Lately, I’ve noticed quite a few corporate design follies–millions of dollars spent to re-package (Tropicana), re-logo (Pepsi), and re-color (Packard Bell) companies. Designers are absurdly serious about such changes, claiming a shift from orange to purple, and I quote, “would leave anybody breathless.”

But much of this superficial design is a commodity–replicable by any company that can hire a design firm. No where else is this more true than online, where a strong web designer can create a slick visual identity (and cheaply), be it a pretty flash-based website or beautiful CSS.

But if such investments are made, success should come from differentiation, things that cannot be easily replicable. Great branding creates a emotional link (it makes you feel a certain way), not a bullshit color scheme. Here are a few sites that get it done:

1. Woot.com — unparalleled personality

There are 100 deal of the day sites on the Internet, each attempting to replicate Woot’s success of 3 million visits per month. But its traffic is counter-intuitive–the products are mediocre and price points nothing special.

Woot’s secret? It’s personality. Instead of a boring website of one product per day, the site is brilliantly branded with a unique, irreverent, loving personality driving repeat visitors and absurd loyalists.

The above image is for a mystery box of items termed “the bag of crap.” Yes–a bag of crap. Woot describes products for sale using a humorous narrative, often trashing the product and even the customers who are willing to purchase it. The FAQ page reveals even more about the site’s personality. Regarding returns, Woot writes,

“If you buy something you don’t end up liking or you have what marketing people call “buyer’s remorse,” sell it on eBay. If the item doesn’t work, find out what you’re doing wrong. Yes, we know you think the item is bad, but it’s probably your fault.”

2. Moosejaw.com — hilarious e-commerce

If you’ve ever experienced Moosejaw.com, it is one of the few e-commerce sites with a differentiated, branded experience. Moosejaw’s brand identity, “Love the Madness,” breathes in every corner of the site. It creates a ton of content, including monthly contests, dating blogs, Madness newsletters, and an incredibly elaborate loyalty program.

3. Yelp.com — a humanized review site

Yelp’s success puzzled me. It copied Citysearch and didn’t have close to its existing traffic. And for any review site to be appealing, it needs a critical mass of reviews. What is unique? The human element. Yelp’s hyper-focus on user exposure  differentiates it from a standard review site to truly presenting its brand identity of “Real People. Real Reviews.” On the front page is a picture of Karen G., with the subtext, “I wanna FUC you like an animal,” adjacent to her review 5-star review of Charlie’s Deli (would you see anything like this on Citysearch?). Members have “badges,” illustrating their “Elite” status, friends, fans, and compliments. 4 random profiles are featured on the front page.

4. Flickr — well-nurtured community

This article from Flickr’s creators sums up the site’s brand and strategy, specifically that, “People don’t like being told what to do.” With fewer rules, the site found that users were more creative and collaborative. With a structure to encourage this activity, the community began to define the site experience. And this experience is humanized. Copy like, ““Get in there,” “Forgotten your password? Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us,” and “Yee har!” differentiates the site’s personality from other photo-sharing sites.

(via Neutron, via eric tobone)

Advertising is just a small slice of marketing. If your world of marketing knowledge is limited to TV commercials, there’s a whole library of sexy, innovate examples available beyond trite advertising.

What are the differences between marketing and advertising? Check out some of my favorite marketing practices to see why it’s like comparing apples to oranges:

• Advertising: Honda’s $1M commercial of a Rune Goldberg Machine (admittedly, it’s pretty sweet).
• Marketing: Toyota’s Scion, the most successful automobile launch in history, uses zero advertising, waiting for its hyper-targeted 20-somethings to find the obscure brand. Instead of marketing an off-the-lot car, Scion is customization and personalization. It’s successful–over 50% of Scion owners mod their car.

• Advertising: Subway’s $5 Footlong jingle/promotion, and the huge media buy to support it.
• Marketing: Discounting isn’t only way to leverage price. Clever restaurant owners know that whole numbers suggest premium food (e.g., Fillet Mignon: $65 vs. $64.98). And the brilliant ones purposely place an expensive item on the menu to rationalize the price of other dishes (e.g., $100 steak among average $30 items make the latter reasonable, mid-range choices).

• Advertising: Cereal giants General Mills and Kellogg’s spend millions of dollars on printed coupons in newspaper inserts.
• Marketing: Sales are heavily influenced by the placement of cereal brands in the grocery aisle. Be it the top/bottom/middle shelf, or the highly coveted end-cap, distance from shopper’s eye-level is directly correlated with revenue. Check out the book Science of Shopping for more info; the author studies this type of behavior for a living.

• Advertising: Crest’s million dollar Facebook advertising for it’s White Strips Fan Page (friend count as of 4/20: 10,021).
• Marketing: The 4 categories of Crest White Strips — classic, premium, pro-effects, and advanced seal (each incrementally price-increased by $10). It’s not four products here. As one of the most successful marketing companies in history, Proctor and Gamble realizes its consumers are rational and stupid. It’s a simple marketing trick called tiered pricing. Among teeth-whitening consumers, some enthusiasts will pay $50 for whitening strips. Others are skeptical, and will only pay $20. By offering four products with increasingly packaging fanciness, P&G tricks customers to pay close to their price point. Genius.

• Advertising: Soverign Bank’s recent advertising swarm, consisting of employees riding segways around the city passing out $150 coupons for a new checking account.
• Marketing: American Express’s Black Card. I didn’t modify the previous sentence because the Black Card is marketing. Cardmembers pay $5,000+$2,500 annually to own a piece of metal (Amex makes the card out of titanium instead of plastic). The benefits are mediocre, but people crave the Black Card because of its manufactured prestige. Zero advertising. You cannot apply. Amex “taps” you.

Only 15 years ago, Robin Dunbar suggested that human brains can only manage 150 stable relationships.

Recently, academics began focusing on “Dunbar-like” relationships that have proliferated on social networks and MMORPGs, many well above 150. And marketers are excited about this growth. If an individual previously had an upper-bound network of 150, a post-Internet world would raise the bar of word-of-mouth marketing.

How did Dunbar arrive at 150 relationships per person?

In 1993, Robin Dunbar studied the social habits of primates. After reviewing 36 primates and the average social group size, he found a strong correlation with the size of the neocortex region of the brain. Through extrapolation, he concluded that human social groups are limited to about 150 people.

In short, it is our brain that constrains the size of our social circles. This limit is only for groups that are physically dependent, paralleling his study of primate group sizes. The real eye-popper is when Dunbar studied historical examples of human group sizes.

• Neolithic farming size: about 150
• Hutterite settlements split at 150
• Average army groups from the Romans until the 1500s were about 150.

Does Technology Raise Dunbar’s Number?

Today, Dunbar’s number has little relevance. We do not live as co-dependants, as required by Dunbar’s experiments. But what it does suggest is a cognitive limit on quantity of relationships. Even intuitively, it’s difficult to track many things over a certain number, be it my Google Reader feeds or tasks at work.

But with Facebook, which allows me to track relationships more efficiently, does it raise our Dunbar number?

The Economist asked this same question to Facebook. Do to our friends’ news feed, status updates, etc., does Facebook reduce the friction of socializing and increase the size of our social circle?

Facebook reported that the average number of friends per account is 120. But those friends with which you heavily interact (write on wall, comment on photos) is only 7-10. But for even those with over 500 Facebook friends, the number only increased to 17-30.

MMORPGs, such as Warcraft, do not suggest an increase either. Average guild sizes are well below 150 for World of Warcraft and Ultima Online, with an average of 17 and a median of 9. There’s a very interesting graph of satisfaction with guild sizes, which peaks at 7 and 50 members. This level of satisfaction has a lot to do with group complexity. Life with Alacrity writes that simple groups will peak at 7 and complex groups at 60, eventually fractioning well before they reach Dunbar’s number.

In short, our brains continue to limit us to below Dunbar’s number, even with Facebook and Twitter. We haven’t quite reached the holy grail of word-of-mouth marketing with online developments–we still interact with the same 5-10 people on a close basis, and breaking the 150-mark seems too challenging to even attempt.

I would like to think that marketing is about sexy advertising and wearing all-black clothing.

But marketing is much closer to what Warren Buffet does with a balance sheet. Or an expert fantasy basketball player does with a roster. Or a Warcraft player does with resources. That is, absorbing a shit load of data, freakishly observing trends, and subconsciously reaching a decision that kills the competition.

If investing were a video game, Warren Buffet would be Gosu. Buffet regularly skims small companies’ financials for 5 minutes and immediately determines if he would like to make an acquisition. He’s that good. I imagine that it’s almost second nature for him–he glances at cash flow, balance sheets, and income statements, subconsciously identifying trends invisible to average investors. This takes years of experience (think Gladwell’s 10,000 hours), instinct, and skill.

Fantasy Basketball = Buffet. Not to undermine Buffet’s talent, but I believe that gamers hone similar skills. If you’ve ever played fantasy basketball/baseball/football, it’s about the dynamics of stats and managing a roster of players. No need to know sports–elite users merely understand how stats accumulate as if it were second nature. They could review a roster and uncover trends and holes in mere minutes.

Warcraft is no different. For those geeks that have played real-time strategy games (Starcraft, C+C, Warcraft), expert gameplay is grounded in intuition and hundreds of incredible subconscious decisions. Managing resources and understanding a strong in-game position are no different than what Buffet does with balance sheets.

In short, an expert marketer perfects these same skills. She can observe industry dynamics, quickly breeze over business data, and formulate decisions as if they were second nature. Market research reveals more customer insight to her than any half-wit MBA. The intuition and subconscious decisions are Steve Jobs-esque.

And this is what I strive for.