While this season’s Lexus December to Remember holiday campaign is being panned, ridiculed, and parodied, we took notice on the astonishing long-term brand ramifications of it all.

Team One, a unit of Saatchi & Saatchi, created the commercials, in which an unsuspecting husband or wife is confronted by the Lexus December to Remember jingle (you’d know it if you heard it), while their partner watches and waits in gleeful anticipation. The delivery method varies from spot to spot (a rock-band themed video game, a crystal music box, and oddly, elevator music), but the hook remains the same — slowly, the gift receiver recognizes the music (as does the viewer) and realizes they’re about to receive a $30–80,000 present. The big reveal is the couple walking towards a brand new Lexus, as always, topped with a big, red bow.

The messy societal issues of such a campaign aside, the ads are a brilliant example of how short-term brand coherence can pay off in the long run, in surprising and unexpected ways.

Lexus first began using the jingle, a shortened version of songwriter Steve Kujala’s “Family and Friends,” for the local Los Angeles market in 1999, taking it, and December to Remember, national in 2001. Year after year, come November, Team One and Lexus returned to the jingle, and now, 13 years later, it’s built up massive amounts of brand equity.

13 years is an eternity in the advertising world, and most jingles — even those supporting entire global brands — don’t have a shelf life half that long. Here we have a single seasonal campaign whose theme music has become so recognizable, that it itself can act as a playful hook supporting an entire campaign, almost singlehandedly.

It’s these kind of results that show why brand equity is so important, and why sticking to your branding year after year can yield unexpected — and invaluable — results. No amount of money could have bought Lexus that kind of consumer recognition in a year, or even two. In branding, just like cooking, time itself is an essential component that can’t be replaced.

So what do you think? Are there other seasonal campaign jingles that can hold a candle to Lexus’ December to Remember? Let us know by leaving your thoughts in the comments below.

Halloween is a hoot — let’s just get that out of the way. But for a seemingly-superficial holiday (dress up and get candy/get drunk), there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes culturally. And for those of us in the branding world, that’s even more intriguing than the sweets (though less delicious).

This Halloween, we’ve noted the increasing trend for Trick-or-Treaters and Halloween partygoers to forego the traditional fun and/or scary character costumes, and don brand-specific consumer product attire for their once-a-year holiday getups. More and more Xbox consoles, Hershey Bars, Facebook pages, iPhones, and Schlitz beer bottles are sprouting arms and legs each year.

Picking a costume is a fun and personal decision, and with no lack of choices, what does it say about our society when someone shimmies into a specific representation of a branded product? What’s behind this shift away from mummy and princesses towards McDonald’s fries and walking iPads?

Here are a few reasons we think are worth highlighting:

Consumer Products Are A Shared Cultural Currency
As entertainment markets have fragmented into dozens of sub-genres, film and TV references are naturally more obscure than they used to be. So, if a Halloween party-goer is looking for recognition, attending a party in a DIY Aquafresh tube outfit will probably be received better than a meticulously-created-yet-little-known Star Trek character costume.

Better and More Thoughtful Branding
Over the past decade, consumer products have been branded in more distinctive and clever ways, and we’ve wholeheartedly accepted these items into our daily lives with gusto, building ever more robust emotional (and subconscious) attachments to such products as electronics, cleaning supplies, sports clothing, food and beverages, and countless others.

People Are Seeking Comfort and Familiarity
Culturally speaking, it’s often been suggested that uncertain economic times draw the public away from film dramas, and towards escapist comedies and fantasies. With the global markets still tenuous, to an anxious public, horror costumes like witches and Wolf Men may seem less desirable than a walking Coca-Cola can.

Halloween Now Aims At Adults
Marketers have succeeded in pushing Halloween as an adult holiday, and the results have been predictable. After all, it’s adults who buy all the candy and decorations, and it’s adults who purchase the costumes, and it’s adults who use most consumer products. The more grown-ups involved in Halloween, the more their fingerprints will appear on its various aspects.

So that’s the landscape, but how does a brand get in on this action?

Producing a licensed costume seems like an obvious choice. Though branded Halloween digs are becoming increasingly common, an organization rushing to market with a branded getup may be missing the point. It’s not the availability of a costume that’s going to entice people to wear it — it’s their feelings towards the brand in the first place. The stronger and more personal connection we foster towards individual products, the more likely we are to see those products as extensions of ourselves. And with a strong enough bond, we’ll create the costume ourselves, as the thousands of homemade iPod costumes from a few years ago demonstrate.

Branded Halloween costumes aren’t a tool in which to build your brand, they’re an end result of strong brand fundamentals in the first place. The connections people make with their brands and those products happen in the dark recesses of the brain, but they’re not random — they’re based on a few, essential practices that any great brand manager holds in the back of her mind:

Make a Great Product
Whatever opinions you hold about Apple as an organization, the design of their products is second-to-none. Consumers often pay a premium for the design, but the resulting bond that ensues is a powerful force that even today many other manufacturers have failed to realize. It’s not just the devices, though — Apple customer service routinely ranks high in surveys, which further imprints the company’s value and and friendliness amongst their customers.

Have a Consistent Visual Identity
Facebook page costumes have flourished over the past few years, in a way that we never quite saw with MySpace, even at the height of its popularity. Facebook’s consistent color scheme and standard visual look allow it to be recognizable from a distance, with the quickest of glances (A blue and white page with a sidebar, and bam — you’re a Facebook page). A MySpace costume, on the other hand, would not be nearly as identifiable, as they all looked so different. You want your costume to be recognizable.

Be Strong in Your Brand Message
Twenty years ago, bottled water barely existed. Today, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry and people are dressing their kids up in as Fuji water bottles for Halloween. This is a direct result of two decades of singular messaging: Bottled water is the freshest, cleanest, safest water you can buy. Despite this being demonstrably false, the powerful and consistent message has cemented itself in the public psyche, and the results speak for themselves.

Halloween only comes around once a year (as of this writing, anyway), and there’s no lack of costume choices. Those consumer brands that have made the leap from shelf to costume have accomplished something incredible. But it’s not so much the result of fickle consumer choices, as it is the byproduct of strong and consistent brand platforms, visuals, and messaging. With those in place, there’s no telling what people will be wearing come Halloween.

And that’s half the fun.

Brand books are awesome. As proof, we submit the Skittles brand book created by TBWA.

This strange and inspirational manifesto crystalizes the personality of a brand whose average consumer is “12–17 years old,” “wears large hats and other popular clothing,” and “fears long-limbed animals, such as giraffes.”

Sadly, TBWA recently lost the Skittles account, but not before producing some of the most memorable oddvertising the world has ever known.

More images after the jump.

So are they trolling us? Or is this genius at work.

What do you think?

After nearly two years in hiatus, the iam8bit art show is back, with a high-profile gallery opening next Thursday, August 11th! This show will be one for the ages, and definitely worth checking out. Started by our friends at iam8bit in 2005, the art show has featured hundreds of artists’ interpretations of their favorite 1980s video game heroes, heroines, villains, and damsels in distress — and this show should be the best yet.

Peep the awesome poster art above, created by our buddy Dave Crosland.

Also, the new iam8bit book, which we designed and co-published, will be officially released at the show.

Take a look for more info on the opening, and the evening’s festivities, which will include all-night ambiance by DJ R-Rated. Both Jason and Tim will be in attendance, so come down and join us for the festivities!

Video games are no longer a niche market. They’re big business, having long-since eclipsed Hollywood blockbusters in revenue. Culturally, we’ve grown used to video game franchises with their own storylines, plots, and characters — a complex web of merchandising, marketing, and gameplay.

It’s easy to forget that these paths were forged by a cast of simple, clever little characters of ’80s videogames. Their screen time may have been short, but Pac-Man, Q*Bert, Mario, and many other characters were bursting with personality, fun, and an ethos that we wanted to capture in the book, SUPER iam8bit: More Art Inspired By Classic Video Games of the ’80s. With our client-partners and co-publishers, iam8bit, we designed the entire volume, helped curate the mass of excellent artwork, and launched our creative imprint, Plastic Highway.

For more details about this project, power up to our iam8bit portfolio page.

And if that’s not enough ’80s video game goodness for you, be sure to check out iam8bit’s 5th art show in Los Angeles, where the book will be officially released and available for sale.

Squaw Valley 1960 Winter Olympics

sneje
Designer: Russ Lobachev, Client: sneje

Snowrider

Reykavik Winter Lights Festival
Firm: Tunglid Advertising Agency ehf., Designer: Tomas Tomasson, Client: Reykavik City

Mt Buller
Firm: SOS Design, Client: Mt Buller

Luxair Snowflake
Firm: Vidale-Gloesener, Client: LuxairGroup

FishFlake
Firm: Bulletpoint Design

Asahiyama Zoo
Designer: Susumu Endo, Client: Asahiyama Zoo

Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics
Firm: Landor Associates

NixOS

We’ve drooled over the Los Logos series since it’s debut in 2002, so we’re thrilled to announce that the new Los Logos: Compass features five Hexanine pieces — our Compulsions, Nerdcore, Ocean Dawn, Park Community Church logos, as well as our type-treatment for last year’s Nerdcore calendar, “Horror”. This fifth book in the series sports a new look and editorial approach, but don’t be fooled; Berlin-based Gestalten still dishes out the same cutting-edge, international identity design we’ve come to expect.

Last week AIGA Los Angeles hosted The Group Typeface Experiment at TypeCon2010: Babel here in LA. During an unscripted hour of collaborative design, attendees were given the opportunity to create a typeface on the spot using nothing but square and triangle stickers.

I had the pleasure of concepting the event, and the honor of helping produce it, along with numerous other intrepid AIGA LA members including the incredi-awesome Heather Parlato, whose design blog is regular reading here at Hexanine.

We were pretty pleased with the results, revealed here in the video above, filmed and produced on-the-spot by our friends at i am 8-bit (we’re looking at you Taylor Ragsdale). Watch away!

As the recent Tropicana packaging redesign fiasco shows, our perceptions of the products we choose are often made up of much more than the items themselves. But where do these brand perceptions come from, and how are they made? If designers are brand anthropologists, as Erin recently touched on, then consumers should be considered explorers, traversing shelf and window in search of that perfect bottle of tea or pair of shoes. And as in person-to-person interaction, in the branding world, first impressions are everything.

Marketers long ago realized the power of Saturday morning cartoons and used that time-slot to introduce countless children to a myriad of toys and snacks. Wide-eyed Children of the ’80s first learned about Fruit Wrinkles through claymation and the simple line: “Hi, my name is Roland, and these are Fruit Wrinkles.” It was fun, it was simple and it worked, and millions of globs of fruit flavored snacks graced the lunchboxes of a generation. Great brand strategists realize that at any given moment, someone, somewhere is experiencing their product for the first time, whether it’s in front of the TV, browsing the internet, or rolling their cart down the supermarket aisle. We call that process it Brand Discovery.

Brand discovery is sometimes used as an business-to-business term to describe an internal creative audit, but we think it has a much more powerful (and useful) meaning. Brand Discovery is strolling into the gas station to buy a Monster Energy Drink and noticing a can of Rockstar for the first time. It’s seeing a commercial for E-harmony while staring at your empty Match.com inbox. Or it’s glimpsing a Tom’s Shoes billboard around town and Googling the website when you get home. These and infinite more first contact experiences place the individual in the role of consumer-explorer, and being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Being handed something on a platter is never as fulfilling as coming across it yourself.

Sometimes entire marketing campaigns are based around the concept of Brand Discovery. Millions of drivers recently stuck in traffic spotted giant billboards with the words “WHO IS SALT”, only later to realize that they were seeing advertising for the latest Angelina Jolie thriller. Using mystery to reward consumer-explorers and create a buzz isn’t a new tactic (especially here in Hollywood), but it’s frequently turned to precisely because it works. At some level, all of us feel a sense of accomplishment when reach a summit and solve that mystery.

Established brands have also found a way to get involved. Generic products, once ridiculed, have been transforming en masse to more polished “Private Label” brands. Private Label sales hit a record high in 2009, and accounted for 90 percent of all gains in supermarkets. Target’s Archer Farm line of products are continuously being discovered by a regular clientele, and even Pharmacy giant Rite Aid is now getting in on the action. Eschewing Private Label offerings, some brands seek consumer-explorers through the use of variety. Remember when there were only two kinds of Cheerios? We don’t either.

With the constant barrage of new products hitting the marketplace each year, it’s becoming more and more difficult to connect with individual consumers. The tools we use to get the job done as brand strategists may change, but the experience stays the same. Exploring is exciting. Discovering is even better.

Photo illustration created using a photo by Anthony Albright, used under Creative Commons license.

Last month we spread the word regarding Font Aid IV: Coming Together, a typeface consisting solely of ampersands. This week, SOTA officially released the font, and we’re proud to be able to say that we’re included.

More than 400 designers from 37 countries contributed to Coming Together, and we’re excited to be involved. We submitted two ampersands, both of which are included in the typeface, (one features the Haitian flag, another, just a plain flag).

Coming Together is an OpenType font and is being sold for $20 US. It’s available through Ascender Fonts, Veer, FontShop, and MyFonts. All proceeds from the sale of the typeface will go to Doctors Without Borders, to help with their relief efforts in Haiti.