Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

Now I’m a huge fan of Starbucks, I love a good latte and have in the past been a daily “user”. Recently though, i’ve found myself going out of my way to go to some other bakeries in the area to get a coffee and a pastry of some sort, why? Free Wi-Fi. Starbucks has Wi-Fi but they use the t-mobile hotspot that requires a subscription, that varies from $6 for an hour, to $29 per month.

Panera Bread specifically has started to become a place of note in my life because it is a Wi-Fi oasis of sorts. It’s got to the point where I know where the nearest Panera Bread is depending on where I am in the neighborhood.

Now I’m not sure how many people there are who are so addicted to internet access that any free wi-fi thing is going to be a place of note, but for me it’s changing my buying behavior. Sure Starbucks is better coffee, and generally a better experience, but Panera Bread has ok coffee, ok experience, better sandwiches, and free wi-fi. For me that wins most of the time.

IMHO as Starbucks morphs into an entertainment (music/movies) company free wi-fi is going to be more essential to the rest of their business. I mean they sell a tonne of CD’s and I know their opening some hybrid Music/coffee “hear music” stores, and recently they’ve been promoting the “Akeelah and the Bee” movie.

In fact if they were giving away free wi-fi they could gain control of that first landing page, because right now the first thing that I see when I log onto a starbucks wi-fi is a bunch of marketing material for T-Mobile. When you log into a Panera Bread network you get the chance to sign up for the Panera Bread newsletter before you go online.

Clearly free hotspots are part of the strategy

It’s rare for a company logo to stop me in my tracks, but when I noticed this in the top left of the screen I just had to write a note of appreciation.

It’s so good it made me all tingle-y and not many corporate logo’s do that for me.

It’s just another example of why it’s important to have a framework for your brand, a framework that enables creativity. Most corporate branding tomes don’t allow for any creativity. I for one would love to hear what some serious corporate branding people think about this approach.

“Brain Age” is here, and yes it’s a video game, but it’s not aiming for what would normally be considered the mass market of boys 18-30 or “gamers”, it’s going for the “massive market” of people who want to “train their brain”. With tag lines like:

and

Nintendo is essentially turning market perception on it’s head, positioning the video game as positive “mental exercise”, as opposed to the common perception of it being a pointless, mind numbing activity. Not only does the game act as a diagnostic tool, by testing your “brain age”, but as a training tool to help lower your brain age, the idea being that a younger brain age is better for your mental health.

As was mentioned in the excellent escapist article the gaming community treated the Nintendo DS (dual screen with a stylus) as a bit of a joke, the graphics were sub par to competing systems, and the interface was kind of clunky and the two screens…. well it didn’t fit the handheld gaming mold. But with a game like Brain Age suddenly the Nintendo DS could become a household name with baby boomers that might not have even heard of Nintendo before. Talk about Word of Mouth, if it starts to gain traction in the 50+ market as a way to stave off something as awful as alzeimers people like me are going to be buying Nintendo DS’s for my parents.

(screenshot from the Brain Age site, not your average gamers)

It seems that Brain Age is squarely aimed at the “grey market” of baby boomers, but it seems that Nintendo is following it up with one aimed at kids called “Big Brain Academy” (originally called Brain Flex I think, but the addition of the word “academy” sure aims to create position this tool as making you or your kids “smarter”).

I’m a huge fan of Guy Kawasaki and I just came across and article by him on providing great customer service, or as he calls it The Art of Customer Service. I thought I would point to this because it’s somewhat related to a previous post I made about the business fear, for as Guy calls it, business paranoia “what if everyone did this”.

I do love the term Guy uses here, “justification for anti-service”.

I am extremely excited to say that i have been asked to contribute to the new MarketingProfs blog, and today i’m the lead story. The collection of contributers they have are stellar, including Seth Godin, BL Ochman, Leigh Duncan, Mark Vanderbeeken and many more.

Go check out the blog http://blog.marketingprofs.com.

BTW I’m also contributing to the futurelab blog on marketing strategy & innovation

Have you ever got in a fight with someone and ended up much better friends? Well I wonder if all the people out there who are slapping GM around with the Chevy Apprentice “negative ads” aren’t actually putting more of a human face on GM? After we slap around the bully aren’t we now somewhat more connected to them? They respect us more, and we realize that they are just a product of their bad upbringing.

I’m not going to run out and buy a Tahoe, but somehow GM has managed to humanize themselves just a little bit by not taking down all the negative ads that were created for them.

There’s now an entire site dedicated to voting on the negative ads, go take a look and prepare to be blown away by the creativity

BTW from a publicity standpoint this is an absolute slam dunk, picked up by New York Times, CNET, Nightline, rocketboom (yes, that’s right nightline and rocketboom in the same sentence

Originally Published: customersonfire.com - microbrands & microbranding