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WooBranding
25. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp
We really love and nurture our WooThemes brand. It would be ignorant for us to ignore how proper branding & marketing have helped us to create the WooThemes that we are today. Maybe it’s because we’re a creatively-focused bunch, which when mixed with some (hopefully) shrewd business decision-making, you get a proper, longer term strategy that can prove to be sustainable for the brand.
So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?
Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).
WooEverything
I don’t know whether you have noticed, but we try to use the word “Woo” in as many ways as possible in our every day activities. Since WooThemes is essentially a CamelCase word, we like to combine other words in a similar way i.e. WooTeam, instead of WooThemes Team. Similarly, we have Affiliated Woo Workers, which reinforces the “Woo” branding again.
We don’t do this to be redundant, but we do sprinkle a good few “Woo”’s in there to reinforce our brand and make sure that it is consistent throughout most of our marketing campaigns & user interactions.
The Ninja
Another one of these elements that I think have become synonymous with our brand is the inclusion of the WooNinja (see what I did there?) as much as possible; in most cases, we’ll find a way to include the ninja and work our branding / marketing around that.
The WooNinja is at least somewhat of a novel idea and I think the way we’ve used it – and how we have made it part of our core branding – appeals to our existing & prospective users. The most important thing about the ninja’s inclusion though, is that our visual branding also stays consistent, which means that the brand as a whole can grow on people much easier (consider that people are naturally averse to regular change).
Take Away
Whilst it’s not gonna help you to “Woo” your own brand with ninja icons, consider the two points that I’ve mentioned above to build your own brand.
Proper branding is about creating a consistent, trustworthy, accessible & fun brand that will appeal to your customers and non-customers alike. And if it helps to include a little mascot to achieve that goal, then you should seriously consider doing so.
26 Responses to “WooBranding”
Leave a Reply
25 January 2010 at 5:54 am #
my love to woo themes has deepen from this post.thanks
25 January 2010 at 6:12 am #
Shouldn’t it be Affiliated WooWorkers in one word to keep it consistent with the rest?
25 January 2010 at 6:55 am #
WooFiliates?
Branding is crucial and those tips above are very useful for someone wanting to start a new brand from zero. It takes time and effort but you have proven that it pays off on the long run.
25 January 2010 at 7:02 am #
I’ve always noticed and have been a fan of Woo-branding. You guys are really doing it great !
25 January 2010 at 8:22 am #
Woopsie Dasies
25 January 2010 at 11:11 am #
“Nature Boy” Ric Flair is the innovator of WOO! Not WooThemes
25 January 2010 at 11:19 am #
I always credit Woo Tang Clan
26 January 2010 at 2:35 pm #
cool bro… you a big watcher of WWE!!! thats good
25 January 2010 at 11:26 am #
I thought WooRank was your start-up too
25 January 2010 at 12:43 pm #
Earlier this month, something that sounded nice too was ‘WEE Themes’:)
25 January 2010 at 2:26 pm #
Noticed Woo Rank. While I didn’t think you guys were behind, I definitely thought “WooThemes” the first time I read that article.
It’s a perfect indication that you guys have done a great job with your branding and name recognition. Rock on Woo.
25 January 2010 at 11:08 pm #
That said, when, pray tell, will we get to order WooNinja dolls for our desks???
26 January 2010 at 12:31 am #
Soonish. We’re most definitely exploring this in the next couple of months.
26 January 2010 at 3:08 pm #
Me wants!
26 January 2010 at 7:36 am #
Yeah marketing is great, but reality is better.
I notice that you’ve very quietly dropped your promise of three new themes per month back to two.
Does that mean my subscription price will be lower, or you think your themes are now 33 per cent better ?
26 January 2010 at 8:10 am #
We had it at 2 before, but added a new row to the pricing table and thought… well we’ve been releasing 3 a month now, but only promising 2, so just put 3. After a while we thought it would be better to keep it at 2+ as it’s better to overdeliver than to underdeliver.
So no your subscription does not get cheaper, but nice try
26 January 2010 at 8:11 am #
So reality is that the subscription promises 2 but you usually get 3… That’s great isn’t it?
26 January 2010 at 8:34 am #
My reality is that I understood and saw for some long time on your homepage that you promised a “minimum of three” per month. Now it’s two.
To me a “minimum of three” implies that you will sometimes release four.
Now to people who just buy your themes every so often – maybe waiting for a famous 5-for-1 day – this is not in the slightest bit interesting or relevant.
But for people who subscribe this is very interesting and not so great. I think that although it’s generally agreed by marketing people that it’s FAR better to have subscribers than one-off buyers, your business seems much more interested in buyers than subscribers. Maybe because subscribers are already “captured” ?
26 January 2010 at 9:00 am #
This isn’t malicious at all… Note that for the longest time, we had only promised 2+ themes per month on club subscriptions and it is only recently that we decided to increase it to 3+. But we re-evaluated our strategy for the year and we want to focus on more significant releases, instead of a quantity over quality strategy.
As Magnus mentioned though, it is fully within our capacity and our aim to release at least 3 new themes per month and we will continue to deliver on this promise. You also need to consider that we’re developing additional, extended functionality that improves all of our themes; so some of our development capacity is geared towards that instead of new themes.
26 January 2010 at 9:49 am #
We changed it to minimum of three in January… when we did the 3-for-1, so it was up for max 2 weeks. So you’ll still be getting the exact same themes as before, it’s only the copy of our site that was changed back to 2+ instead of 3minimum in case we can only deliver 2 one month… (we might do 4 one month though too…)
26 January 2010 at 9:49 am #
If we were interested in buyers instead of subscribers we wouldn’t have a subscription package.
26 January 2010 at 9:33 am #
“Extended functionality” is what I’m looking forward to. Specifically your new navigation menu tool. Any word on that ?
26 January 2010 at 9:50 am #
I’ve just added it to the WooFramework, and have integrated it into Delegate now so will deploy later today after some testing
26 January 2010 at 11:31 am #
Even better !
27 January 2010 at 12:03 am #
Woo Woo!
29 January 2010 at 6:17 am #
You have ninjas, I have a girl in a cape … who, btw, really does look like me.
http://thatphpgirl.com/wp-content/themes/overeasy/styles/blue/logo-trans.png
We should all embrace our inner kickass!