Skip to main content

Branding in a crowded space

The apps market is a pretty crowded place. Anyone who has searched the iOS store or the Google Play store will tell you that is quite tough to cut through the clutter despite the best efforts of the designers. Yet, in this space, over all these years, there are brands.

As usual, we were trawling through the app store on what we could download – looking  for that mix of cost and space and entertainment that can be branded as education enough to be ‘marketed’ and ‘justified’ and then made available to the kids. And then, all of a sudden, the little one says, Chillingo – they make good apps. They made Cut the Rope. Endless Road is also nice – therefore this (whatever we were looking at) must be nice. So, we googled, read through the Chillingo site and promptly downloaded whatever they had to offer.

And then after a moments reflection, “even Half-Brick is good – they made Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja”.

Now who said, making space in a digital store is impossible? Of course, it is tough, but not impossible. If you can create an impression in a place like this, what makes it unable for us to create space for ourselves in any arena we choose?

So what gives? How does one get there? Taking a leaf from those apps – and this is my list, it probably means:

·         Coolness - Consistency of ‘wow’ moments (the games are different each time, yet I can have fun)
·         Ease of engagement -Intuitive (ease of play)
·         Value for money (or else appa wont download)
·         Great design (that makes the users ‘feel’ each time)
·         Challenges that make one want ‘more’ (basically delivering more each time)

Some lessons for personal branding there…
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gamified Presentation Skills

Creating a tool or a game or an aid for presentation skills has been on my mind for a long time now. As someone who has developed, designed and delivered many versions of presentation skills and slide making skills, this has been a question in my mind. And I thought of something fairly obvious - a deck of cards (Yes, I am a huge fan of card and board games) to help people as they work on their presentation. But when I looked this up, there seemed to be a few products that serve this need. And so it went. There did not seem to be any new value addition that I could bring. And a few weeks ago, I attended a session where we had to evaluate a speaker and there was no feedback for the speaker. The insight for me was that many a time giving feedback is 'difficult' I suppose. The issue with feedback is - that most often the only way to do it at the 'Point of Presentation' is with paper - And many a time, people just cursorily fill out the sheets with any random number
Post a Comment
Read more