(Burbank, CA)  Dave Newman Advertising, a full-service marketing, advertising, design, and online communications company located in Burbank California, finds itself on an upward business cycle as the first half of 2009 is reached.  In spite of the recession, DNA’s largest clients see the wisdom of communicating aggressively while others are pulling back.

Because of their success, the Business Journal selected Dave Newman Advertising as one of their Top 20 Agencies.  Additionally, Dave Newman recently received the prestigious Chairman’s Award from the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce given to that year’s outstanding business person.

One of DNA’s long time clients, Fulham, a worldwide leader in energy efficient lighting solutions, recently made two important strategic moves.  Braemar, a leading investing company which partners with companies developing emerging energy technologies such as solar and wind power, saw the merit in investing in Fulham due to Fulham’s dedication to developing “green” energy and lighting solutions.  The second move was to partner with Samsung LED to provide state-of-the art LED lighting applications.

Dave Newman Advertising also performs a number of marketing/communication tasks for a growing list of clients.  In addition to traditional advertising, DNA provides new media expertise, online marketing, e-mail marketing, trade show booths, brochure and catalog creation, experiential and engagement marketing, public relations, strategic branding, and packaging.

Additionally, Dave Newman Advertising works with clients to grow their businesses by assisting them in the development of strategic initiatives to help with brand building.  “We want to provide the client with 360 degrees of communications,” says Dave Newman.  “With the move from offline to online advertising, and the explosion of Internet marketing, we need to be flexible and provide the client with what is best for them, not just something that we happen to do.”

The most talked about booth we have ever created. Giant vibrant images of world icons and tall sculptures give the global presence the client was trying to promote.

How do you showcase an entire city at a book fair? DNA recently undertook the challenge of designing a complete 12,000 square foot booth for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs display for the Guadalajara BookFair 2009.

Encompasing 2 areas and built for over 100,000 people attending, DNA’s submission encompasses “pop-up” book giant sculptures to relay the vibrant cultural and city icons for Los Angeles.

Check out more of the display by clicking more

The Business Journal named Dave Newman Advertising one of the top 20 advertising agencies in their Los Angeles market.

This is the 4th year in a row for DNA being listed on the Journal’s Top Agencies list.

We’re glad to see some growth for our company in advertising and marketing — and the recognition from the Business Journal is icing on the cake.

For more information about the Business Journal, check it out online at: http://www.sfvbj.com/

Start with a good product or service. It doesn’t have to be the greatest. Few people need “great.” Few are willing to pay for it, even if they recognize it. The product just can’t be really bad. No amount of clever ads and media bucks can turn a stinkpot into ambrosia. Indeed, the worst thing a new brand can do is to raise expectations with great ads that hype them to the skies. The crash to earth – driven by merciless word-of-mouth – will be ruinous. Everyone knows crap. But since most people can’t tell “pretty good” from “really good” or “great,” a mediocre product can build a solid brand franchise. Corona and Budweiser, Ford, American Airlines (almost all airlines are mediocre except for Southwest, Singapore, SAS and once upon a time, Alaska).

Find or create some point of differentiation or uniqueness. An ESP (emotional selling proposition) is better than a USP – it’s hard to be unique in this age of growing commoditization. Whatever the differentiation is, the brand must remain consistent and clear about it, and stick to its core values.

To succeed, a brand must share its customers’ values. These values vary from year to year (even month to month!); segment to segment. So some brands are more relevant to one age group, gender, ethnic segment or geographic region than to another. Others have a broad enough platform to support a varied spectrum of customers. A frequent mistake in brand management is to be greedy; to try to be all things to all customers. Bad move.

If success depends upon sharing consumers’ values, it’s obviously essential to keep close tabs on those values. Brands that fail to do this wake up one morning to find that two things have shrunk: (1) their share of market and (2) their share of customer. This is usually linked with decline in profits and in shareholder value.

For a brand to keep tabs on the people who buy what they are selling, they must always be aware of (a) the direction and speed of customer value shifts, and (b) the direction and speed of the brand’s own value proposition. It is simply amazing how many companies do not know where their own brand equity lies.

There’s even more. They must assess the value of each medium of brand communication (including internal). That’s the subject of another paper – a topic exotically dubbed The Brand Consonance Triad.

A brand must communicate meaningfully in all 3 ½ marketing channels. Say what? Three and a half? Yes. Obviously channels #1 and #2 are the Consumer Channel (dialogue with customers) and the Business-to-Business Channel (dialogue with marketing partners, suppliers, government). Less obvious is #3, the Management-to-Employee Channel (internal dialogue). But it’s essential for company-wide understanding of the brand values. This aspect of corporate culture involves training, newsletters, benefits. Our #3 ½ , the final “half channel,” surprisingly, just may be the most critical of all. It’s the individual employee’s dialogue with the brand. This Personal Channel is the alignment of the brand values with the worker’s own values and understanding. If this employee-to-brand (not company, brand) consonance is not present in enough individuals, the brand will lack cohesiveness at the atomic level.

Launching new brands is like swimming up a waterfall. But it can be done with enough imagination, hard work and opportunistic gambles. As recently as Gulf War One, nobody had heard of Yahoo!, Starbucks, Amazon or Virgin Superstores. And CNN, currently one of the world’s Top Forty brands – unlike the previously powerful NBC, CBS and ABC – was just “making its bones.”

Japanese companies (cars, electronics, beer, consumer durables) are an excellent example of intelligence and determination overcoming a stacked deck. Through uncompromising attention to product excellence and relentless marketing, Japanese brands succeeded in conquering much turf that homegrown brands previously believed impregnable. In just over three decades they changed the U.S. market’s brand perception of “Made in Japan” from cheap junk to reliable engineering, handsome styling and excellent customer relations.

The fact that some Japanese brands, after such impressive performance, are presently struggling to maintain their earlier level of success is further evidence of the importance of keeping a brand’s equity current – and consonant with rapidly-evolving customer values.

A brand is more than a symbol cruelly burned into a doggie’s smoking hide.

Like other transcendent ideas, a brand has many definitions; it’s many things. Like fine art, branding is not easy to define, but you know it when you see it.

Brand is more than product or service, more than trademarks and logos or a slogan or a corporation. Almost any human activity designed to interrelate with the public can be branded. Political candidates, sports teams, entertainers are all brands. (Celebrities regularly associate with branded products or services.) By extension, religions, social systems and self-help movements are brands. The Mormons, Islam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Alcoholic Anonymous are all brands with strong central brand propositions, slogans, logos and vested equities.

In our advertising and marketing world, a brand is represented by the client. We may talk with individual clients named Louise or Billy or José; we may get paid by checks with a company name printed on them, but what we are really working for is neither human nor corporate. It’s the brand. It’s not even the specific product or service the client makes. It’s the abstraction in which that product or service has its origins. Not the product, the idea behind the product. Any brand is an amalgam of corporate identity; quality guarantee; return address; personality. It’s what a company is, makes, does, stands for and represents in the mind of the customer. There’s more, too. But that will do for starters.

Brands have real monetary value. Brand names are assets that are considered in every corporate purchase or merger. Brands are “good will.” Brands are franchises, sometimes literally. Strong ones deliver profits and enjoy longevity because they deliver shareholder value. They deliver shareholder value ultimately because they first deliver customer value.
We will return time and again to this frequently overlooked simple notion.

Brands have a life cycle. Some live longer than others. Established brands can fade away by becoming less relevant to their constituency, because a more relevant brand emerges, or through lack of differentiation.
Examples abound. Mademoiselle Magazine, Ipana Toothpaste, Collier’s, Oldsmobile, Dutch Cleanser, Plymouth Automobiles, National Airlines – even TWA and Pan American, for that matter – all faded away. Some through simple mismanagement. Other brands are overly connected to a dying category and gradually fade with that category, like Polaroid, Cadillac, Brylcream. Some make a comeback. Ovaltine and Breck are trying. Even power-brands can lose name value overnight: Enron, WorldCom, Exxon, Martha Stewart, Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen. But strong brands can take severe hits and recover, like Tylenol, Perrier, Ford Exploder – oops, we mean “Explorer.” Some never quite get back in the game, like Firestone, Trini Lopez and Jim Bakker’s ministry. Others were never really in the game to begin with: Yugo, Arch Deluxe, Frank Sinatra, Jr.

Strong brands can more easily succeed with brand extensions or sub-brands. The idea is for the new line to profit from the “halo” effect, getting credibility and acceptance on the coattails of a trusted parent brand. Diet Coke, Ivory Liquid, Saturn, Smirnoff Ice, Nivea Cream (now in men’s products), Snapple carbonated drinks, Starbucks ice cream.

But sometimes an extension weakens the brand by hubris or simple stupidity. Edsel, New Coke, faux-Cadillacs platformed on cheaper lines, Coca-Cola fashions, Donald Duck orange juice. To avoid this reputation leakage, some brands use a strategy of competing in a different (say, lower-priced) arena under a different name. They can get additional sales from that end of the market without cannibalizing brand prestige. Since somebody is going to “knock them off,” why not do some of it themselves? Smirnoff does this with Popov Vodka; record companies and book publishers have budget lines.

Brand erosion happens through mismanagement; overexposure; trade mark misuse; dilution of brand message; gradual loss of public confidence; PR catastrophe; acquisition by a stronger brand; evaporation of customer relevance.

What is design, anyway?

How do we define the difference between design and plain old drawing? Or design and random lines and colors?

We all know it when we see it, just as we know the difference between writing and typing. Between intelligent speech and mindless babbling.

But there’s even more to design than bringing order out of chaos. There are many apparently orderly things – even orderly graphics – that are not necessarily design, let alone good design.

And music is more than an orderly sequence of scales and notes.

Just because graphic elements are neatly lined up, or symmetrically balanced, or brightly colored, does not make them well designed. Because design is NOT just a pretty picture; logo; geometrical pattern; color combination; shape or packaging concept, although any or all of those elements do contribute to good design.

Design is the entire visual environment in which a brand lives and competes.

Good design helps a brand “dress for success.”

Design makes a major contribution to a brand’s success or failure in the marketplace. No brand moves off the shelf unless it moves something in the consumer.

One of the great tragedies of marketing is for a company to produce an excellent product or service … only to watch its brand fail because the graphic design – the brand’s “look” – does not convincingly convey anything significant about the brand’s excellence. So it never connects impactfully enough to resonate positively with its target market. Splashing bright colors onto a package or an ad, or making a logo screamingly huge, doesn’t necessarily give the consumer any reason to buy. Attracting attention isn’t the be-all and end-all of design. Once you have opened the door of the consumer’s attention, something worthwhile has to enter it.

Yet few marketers stop to consider that anything apparently unrelated to the product – graphic design, the brand’s overall visual environment – could be a major factor in marketplace disconnect. But it’s often true.

The brand’s overall design must convincingly project some meaningful aspect of the brand’s personality. This might be (depending upon the product) playfulness, confidence, femininity, masculinity, seriousness, boldness, delicacy, sexiness, subtlety, strength, novelty, honesty or [fill in the blank with your own brand’s characteristics].

The power of picturing.

Visual impact is a subconscious – actually, pre-conscious – process. It all happens on the emotional level, before thinking even starts.

Visual stimuli resonate in the right brain long before the analytical left brain has a chance to kick in. It is important to understand that the brain does not understand words (especially written words, which are abstractions of other abstractions). But the unconscious mind – the right brain, where all purchase and brand loyalty decisions begin – responds to visual images. We all act on emotional responses. In other words, based on iconographic, not verbal, stimuli. Which do you think moves someone to contact a potential dating partner on the internet – a clever written outline or a picture of someone who clearly has personality? Indeed, even if the written material is brilliant and witty, if the photo shows someone unappealing, you move on to the next name.

The emotional right brain trumps.

The “conscious” left brain comes active only a bit later – sometimes a tenth of a second or less – in the process, to ratify what the right brain has already let into our emotional universe.

That’s one reason the history of strong brands is filled with great design for those brands. For just a few obviously examples, think of the Nike “swoosh;” Apple Computer’s apple silhouette; the ingenious arrowhead embedded in the Ex of FedEx; the bold horizontal striping on airliners. It’s hard to think of any really strong, lasting brands that feature weak design.

Brands need strong design now more than ever.

Consider today’s advertising and sales environment. There are more media vehicles than ever before – broadcast, print, internet and out-of-home (including point of sale). Consumers have more choices, and more power to choose than ever before, thanks to web browsers.

The challenge today is for brands to punch through the clutter, with a brand message that bolster the brand’s chance to sell and ultimately develop a competitive edge. And how is that brand message conveyed?

Through good, brand-relevant graphics.

The first line of defense is the visual dimension. Good graphic design is the “advance guard” of any brand. It’s what the public sees first, and remembers last, about the brand. Good graphic design leverages a brand’s good points to best advantage. (It’s hard to imagine a case where good design ever hindered a brand’s market position!)

Wise marketers take this into account. And wise design studios take brand equity issues into account. Working together, they stand a good chance of succeeding.

DNA recently created packaging for a line of industrial, architecture lighting products.

DNA created a box to hold each of the delicate and heavy products. The target marketing was in-channel distribution customers, end-user building contractors, architecture agencies, building retro fitting companies.

DNA created quite a big splash at the SEMA show in Las Vegas for client Professional Products.

SEMA is the largest tradeshow for automotive aftermarket manufacturers in the nation.

DNA created the design, layout, and engineering for the Professional Products booth. We are becoming a “One Stop Shop” for manufacturers and tradeshows.

Kontainit recently had DNA create identity, marketing materials and in-channel promotions, and product packaging for their latest product.

Tough TSA-compliant container for wine and valuable bottles, the product is geared towards travelers.