In times where brands respond to customers within seconds via Twitter it makes sense that brands try to stay on top of the movement by providing a personalized experience to their customers. It is good to try, but if you try too hard, you die trying.

Some policy changed at Peet’s Coffee & Tea for example and all of a sudden a random ‘barista’ shouts ‘Good Morning’ to the crowd, which feels very awkward as everyone feels like they are being talked to, yet no one feels addressed. Another awkward new habit is to have employees at stores such as Nordstrom, and even Barneys, use their downtime to write strange postcards that look like they are written by a pre-teen, for a pre-teen, to their customers.

Brands, be careful out there. Unless you really understand who your customer is and how you can take advantage of a more unique outreach that is truly personal and honest, it is best not to try too hard and stick to the conventional ways you already mastered. It can only backfire.

Time is money and both are scarce in corporations these days. Pressure is up to connect to customers in untraditional ways and marketing companies and consultants push their clients into places they have never been to before, places they often don’t understand clearly and that they don’t have resources to manage well. I am talking about company blogs, twitter pages, flickr accounts et cetera. Each come with responsibilities – responsibilities first and foremost to your brand and the consumers that are exposed to it.

Today I read an article in the online edition of Forbes about the importance of the right, aspiring, positioning of luxury brands, especially during hard economic times like these. I read the article because the individual who wrote it is an Executive at one of the world’s leading branding agencies, so a brand I trust. I also lend Forbes my trust. The problem is that I spotted a typo half way through. Instead of ‘They’, it said ‘The’, which changed the meaning and made me pause for a second. It changed my trust in the article, my brand perception of the agency as well as my trust in Forbes. Could it be that editorials, even just short columns, are being written at the speed of blog entries, or maybe even faster? As I am typing this entry I clearly understand that it comes with the responsibility of representing the brand of Geyrhalter Design to everyone and anyone, a brand that I built over years through intense work, a brand that many individuals are nourishing 24/7 to remain in tact to aspiring and current clientele alike.

Consumers want brands they aspire to to consistently show that extra attention to detail. In your customer’s mind there is no difference to the way your brand gets communicated, may it be a 20 second tweet or a 30 second campaign, it is all about how it makes them feel afterwards.

When we received our edition of the latest hardcover ‘bible’ on Graphic Design, from the publishing brand Creatives have trusted and aspired to over decades, Graphis, I was greeted by a horrific mistake in the second intro paragraph, followed by a slightly amusing typo, if it only was not in our very own company name, as shown below. After thousands of brand interactions over decades, it only took seconds for us to decide that the brand has lost its appeal to us.

To further make my point I was greeted by the below ad in the online edition of the New York Times, one of the world’s most important and highly regarded papers, just minutes before writing this entry.

Do we really not take the time to evaluate how much these little mistakes or decisions harm our brand? Maybe the advertiser does NOT suit our brand. Maybe the – already much delayed – book should yet NOT be rushed off to China without proper proof-reading and maybe a leading branding agency should watch out for their own affluent brand while advising others on what to do with theirs.

The times are changing, we do a thousand things at once, but none of them to perfection.

Maybe we should strive for perfection again (even if we do not reach it), because emotional connections to brands are still being built on the foundation of excellence that leads to trust and last but not least to sales.

The current economic climate brings out the best, and worst, in marketing practices. A bold approach was taken by The Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, where the management team decided to give away 200 complimentary stays over weekends in March and April. With a night averaging $250 and the hotel being associated with one of the largest hospitality brands in the world, Starwood, this counts as quite a big step which most traditional marketers and hoteliers would have immediately strayed away from. What Bonaventure understands is brand value. Their business is down 20%. The hotel most likely feels empty, even on weekends. Of course this marketing stint will bring in 400 guests who will be exposed to the brand and spend money on the property’s bars and restaurants, but more importantly thousands will try to score that free night, thousands will read about the promotion, and at the end of the low-cost, yet highly viral, campaign tens of thousands will be reminded of the fact that there is a forward thinking hotel in downtown L.A.. Maybe to keep in mind when relatives come to town, or for an in-town (=economic) weekend get-away, or to just check out and grab a drink at the bar, either way the brand is on your mind. The recession has all of us rethinking traditional approaches to brand marketing, and many more great ideas will be born. And we will see lots of in-your-face, nearly pathetic, approaches of small businesses trying to hang on to that one more sale that will drive them into the ground and make the ones who understand brand-strategic thinking stand out.

I taught a class at Art Center College Of Design with the focus on creating Brand Atmospheres™ for an artist or a band. I am very passionate about music, design and branding, so the outcome of the class was a big success for the students as well as for myself, which most often is the case when you put passionate people to work together.

Based on us just having spent 3 months designing for music as a group, it was reassuring to see today’s digital music fans being very opinionated, and also quite savvy, about design and brands that are being built around their favorite artists as new albums are being released.

Three of my favorite creative collaborators, Depeche Mode, U2 and Anton Corbjin, sparked this blog entry. Depeche Mode’s soon to be released single design to the upcoming ‘Sounds of the Universe’ album is, well, let’s face it ‘wrong’. I will not bash it more then others have already done before me, but it is amazing to see fans’ mock-versions appearing online when the single will not even be released until April 6th. As a bonus I throw in the design of the full-length, just so we all understand the depth of the design issue at hand. Anton Corbjin is the backbone of the visual re-launch of the Depeche Mode brand in 2009, and it shows that an amazing creative force with a unique vision for the moving image, does not immediately make a good graphic or brand designer. Or typographer of course:

The mock ‘remix’:

The full length album design (NOT a mock-version):

U2′s just as eagerly awaited full-length feels like the opposite to me and I was taken by its beauty and modern simplicity, yet the equal sign disturbed me mainly because of Coldplay’s very apparent and frequent use of the ‘trade fair’ symbol. Yet, as you can read here, fans of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and U2 had their own strong opinions.

And the ‘trade fair’ logo as seen in tattoo form:

The power of brand building, seen in one of its mass market – and most competitive and critically viewed – forms.

On that note I salute our friends at Audiolife for having launched their web site recently. The power of music and design, displayed in a visual language that, we hope, shares common ground.

It is hard not to notice the new billboard campaign for the Showtime series Dexter. Makes you value the idea of brand building by use of typography and layout. How else could we quickly put names to these ‘Dexter’ magazines? A job well done.

I wonder how long it took Showtime to get the go-ahead from all the publishers’ legal departments before running this campaign…

Images found via my friend Google at showtimefan.com

Watching the first 70 seconds of the Dior Homme Summer/Spring 2008 Runway show is a treat. An amazing reveal of a great location paired with a custom soundtrack (titled ‘Planisphere’), appropriately composed (or maybe better put ‘altered’) by french electro hipsters Justice, make this an amazing brand enhancer. You can view it on their web site, even though you will have to navigate to find it (deep linking would be a nice feature), or download the entire show as a whooping 87 MB file courtesy of the nice folks of Ohh Crapp here.

As of this season’s style, I have a feeling that I will be more impressed by the new John Varvatos collection, which we have the pleasure of rolling out via their (Geyrhalter Designed) web site within a week.

It may seem like the perfect blog entry for our ‘Brand Atmospheres’ blog, even though some of you may have already learned about this in a past edition of Wired magazine. You might have noticed that i took a couple of days off to rejuvinate while visiting a client up north. A part of the long weekend was trying to play catch up with magazines of past months, and this is when I came across ‘Flogos’. The image below explains it quite well: Flogos are foating logos, way above in the sky, created of soap-based foam formulations.

An interesting idea that can surely be used in very smart ways. Excited to see where marketers will take it. I guess we will see, if weather permits.

What happens to an international consumer brand once it starts ailing and laying off employees?

In the worst case, a blog of former and current employees of the company would start sharing secrets and discussing all ‘the dirt’ online, as it occured in the case of Starbucks. Grab a cup of Joe and stop on by ‘Starbucks Gossip’ to get the latest in barista rage and witness how one of the great international consumer brand phenomenons is losing its’ magic.

This new found freedom of speech opens the possibilities of low cost, overnight, viral marketing tremendously, but it also adds a new level of risk management to brands worldwide, which makes another phenomenon the best call for help: Google.

Above you can see a proposed re-design of the Starbucks name and logo by architect James Biber, as featured in Architects magazine.

Enjoy Coca-Cola.

In Iraq.

Before, during, and, if there ever will be such a thing, after the war.

Maybe there is a reason for it to be graphically treated in camouflage after all?

Years ago I took advantage of a too-good-to-be-true offer that Rolling Stone Magazine had: A lifetime (!) subscription for $100. Being obsessed with music, and thinking that just staying on top of current ads alone would be worth the 100 bucks, I went for it.

The other day I studied my address label and I found the expiration date (!) to my life long subscription. Rolling Stone magazine decided that Fabian Geyrhalter’s lifetime subscription will come to a sad end on the 17th of December in 2055.

Thank you Rolling Stone, but can I sign up for an extra year or so?

A similarly strange experience with a brand occured the other night when I got Fast Food on my way home. Being mostly Vegetarian, I maybe eat Fast Food 5 times a year or so, but coming home late from the office I did not feel like cooking, so I stopped by Panda Express. After already feeling guilty, and quite unhappy about a not-so-great late night dinner experience, I was OK with eating that Fortune Cookie too. Might as well.

Here was the message, or may I call it ‘fortune’, from Panda Express to its customer:

Ouch. Brand police – where are you?