euros (about 13.4 US$ at the time of writing) for getting in. There are 15 tiny rooms with “inspired art”, that’s close to a dollar/room. If a ordinary museum would charge at this prices… and not to forget – this is a marketing stunt, so free entry should be the minimum
If you are not interested in the “art” you cannot enter the shop directly – you have to pay to get into the shop basically. Ok, you get 2 Euro off you purchase with the ticket.
The so called art is a hoax – maybe 2 or 3 pieces of this exposition is worth the name of art. I studied art and I can tell the difference. They have a separate room for the “gallery” as they call it – the room with real masterpieces from the Swarovski art collection – see the difference in the naming
You don’t get any information about the production process or about Swarovski – there is only one room about the jewels itself and this is a little bit frustrating as you go there to learn about Swarovski
It’s old – 15 years and nearly no addition. You can tell the date of the art pieces and the updated rooms are just fitted with larger screens.
The shop has not all products on stock. The shop is big and they have nearly all products on display, but not all sizes. The factory is 50 meters away, we are at the heart of the Swarovski production site and they are not able to stock the rings on display in all sizes (and they just do S, M, L and XL – not like the jewellery ring sizes which are 22)
On the good side I have to admit, that the “crystallized” section, where you can buy single items to combine by yourself are quite neat.
The prices in the shop are the same all over the world. So if you travel to the Kristallwelten in Austria and you think that the shop nearby the factory is cheaper your wrong. No outlet – no factory sale.
So what is the conclusion – I stumbled out of the Kristallwelten and felt like I’ve been betrayed. The website is actually beautifuler and the respect for the firm was gone. No content for real money and no “magic” and all. Common’ Swarovski – we know it’s a marketing stunt, but don’t take us for fools. Get rid of the entrance fee (or do a full rebate on a purchase) and spice it up with more about the firm.
In various posts around the web you can find opinions on the new identity of the tv channel SyFy – formerly known as Sci-Fi Channel. While I don’t want to go into the design details I want to express some thoughts why the probably made this change. At first it seems quite unusual to change a well established brand so radically. It seems even more radical as the new name is also a new term that sounds like the old name but doesn’t has the same meaning – it actually has no meaning.
This puzzled at first even me. Science fiction was born over 100 years ago and the abbreviation sci-fi has become wide spread. Everybody knows what sci-fi is and therefore naming a tv channel who broadcasts sci-fi shows should be called sci-fi. But here lies the big problem. The vast majority of people “thinks” the know what sci-fi is all about. Basically science fiction is all about ufo’s and space travel. Science fiction is obviously much more than that and actually most of the movies and shows on tv are some sort of science fiction. How can you break this misinformation of the general public?
There are two ways. One way is to educate the people, but this would cost much more that just do it the way SyFy has done it. They changed the name and claimed that SyFy is the tv channel where you could “imagine more”. The name sound familiar enough to sci-fi fans to recognize the term and is new enough to new viewers to just be a name.
How far SyFy is more than just space crafts and aliens shows the spot – well done and good luck to the “new channel”.
Update: As @Lazarus2000 on Twitter pointed out giving a brand a unique name has another advantage. You can trademark the brand.
There is much talking about the Facebook usernames but none about the Feedburner feed dresses. You could get nice feed dresses in Feedburner right from the start and you might think there is nothing new to know about them. You’re right, nothing new but some time ago I found some trick to get the feed address you like even when it’s already taken.
There is a undocumented feature when you choose your Feedburner feed address – the address supports the forward dash “/”. This means, that you can have a Feedburner Feed with this address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie/blog/allitems and the best part about this URL is, that the feed address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie was already taken by someone else.
You can use this feature to make your feeds (say for your category or comment feeds) or to get nice looking feed URLs relevant to your business and to reinforce your brand.
BTW: I always suggest that if you are using Feedburner you should also use the MyBrand feature which let’s you use your domain name instead of feedburner.com. It’s wise to let your visitors subscribe to the RSS Feed with your domain in the URL because if for some reason in the feature you want to drop Feedburner or Feedburner closes down you will not lose your subscribers.
An important part of corporate design and branding in general is the font used online and offline. That’s no secret – the typeface must be readable (or not) and transport in a distilled way the character of the brand. But how unique can you be when 90% of the logos and corporate designs are made with the 8 most popular fonts (Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Thesis, Eurostile, Bank Gothic, Avenir)? Not much.
It is therefore a good idea to search for a special font or even better to ask a type designer to make a custom font. The custom font can push your brand experience further than you could by just using a common font as they can be tailored to the profile of the company.
A nice example is the font “Serrano” a custom font made for the Bank of New Zealand made by Klim Type Foundry under the direction of DNA.
If you think that having a new font from scratch is too expensive you might also contract with the type foundry that you don’t have the exclusive rights to the font to bring down the price. But in the end the benefits from having your own font is priceless;-)
Browsing the web I’ve discovered IncSpring - a site who claims to sell:
Full Brand Identity Packages – Logos, names, domains and more for sale by creatives around the world
It’s a creative description of a stock-agency for logos, domain names, and brand names. The prices are accessible (ok some are too high), the logos well drawn, the site nicely designed. So do I recommend it? Yes and no – there are a few hiccups:
A brand is more than just a logo/name/domain combination, much more
Most logos are just presented in the colour version (RGB!!), no negative or single color version
You just get the logo, not a corporate design – and have no option to “upgrade”
The names are obviously not personalized, you label yourself
Some names sound nice, but you don’t know if they are already registered – and if I pay 500-2500$ for a logo and name I want to be sure that this name can be used in my country in my industry.
Recommended for a company? Probably not.
At first I would recommend it for very small firms who don’t need a full blown corporate design and just want to get a name and logo from the shelf. But when I think that this company probably is not aware about the brand registration regulations and may get in trouble.
A small to mid-sized company needs in my opinion more than just a logo/name/domain combination – and for 2500$ you can find a easily a local designer (or on the internet) who gives you a personalized service. This way the company gets a name which tells their story and they can endorse. At the end they have to live with it.
Recommended for graphic designers? Don’t know..
As an art director or graphic designer the opportunity to sell a free work is quite nice. I would want to know how many visitors has the site, the average selling price and the legal stuff – how about payments to designers outside of the USA. If you have lying around some logos and can come up with a nice name you can try to sell them here. But I would not (like specialized stock-photographer do) create content specially for this portal. I think this time could be better invested in getting direct clients. Getting direct clients will allow you to enter business through a logo design and continue working on the rest of their communication – long term relationship is the keyword here.
So you should decide for yourself it is worth trying. I will scan my libraries and give it maybe a shot – will keep you updated.
Fonts are the key to bringing the message to your reader. I will not bore you with explaining you the importance of typography, but I can tell you that I love well designed type and even though I’m not obsessed (ok, a little bit) with fonts and typrography, I hate working with poor “developed” fonts…you read right, fonts are not only designed but must also be developed just like software. …click here to continue…
Scholz & Friends, abig german advertising Group made this little animation how advertising in the old days compares to today. Very ne at and you can’t explain it a simpler way.
It’s easier to understand what makes a brand interesting if we think of it as a person. Many brands are clearly male, others clearly female – but there is more to it. There are many elaborate ways to identify the brand personality and brand identity, but for most projects our simple 20 questions will help you get a quite good picture that will help you a lot. Find out how to apply it and how to use the results. …click here to continue…
What is the job of an art director anyway. How is it like? And how to learn to do the things the right way in real life. I will present you here some insights and some tutorials about becomming an art director, not just a graphic designer. Tips & Tricks you won't learn in any school and normally you will have to figure them out yourself. So go ahead and start your lessons.
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