Welt Branding sat down with Mike Dover, co-author of Wiki Brands: Reinventing Your Company In A Customer-Driven Marketplace, and had a discussion about a few of his branding insights and their impact on businesses. Wiki Brands discusses what companies have done in the past, what they are doing now, and what they should be doing with branding efforts. The authors analyze the effects these efforts have on brands, and highlight some key concepts any executive or marketer should consider.

Don Tapscott’s research program known as Marketing 2.0 initiated Wiki Brands. Dover ran the operations for this program while Sean Moffitt, co-author of Wiki Brands, wrote its research papers in conjunction with other faculty members. The two were granted permission to take existing work and expand it to book form by continuing their own research as well as updating existing results.

Here is a sample of their findings:

Brand managers make a series of mistakes in their branding efforts, which can be simplified into three elements.

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This year there were a number of campaigns that either affected our buying behavior or changed our opinion of a brand. Below are the five brands that were most influential to us brandlings.

Ford – Campaign: “Drive One” and “Swap Your Ride”

Growing up, everyone we didn’t like owned a Ford Explorer, and unfortunately, we began to associate our dislike for these people with that of the Ford brand. This past year, Ford has been heavily marketing its brand and products through a couple campaigns.

The “Swap Your Ride” campaign allows customers to drive a Ford vehicle for a week and then talk about their experience. The advertisements that cover this campaign are hosted and endorsed by Mike Rowe – who was named by Forbes magazine one of “Hollywood’s 10 Most Trustworthy Celebrities”.

The “Drive One” campaign is composed of actual Ford customers who come to the dealership to take part in a focus group. When they arrive they are led into a room that opens up to a surprise mock press conference.

These 2011 campaigns changed how we saw Ford, although both debuted a few years ago: “Swap My Ride” in 2007, and “Drive One” in 2008.  We don’t cringe at Ford cars anymore, in fact, we “check them out” when they drive by on the highway – and we’ll admit we’re very jealous of their 40mpg fuel economy.

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This week Welt sat down with Joe Alary, the brain behind tit4tat, a new campaign that will show the side of breast cancer that no one has yet had the courage to show. The campaign, currently based out of Canada, will show the reality of what cancer can do to those we love. To start, the campaign will feature a large poster showing nude breasts of ordinary women. All money raised from the poster sales will go to cancer research and awareness.

Q: Joe, tell us a little about yourself, what do you do?

A: I’ve been a video editor for almost 25 years with CityTv, MuchMusic and now the SPACE Channel in Toronto, a science fiction/genre themed specialty channel within the Canadian national network, CTV.  On summer weekends, I’m a skydiving instructor and coach. I’m 43 years old and I have two teenage daughters.

Q: So What’s tit4tat all about? What Made the Issue Important for You?

A: The project has just really started to evolve recently but it began as an idea for a coffee table book probably 20 years ago.  I’ve always been known to friends as a “boob man” and the idea for the book was that each page would feature an actual-size picture of ordinary women’s breasts.   Old, young, big, small, no airbrushing, just real boobs, real women, no faces, just the boobs.  For fun, women could actually hold a page up to their own chest to see what those boobs might look like on them.

At the time, it was not the easiest thing to pull together; there was no internet then, and asking women to let me take a picture of their boobs was daunting to say the least.  Along with the book however, I thought it would be a good idea to donate a percentage of the sales to cancer research.  Unfortunately the idea was shelved and sat there as a quirky memory that I would pull out as an interesting topic of discussion once in a while.

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Movember, the month formerly known as November, is a moustache growing charity event held during November each year, raising funds and awareness for men’s health in the process. Welt was able to interview Donny Killian, Movember’s US manager, to find out more about the event.

Welt: How did the idea originally come about?

Donny: It started in 2003 in Melbourne, Australia, with a couple of friends talking about ‘80s fashion and how everything cycles back into vogue. They decided then and there that the moustache was the perfect old school fashion that needed a comeback. That November, they got 30 of their friends together to grow a Mo, Aussie slang for moustache, re-naming the month Movember.

The rules were simple: Start the month clean-shaven, and grow a moustache for 30 days. The guys had so much fun, and were shocked by the amount of conversations started by the moustache. They decided to grow the following year, and to do it for a cause. Inspired by the breast cancer and women’s health movement, they chose an under-served disease that affecting 1 in 6 men, prostate cancer.

The following year, 450 Aussies raised $55,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia… And that was the beginning of the men’s health movement.

Welt: Currently in the US, $7,091,183 has been raised. What has not proven to be effective in your social media efforts to help raise this number?

Donny: We are thrilled with the amount raised so far this year (nearly $7.2M) and how far we’ve come from last year. In 2010, we had nearly 65,000 registered Mo Bros and Mo Sistas participating and they raised $7.5M ($81M globally, with 450,000 global participants). We are only 18 days into the month and already have 138,000 US participants and close to $51M globally! We are honored to have this overwhelming support.

Our community is a fun, strong and dedicated force – they understand our messaging, believe in the cause and spread awareness in their own unique way. We support our Mo Bros and Mo Sistas throughout their Movember journey by providing the tools and resources for them to have meaningful conversations, educate others and above all have remarkable experiences throughout the month.

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Ladies, how many times have you stood in front of your mirror and analyzed the different parts of your body? Have you ever actually gotten to the point where your body is exactly the way you would like it to look?

Let’s face it: we’ve used firming crèmes, lengthening mascara, push-up bras, Spanx, and hair extensions just to feel pretty. I’ve even gone so far as to wear colored contacts! Our definition of “pretty” is often defined by pop culture and advertisements that are endorsed by gorgeous models with perfect…everything. So, regardless of the assumption that even the models in these photographs don’t actually look that good without digital alterations, we still feel bad about ourselves.

What happened to inner beauty and character in flaws? Or the beauty in smile-wrinkles and, God forbid, letting your personality shine?

These ridiculous standards are contextualized in advertisements that we consume every day. We can always complain about this, but what exactly can we do to help minimize these standards?
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