Few links - 16 Sept. 2006

1. The onliness of Strong Brands is a BusinessWeek article about ZAG, a new book from Marty Neumeier. The book talks about the "onliness" of brands, meaning their uniqueness. It emphasize the need to create unique experiences as opposed to best experiences, arguing that best experiences leads to following common practices and fail to differentiate the brand. The article also emphasizes the need to link brands with long-term trends to create a bridge with customers, as well as be critical towards results from market research that sometimes fail to identify a killer product.


2. (Links in French) WAT.TV is an online platform launch by French TF1 (The channel number 1 in France). In LeMonde, leading French newspaper, the article entitled "TF1 fait de la television avec du Web" (TF1 does TV using the Internet) discusses the new strategy employed by the channel to bridge traditional TV programming with the Web. The online platform allows the community to share pictures, videos, text and so on. On a weekly basis, the channel will choose a selection of short videos that they will broadcast late at night on their main channel. The authors of the videos receive Euro 100 for that. I find the approach pretty nice, but I wonder if a significant community can really emerge around a TV channel... it seems too restrictive to me.


3. The last link is to the SonyEricsson ad that is showing right now on Hong Kong TV. The ad is very neat and nicely done... but at the end the phone rings and a guy says: "Hello...". Am I the only one who wants to complete the sentence with "Moto"? Every time I see the ad I think about Motorola more than SonyEricsson...