Nathan Lustig

Mozy: Branding Gone Right

Category : Business & Advertising
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In my last post, I talked about the state of Wisconsin and its branding gone wrong.  I wanted to use this post to show an example of a company with excellent branding and customer relations: mozy.com.

Mozy is an online data backup company that stores and protects files on your hard drive.  Here’s how it works.  You sign up for an unlimited storage plan for $4.95 per month and install the Mozy client onto your computer.  You tell Mozy what you want to back up and then the application does the rest.  The client runs in the background when you start up and shut down your computer, saving any files that have been modified in the interim.  If you computer dies, is stolen or somehow gets damaged, you can load the Mozy client onto your new machine and have your data back in as little as three hours.

There are a myriad of online backup companies, but I think Mozy has the best branding and advertising (I use Mozy to backup my computer).  Check out their homepage and see if you agree.  

I wanted to focus on an email they sent to their customers last week.  Its simply brilliant.  Here is the email:

Monthly Newsletter – April 2009
Flight 1549

 

 

Flight 1549Paul Jorgensen had just come from a meeting at Goldman Sachs when he boarded US Airways Flight 1549. He sat down in seat 1A next to the window, pulled out his notebook to capture of few thoughts, then put it away and prepared for takeoff.

Seated one row behind Jorgensen was Bill Wiley, also traveling for business with a computer onboard the plane. In fact, he brought a couple of notebooks with him. But he, like Jorgensen and all passengers, abandoned his personal belongings and focused on saving his life when the plane crash-landed into the Hudson River.

Both men had been backing up regularly. The difference is Jorgenson backed up online with Mozy, and Wiley backed up his two computers to thumb drives. Jorgensen retrieved his data back from Mozy, but Wiley lost 250 GB of his employer’s information. The stories were detailed in USA Today and ComputerWorld.

In moments of disaster, those who use Mozy are able to focus on other things than backup without the fear of losing their data. At Mozy, we’re grateful that all passengers on Flight 1549 were in the hands of such an skillful crew and were able to return to their loved ones without any loss of life or significant injury. 

Be safe,
Devin Knighton
Mozy.com

 

This story is the perfect example of a sticky message.  Most Americans know about the crash landing in the Hudson.  Everyone can picture what they would do if they were in a similar situation and everyone can picture what they would feel like if they did not have Mozy to protect their data.  This email is another piece of brilliant marketing from Mozy.

“Live Like You Mean It” – Branding Gone Wrong

Category : Business & Advertising
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Live like you Mean It.  

That is the new slogan for the state of Wisconsin.  Apparently “America’s Dairyland” was not good enough.  The new slogan cost $50,000 of taxpayer money and it wasn’t even original: Bacardi trademarked it and has used it as a slogan to sell rum.  Motivational speakers use it as book titles, marketers put it on baby bibs, and high-minded college kids use it to discuss what they would like to do after graduation.

Its boring, unoriginal and very debatable whether Wisconsinites “live like they mean it” or if tourists are supposed to come to Wisconsin with that goal in mind.  Either way, it is a weak effort.  Wisconsin could have crowd surfed its way to a better slogan; It probably would have been better than Live Like you Mean It and wouldn’t have cost $50,000.

It brings up three rules that should should make sure to follow when they are trying to brand themselves:

  1. Do your due diligence to make sure your brand does not evoke other, unrelated products. (If it were Wisconsin and beer or brandy rather than Wisconsin and rum it might make sense)
  2. Be creative, not boring
  3. Don’t waste cash on something you could do yourself

A Free Way to Create American Jobs

Category : Entrepreneurship, Political Science & Economics
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The recent stimulus bill focused on creating new jobs, especially in alternative energy startups.  The cost creating these jobs is probably going to be high.  What if there were a way to create good American jobs that did cost anything out of pocket, up front?  I believe that startups are the quickest and easiest way to create  good, new jobs and new, lasting value for an economy.

Paul Graham has a suggestion that I think is not only reasonable, but also timely.  He argues that “[t]he single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for startup founders.”  He says that it isn’t tax policy, employment law or Sarbanes-Oxley, but rather our immigration policy that is holding back the number of startups.  He advocates creating a new class of visa, the “Founder Visa” that would be open to 10,000 founders of startups who want to do business in the USA.

I think this is a great idea.  Unlike other types of visas, nobody can argue that immigrants on Founder Visas were taking American jobs.  In fact, they are creating American jobs.  If an immigrant on a Founder Visa creates a new startup, at some point they will need employees.  Since the startup is located in America, they will have to hire Americans.  This process creates jobs.  Not only does it create jobs, but it also increases the chances that the US will be the home of the best new companies, thereby generating more tax revenue at a time when the US has a huge amount of debt.

Graham contends that 10,000 Founder Visas could create up to 2,500 new companies per year.  Obviously, not all of them would be successful, but one would assume that at least some of them would be.  These new companies would be great for our economy and country as a whole.