Kit Kat is the #1 candy bar in Japan thanks to flavors like miso, green tea, sweet potato, blueberry, and yes – soy sauce.  A soy sauce Kit Kat sounds less than appetizing to most of us around the office here at Braithwaite, but Nestle, who makes Kit Kats, is too busy counting its yen to care.

The point is clear – know your audience and what they want.

Right now, we’re working on re-branding a company that does insurance for classic cars.  We’ve been talking about campaigns that involve custom baseball cards showcasing the cars, an iPhone app, and beautiful women.  We could guess which item we should invest thousands in, or we could just ask.  So we’re asking.

Branding isn’t the only place where you need to know your audience in order to turn them onto what you’re selling.  The same can be true of employee engagement.  If you are working with a large manufacturing workforce in rural Pennsylvania, you should communicate with them in their dialect and jargon.  If you are laying off employees in Germany, think about getting each worker a case of the local beer along with their transition packet.

Today, there are a number of tools for those willing to ask.  Online surveys, social media monitoring, and good old fashioned phone calls will give you a sense of what your audiences want.  They’ll even go so far to give you direction in terms of tone, reputation, relevance, and other soft measures of effectiveness.

Soy sauce Kit Kats may sound disgusting to you, but you are not selling to yourself.  Ask for and listen to what makes your customers or employees happy, and all your communications will be much sweeter.

ZDNet’s “2010 Predictions: Will Social Media Reach Ubiquity?” is an interesting read despite the rhetorical question in the title.  One of the most interesting insights comes from Paula Drum (@pauladrum) from Gettington.com.  She writes, “The good news is that consumers will continue to wield their power and word-of-mouth worthy brand will benefit exponentially.  Social media has created a world of word-of-mouth on steroids.”

While she’s correct, this is not a simple equation for marketers.  Compelling people to be interested in and an advocate for a brand is not simple.  They have to love it.  More than that, it has to be top of mind.  And there needs to be a time and place for it to come up in conversation.  For us, 2010 will be about one thing: participation.

If you could never hit a baseball to begin with, steroids aren’t going to help you.  In the same vein, if you don’t have a product or service that customers can interact with, social media isn’t going to help you.  But what does participation mean?

An article from TechCrunch showed that 80 percent of Twitter accounts have less than 10 followers.  While companies like Dell and Ford have engaged customers there, they remain the exceptions.  Domino’s Pizza has used a more old school approach of in-person focus groups supported by online media and put a lot of dollars behind it in order to encourage participation. (It did manage to get Stephen Colbert’s attention…)

The truth is that people like to give their opinions.  They like to talk about themselves.  This is not news.  The breakthrough that should start to occur this year is a move from “Marketer as Message Pusher” to “Marketer as Question Asker.”  Finding your customers, asking them relevant and timely questions, and showing them that their responses count – online or off – is the best road to participation.  Sure, the approach is as old as Socrates himself, but when paired with social media – “word-of-mouth on steroids” – it could be the next frontier of marketing.  It’s worth asking.

As AOL has slipped from its perch as a premier Internet provider to irrelevancy, the brand is seemingly now better suited for a museum archive than a laptop.

But rather than scrap the AOL brand entirely, the company is giving it a fresh coat of paint in anticipation of its spinoff from parent company Time Warner on Dec 9. It’s a desperate move for a brand that has struggled for years to shed the perception of being a technological laggard, but is also one that’s necessary if there’s to be anything of the company left to salvage.

The new logo, Aol., drops the familiar triangle at the end, favors title case over all CAPS, and adds a period at the end of the name – hardly a big departure from the existing logo. What’s noteworthy is the added flexibility. The new logo will be superimposed on a variety of images – anything from a fish to a skateboarder to an abstract drawing – to give it new life. It recalls the various treatments of the MTV logo and, more recently, the chameleon look of another giant M, this time from the City of Melbourne. Additionally, the period can be leveraged much in the way that ESPN has used “/” in TV ads to promote the extent of its online content (e.g. ESPN.com/nfl, ESPN.com/sportsnation, ESPN.com/Chicago, etc).

While many designers may cringe at the new look, it’s clear that the logo’s strength draws from the brand associations it makes through various treatments of the logo. A new graphic identity cannot alone save AOL from irrelevancy, but AOL will find success if it is able to match the tone its brand sets with an updated offering that is in tune with the needs and demands of a new generation of Internet users.

Not to be simplistic, but the NFL is pretty big business. It didn’t get that way by letting just anybody do whatever they want on the field of play. Message discipline always rules the day when it comes too league matters.

And in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the League crack down on two individuals who dared to sully the message in the stadium.

The first incident was the launch of a brilliant “ambush marketing” campaign by Captain Morgan. In the Eagles-Cowboys game November 8^th, Eagles tight end Brent Celek  caught a touchdown pass, then celebrated by putting his hands on his hips and raising his right leg, mimicking the pose that the pirate on Captain Morgan’s label makes. At the time, nobody knew what he was doing. A couple days later it came out that Celek was the first player to participate in the spiced run company’s effort to raise brand awareness; for each time a player was caught on camera doing the pose, Captain Morgan was going to make a $10,000 donation to the charity Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund – a non-profit which helps retired NFL players with various hardships after leaving the game.

A good cause. A clever campaign. But the NFL won’t let it happen again. League spokesman Greg Aiello said you just can’t do that.

The NFL does not permit on field advertising that it doesn’t approve (or get a cut of). The league wants to project a wholesome image, and Captain Morgan isn’t part of that.

Speaking of not wholesome, how about 86-year-old Tennessee Titans’ owner Bud Adams? He flipped the bird to Bills fans in Buffalo this past weekend after his team stomped the hapless Bills.

Unseemly, to be sure. Certainly, Commissioner Roger Goodell thought so – he fined Adams $250,000. That’s a quarter of a million dollars. Prediction – this won’t happen again.

Critics – especially sportswriters – sometimes knock the NFL for being the “No Fun League.” For being uptight. For being obsessed with its image. But ask any politician whoever won elective office – message discipline is important. Sometimes, the people in control need to assert that control, if only for consistency sake. These last two weeks, the NFL has asserted control and let everybody know that when it comes to its image, this is not the Wild West.

In an effort to alleviate some of the approximate 23.8 billion pounds of clothing and textiles that end up in a landfill each year, Levi Strauss & Co is making a change to their clothing tags. They hope to achieve this by adding a simple “donate to Goodwill” icon to the set of instructions, in addition to encouraging cold water washes, and line drys when possible to reduce energy usage.

Goodwill Industries International CEO & President Jim Gibbons was quoted as saying, “In addition to funding community-based services, these landfill diversion programs create job-training opportunities for more than 1.5 million people a year.”

It’s a simple effort with great effect.