TEDxCincy featured previews of how our smart phones may look in the near future, insights on how we can better obtain our own unique American Dream, the developing story of “Kentucky Caviar,” and it even included visuals displaying how a local school’s gym transformed into a jungle through art.

In honor of what’s at the core of TED events – the spreading of ideas – we’ve captured the top 10 tweets shared from those at the event below.

Hit us back at social@weltbranding.com or leave us a comment!

Post on our Facebook wall at Welt Branding
Tweet us at  WeltBrand
Or join our LinkedIn group at Welt Branding: Challenge Everything

What exactly is a brand without design? We’re not sure either.

A brand needs effective design and strategy in order to be complete. Great design helps a brand function as best it could; so even if there is a purposeful lack of design, this simplicity could make the brand.

A brand needs to be cohesive across all outlets, yet maintain a differentiated image!

On digital and social media outlets, effective design is pertinent because of the increased audience and competition. What makes consumers ”gotta-have” your brand? What differentiates it from others? The marriage of strategy and effective design create your “special sauce”.

Check out our blog post on gnomeflash, our design blog, to see what our designers have to say about this topic. They even provide a few case studies.

Join us on Gnomeflash…

Charles Duhigg is an award winning investigative reporter and NY Times Best Seller. You have probably heard of Charles Duhigg’s investigative report on Target… well, targeting pregnant consumers by mailing them coupons. Target was able to do this by tapping into their buying habits.

Habits, Duhigg explains in his book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business, focus on routine. In an interview with Welt Branding, Duhigg described the three components that guide habit understanding and change: cue→routine→reward. He explains that in the past decade we have learned it is most effective to focus on the routine component. For example, we experience a trigger (cue), and we then act out a behavior (routine), which facilitates a future craving for the benefit that we receive (reward). The behavior is the usual focus because this is the component a person controls when guiding habit change.

From a marketing and business standpoint, there is no particular need for comprehensive data in order to identify habits. Data doesn’t pin point cues and rewards — robust data finds correlations. For a company to be successful in identifying and leveraging on consumer habits, the company needs to watch consumer behavior.

Duhigg explained that marketers have to understand their own consumer in order to encourage habits. There are multiple opportunities to trigger behavior. Targeting consumers during a major life event is not necessarily the best opportunity for encouraging buying habit changes. For example, consumers make thoughtless purchases and these purchases change buying habits on their own. However, when consumers do experience changes in their life, these habits become particularly valuable because they are vulnerable to change as well.

To stay up to date with Charles Duhigg and The Power of Habit:

Visit http://charlesduhigg.com/
Buy the book
Tweet him @cduhigg

For more of Welt Branding in the digital space, engage with us here:

Check out our Facebook wall at Welt Branding
Tweet us at  WeltBrand
Connect with our LinkedIn group at Welt Branding: Challenge Everything

Short-term gains are not always going to align with your brand strategy. What manipulates a higher (current) ROI can have adverse and long-term effects, which result in a tarnished brand image. There are a lot of components in both your overall business and marketing models that create, grow, and also maintain a strong and meaningful brand, including company ethics, customer service, and innovation.

Companies use branding to enhance customer perceptions – perceptions that will ultimately embrace or destroy a brand image, and heavily impact the bottom line.

But, what happens when consumers experience a loss of trust in you or your product?

Trust is extremely difficult to define. In some cases it directly correlates to customer satisfaction while in other cases it relates to ethical alignment. Netflix consumers lost trust in 2011 when the DVD company hiked prices up by 60 percent.  Ozzie Guillen, MLB Miami Marlin’s Manager, stated, “I love Fidel Castro,” in a Time Magazine interview and upset thousands of fans.

Continue reading »

On Facebook, the single largest shareable is photos. Most of the people that use Instagram all have Facebook profiles, and even though Instagram works very well at what it does, it only really does one thing. This is strictly our opinion, but the reason that Facebook splashed out a cool bil. on Instagram is to spite its competitors.  Facebook had no intent of letting a Google get it, or a Twitter. But to be honest, we don’t think anyone at Facebook thought of either of them ascompetitively the most dangerous thing out there. We would be willing to bet that Facebook did this to prevent Instagram from teaming with a new or as yet unheard of potential competitor.

In fact, we’d go so far as to say that if Facebook were looking at the situation through cold calculations, they would have seen Instagram itself as a potential juggernaut. Instagram (as we mentioned earlier) does one thing well, and that is share photos. It could be argued that this “one thing” is raison d’etre of social media on the whole.  Facebook now owns the “one touch” of the industry.

Don’t believe us?

Continue reading »