gabor vida

About a year and a half ago, I came up with the term “Branded Applications” for what we do at Teknision. The term arose from a need to clearly explain our niche in the web design and development world. I couldn’t find a good description so I made one up. It looks like I was on to something.

First, a little background…

I’m a firm believer that the path to success lies in differentiation.

The best thing a company like ours can do is pick a specific vertical in which we can demonstrate a unique viewpoint and a measurable level of expertise and then market the shit out of our services to that vertical.

The beauty of differentiation is that it simplifies your marketing and opens your company up to more clients, two things that sound completely counter intuitive.

We used to say: “we are a multimedia design and development shop that focuses in Flash based marketing solutions. Our award winning designers follow a proven process to ensure our client’s success.” How many times have you heard a version of that speech? The problem is that any shop can say the exact same thing. The only point of differentiation in the entire sentence is the focus in Flash, which is really a horizontal not a vertical and only reduces our competitors from a pool of hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands of companies. The whole awards and process bit is nonsense. Everyone has a process and everyone who is in the game long enough wins an award. Smart clients know that. Thank god we don’t do anything outside of Flash or, heaven forbid, traditional design such as print or broadcast. The worst words you can use are “full service”. The point is that if the message you put out to the market can be said by anyone, then there is very little reason for a client to choose you over a competitor. In fact, the deciding factor is often whittled down to one dreaded thing: price. Never ever ever compete on price. It’s a losing game.

The funny thing is, a clearly differentiated company can talk about design awards and process and get away with it. If we were a multimedia design and development company that focuses on solutions geared specifically for the skiing and snowboarding industry in North America, then all our talk about awards and processes suddenly get qualified. Plus, your list of clients becomes very clear and easy to build. And, best of all, when you call a client out of the blue, you have something important to tell them.

So this was the problem I was faced with; how to differentiate Teknision. I looked at the types of projects we did, what we liked to work on, what we were really good at working on and the types of clients we liked to work with and I noticed some similarities. We excel at making rich internet applications. We have a strong background in understanding user behavior, but also have a background in understanding consumer behavior. Plus, we hate designing anything thats boring.

So we came up with “Branded Applications” as a way to describe projects that are both valuable applications and entertaining experiences.

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that Branded Applications is more than a description of what we do, it is also a growing trend in marketing. The concept is getting a lot of traction lately under a slightly different name, Branded Utility. It started as an article in Ad Age about the future of advertising and then spread to the blogshere with posts in Jack Cheng’s blog,  Dino Demopoulos’ Chroma and, ultimately a series of articles in Piers Fawkes’ PSFK.

So the moral of the story is to try as hard as possible to clearly differentiate your business. When you are stuck for a description, make one up. Who knows, maybe there is no description because you are riding the wave of something new.

Branded Applications or Branded Utility, they both sound good to me.