It all started with me taking the plunge into facebook. It took me quite a while to cross this Rubicon ;-) because I was actually afraid of the time it would consume, and it did ;-) ... but for some good reason I have to admit today. This is now one and a half years ago, and slowly slowly a network has grown that is following me and my biestmilch philosophy and vision. Biestmilch is still very focused on my person. This is about to change now.

During the last weeks we worked on quite a sophisticated communication concept for Kona 2009. Since 2002 we attend the IRONMAN world championship on Big Island. And every year we learn a lot about what we could have done better. We are already curious to see which lesson we shall be taught this year ;-) ... Our wish is that all our efforts contribute to biestmilch becoming a brand at the end of the day. In the beginning of our biestmilch history was the idea to build a strong brand. As we know today ... a difficult task. By all efforts one can undertake, our customers make biestmilch a brand. This process of making is beyond our control. What we can do, is trying to do a good job, be authentic, respect our costumers and be serious and loyal about our goals. Promises and delivery have to race neck-and-neck. Seth Godin says in his post about brands that matter:

1. Do we want people to interact with us and our brand in unexpected ways (as opposed to just quietly consume it)?
2. When they interact, do we overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?

He says that in cases like the dead brands of "Tide" or "United Airlines", the answer to both questions is clearly 'no'. For vibrant growing brands the answer is clearly 'yes.' It's not an accident and it's not easy, but if you do it right, it may be worth it. Greg Cordell from Brains on Fire says: "It’s our job to find passionate people and lift customers up. Hoist up their conversations. Shine a light on their lives. Raise the sails of what they care about and connect them with the companies that care to have a real relationship that transcends a Twitter feed." Both express themselves in very different way and it seems so on different subject. But for me these 2 are very closely interlinked, at least in the times of Internet, community platforms, web 2.0 ... one name it.

Today was not a too good day. I was not efficient at all. Days of this kind are days of doubts, necessary days, days of renewal as one recognizes only later in the process. I started to read, this is always a process of refueling for me, if the books don't turn out to be stupid, but stirring up. It is like pressing the reset button, and that's good too. Step beyond the daily rush and routine, and start questioning. This is how I came across a paragraph on Seth Godin's blog. I donate these lines to all my young co-workers who seem to be so straight on track, that I envy them sometimes. "Some people read (business) books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward." by Seth Godin *Photo by Fritz Oelberg

For months I was very reluctant to get involved with Twitter. Since the birth of macca09, my road trip with Chris McCormack things have changed. Slowly, I start to realize the power of Twitter, but I'm still an absolute beginner. For those who find themselves in a similar situation as I do I found an useful article on Pronet Advertising "How To Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time" For those who don't want to read the whole article here are the conclusions:

• Follow Twitter etiquette. For example you never want to spam (which I have done), you want to give credits when retweeting, and most importantly you want to stick with 140 characters (don't create multiple tweets to get across a message).
• You want to join the conversation. Don't  just tweet what you want, then your profile never grows. The main reason for this is because you never joined the conversation and contributed to it.
• Make sure you are interesting on Twitter. If you want to tweet crap, that's fine, but you will probably gain a lot more followers if you are interesting.

Today, when most people ;-) have returned back to work after a long Christmas holiday, I myself feel urged to change my working speed back to normal and give more attention to my blog posts again as well. I picked up a post on the designobserver blog this morning about branding that reviews the book »Obsessive brand disorder«, by Lucas Conley . I do not want to add a comment to this review. I want to just give our perspective on this fluffy issue that escapes substantiality so fast. Right from the beginning when we started our biestmilch business in 2000 to create a brand was one of our major aims. During these years we learned many lessons, but interestingly not those ones we were told by the experts of marketing (we have been strongly advised not to use the product name »biestmilch«). We don't follow branding as formal design oriented process, we left he dogma of the much fuss about recognition under which wild mixtures of opinions, predilections, ideologies, philosophies, aesthetics, ethics and morals are boiling. We try to tell the biestmilch story as consistent and exciting as possible, we sometimes also do things that by the rule shouldn't be done. Whether a powerful man or women will one day call biestmilch a brand is like many other things left to the uncertainty of future ;-)... and whether our targeted audience/customer or an unexpected other one will accept or better receive us as a brand lies beyond our control. I think there is a big difference between »doing branding« or talking about branding (to write a scientific paper or book about this topic may be interesting but has to avoid a lot of pitfalls not to become a propaganda oeuvre in many ways). Branding is a relational thing among .... ???? I avoid the answer because the pitfalls are opening immediately! If you do branding in the wild as we do, you try to anticipate, observe and analyze on the one hand, on the other you have to be passionate, assured and persuasive. Whether we reach our goal, is not up to us to judge. We can only observe our sales figures.

Christmas time has always been the time of story-telling. Therefore it seems obvious to brood over advertising, slogans, stories, and their relations to marketing and the ultimate intention to communicate content around this time of the year. Since several decades advertising is the domain of slogans*, the slogan as the condensed essence of complexity and diversity, be it commodities or knowledge, know-how that is brewed into the mystery of a  slogan.... neglecting the particular in favor of the general, mystery instead of transparency. In the 50ies – from my viewpoint the dawn of advertising – stories have been simple, the world of commodities has been sparse and far less complex, slogans could easily emerge without raising the costumer's suspicion of concealing depth underneath the surface. Today the picture changed, slogans simplify complexity in a way that make customers suspicious. People today are longing for in depth information, they are in need of trust. To cut a long story short, this one reason why story-telling develops more and more into a marketing tool again. Since I decided to change Biestmilch's marketing and use the advantages of web 0.2, I became more and more aware of the fact what it means to tell stories instead of using exchangeable phrases. Stories have the at least the potential to convey authenticity and build relations with people, they can but they don't do so necessarily. It is tightropewalk not to tip into superfluous gossiping, remaining precise and honest.. It happened that since several months I passed by the brains on fire blog. They gave me the inspiration to raise this issue today which I consider a very crucial one for marketing people. I have to admit that it is very difficult to make a so-called marketing experts understand what it means to shift from slogan creation to story-telling. This year I made many efforts to explain my approach of story-telling in advertising. I have to admit, I only rarely succeeded to do so.