Kellogg's Vs Post

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago during the depression of America in the late 1920’s there were two main brands of packaged cereal, Post and Kellogg’s.

When the depression hit no one had any idea what would happen, as the concept of ready to eat packaged cereals was still a relatively new market and perhaps more of a luxury item when placed next to the more traditional cereals of the day such as oatmeal and cream of wheat.

Post went ahead and did what most companies tend to do when things get tough and predictably reigned their expenses and slashed their advertising budget.

Interestingly Kellogg’s looked ahead and doubled their advertising spend, they came up with the Snap Crackle and Pop campaign for Rice Krispies and aggressively marketed all their brands across the country, by 1933 Kellogg’s became the industry’s leader, a position they have maintained to this very day.

How to stand out

When everyone is advertising at full throttle it can be very difficult and expensive to stand out from the crowd. When everyone has reigned in their advertising, you can get a huge return on investment, and if done properly with a full service design agency it could be the safest bet you ever made.

So are you a Post or a Kellogg’s?

Are you ready to rush out, start advertising and marketing your way out of the recession, well if not, you should be. A study of advertising during the recession of 1981-1982 revealed those companies who  maintained or increased their advertising budgets grew precipitously over the next 3 years compared to those companies who had slashed budgets and enjoyed only marginal improvements. 

It is true that recessions usually make the strong stronger and the weak weaker. The weak will focus on surviving, and while money in the bank certainly helps in these leaner times, its the bold ones who can establish themselves as market leaders even leap-frogging their way to the top!

So which are you, or should I say which will you be?

After many years of dominance Adobe Flash (Formally Macromedia flash) is being challenged in the RIA (Rich Internet Application) space by a real challenger.  Microsoft is currently working on the third release of SilverLight, a rich media technology that has a lot of parallels with macromedia flash, and it’s starting to really get noticed by developers.
Flash was initially created by Macromedia, and it first surfaced around April 1996 and has been pioneering the RIA space since. More recently Adobe acquired Macromedia and as a result helped further the technologies development. There were some significant changes to Adobe Flash as it hit versions 9 and 10 that are worth mentioning, with the introduction of action script 3, which was ECMA Script 4 compliant, which was a huge leap forward for flash developers in standardising development.  In addition to that in version 10 there is 3D support, and inverse Kinematics and object animation, which has begun bringing a whole new wave of creative 3D websites into the RIA space.

SilverLight version 1 was released in December 2006, and version 2 was released in the last quarter of 2008 and is still a very young, but has some nice features that make it a real competitor for Adobe Flash.  Firstly silverlight can be authored with visual studio 2008 and Blend. The files that make the RIA could be easily digested by a search engine. Search engines have always been a problem for Flash websites. There is no 3D support but Microsoft has hinted there may be support in the next version, along with some other features like dynamic bit rate changing for video streaming.  Oh and one final thing, Silverlight can be authored in most common asp.net languages, that means that most asp.net developers already know how to develop Silverlight, and don’t have to learn another scripting language, that puts SilverLight in a very strong position to compete.

So in summery it looks like Adobe flash has the number one spot, with more time in the RIA development space, and over a decade of experience in delivering rich multimedia content.  Anyone who has been on the internet for over 10 minutes will get a request to install Flash. Silverlight does not have that penetration, and there for will have to be around a while to get installed on any significant percentage of browsers. Installation might work better if it would be installed as a windows update rather than a browser add-on.  

As a developer at the Alight Web Design Agency my hope is that both these seemingly competing technologies continue to push the boundary of the internet experience further for the user, and more people see the need for RIA’s and a better and more enjoyable internet experience.  

There are moments throughout my day at work where I will think “Oh, I need to check last minute flights when I get home”, “Oh, I’ll have a look at what play.com have to offer this week” “I wonder what’s new on Money Saving Expert” and so on. But what happens when I get home and switch on my notebook is a little phenomenon I like to call ‘Facebook default’.

Without even thinking about it, my pointer goes straight to the Facebook shortcut in my menu bar and before I know it I’m logging and looking at my Mum’s photos. The funny thing is, I created my Mum’s profile and uploaded the photos for her from MY own personal photo collection!

So what is it that Facebook has got which means it has this automatic pull to so many of us when all we really wanted to do was look at holidays, clothes and ways to save a bit of cash?

I was never a MySpace user and have only visited MySpace on a handful of occasions and my overall impression has been that it appears jumbled, messy and far too disorganised for my tidy designer mind to deal with.

Perhaps it is this which has captured the masses so well?  Facebook took elements of MySpace and FriendsReunited and simply did it better. Facebook’s interface design is clean, effective, self explanatory and doesn’t allow users to meddle with its look and feel, which, to us fastidious creative designers – is always a good thing and has become one of its strongest assets.  From a critical eye, the ability of the site's creators to cram so many features and so much information into a somewhat simple and clean interface is quite a triumph.

But I’m still not sure though if this neither explains Facebook’s ‘stickiness’ nor provides any justification to its habitual draw for so many of us.  

I would not even say Facebook is particularly cool, (especially when your Mum starts using it) sometimes I even feel a little ashamed of myself for having spent so long having a nosey at other people’s profiles.  However, I can quite shamelessly admit (and maybe I speak for others here) that as a naturally competitive and curious person it’s normal to judge ourselves against those we know, so there is an additional motivating factor creating this pull - the desire to see how others are doing and to judge our own achievement and/or happiness against them.