According to the Financial Times Kodak has gone through the most radical business transformation in history.
Here’s a company snapshot to give you an idea:
Company employees 1988: 145,000
Company employees today: less than 20,000, 60% of which are new in the past 4 years
19 products drive almost all the company’s revenue, 11 of them are digital
Half of these products didn’t exist 2 years ago
In this video CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett is very open about the rapid pace and in-flux state of their brand transformation.
I have to say that I love this guy. In a very entertaining and humorous way he highlights the company bottlenecks that have them producing break-through products with meaningless names (i.e. Zi8).
In my opinion Hayzlett’s energy is just what this company needs if they’re ever to become a household name again. Seems like a great client to work for.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong introduces the new AOL brand identity to employees in this video. The brand is supposed to officially launch in December.
There’s a few interesting treatments in there, but there’s also quite a bit that feels lackluster and stock. As far as employee communications go, I hope this was broadcast with some other supporting documentation, as all this video really says is “hey, we’ve got a new brand identity”.
I’m interested to see if this identity feels as dynamic in the places that it’s going to live the most: the upper left corner of their digital properties.
HTC has been slowly expanding its brand awareness beyond techies into the mass market mindshare. This recent spot is a great move in that effort. They’ve injected just the right amount of hipness as to not alienate the non-hip while making all the other players (except for Apple) look ordinary. It’s a spot that’s easy to connect to.
Their tagline “Quietly Brilliant” speaks to how they’ve been an understated innovator. I suspect that that will change as they gain ground in the marketplace.
You don’t need to get a phone. You need a phone that gets you.
There’s an organic body care brand that my wife and I have been fans of for many years. I’d go as far to say that for their hair care products, we’re brand loyalists.
The name feels kind of awkward ... you just can’t help thinking: Kiss My Ass. Years ago I chalked that up to the folksiness that some of these organic brands have. Well, folksy or not, these guys are being sold through Target and Whole Foods, which certainly begins to push them towards mass market.
There’s also a few products that are a bit challenged on the naming side too:
Miss Treated Shampoo
Big Body Shampoo
Rough Thyme Shower and Bath Gel
These are puns gone wrong, so to speak. Most of their product naming is pretty straightforward, but somehow a few bad ones slipped by.
There’s few gems on the website as well, such as “The cold war is over—it’s time for a hot bath!”
Regardless of whether their kissing my face or my ass, as long as they keep making good product they’ll be kissing my wallet.
Whilst I was browsing Apple’s site for info on Snow Leopard, I came across the “leap forward” we can expect with the new release of QuickTime - QuickTime X.
I have to say that I like the new branding. The integration with the Q and the X and the lens-like treatment are nice touches. The new minimized application interface is slick and takes its cues from the iPhone.
Coincidentally, as I was searching for a video to include with my last blog post I first landed on a page with an embedded QuickTime movie. My immediate reaction was “ugh”. Somehow QuickTime has become associated with “heavy” and “sluggish” - at least for me.
Why is that?
Well, on the flip side of things, I also associate QuickTime with “image quality”. I watch all of my movie trailers on Apple’s website (or my AppleTV).
But in the span of a typical week, I watch all/most of my videos through some type of Flash-based player. And for myself, along with countless other bloggers, embedding these Flash players onto our sites is super-simple. Not so, for QuickTime movies.
When I came across that embedded QuickTime today it made the site feel dated too.
In Apple’s pursuit of quality they missed a huge part of the market. I’ll be honest, I have no clue what their strategy is there. With YouTube using Flash (and possibly the speculated new Google format in the future), it will be tough for Apple to make a dent. Arguably they’ve missed the boat on this one.
And does the average Mac user even really get what QuickTime is? Between apps like iTunes or Front Row kicking in when a user inserts media, when do people have the need to launch QuickTime?
For video professionals however, the QuickTime brand is very relevant. So has QuickTime mostly become the stuff of pros?
There’s an organic body care brand that my wife and I have been fans of for many years. I’d go as far to say that for their hair care products, we’re brand loyalists.
Whilst I was browsing Apple’s site for info on Snow Leopard, I came across the “leap forward” we can expect with the new release of QuickTime - QuickTime X.