Chris Farmer, owner of Notapipe agency - There is no brand without emotions

Chris Farmer is an American with more than a decade of experience in PR, marketing, branding in Serbia. The list of clients he cooperates with is pretty long and now he went a step further. He set up "notapipe" (Not a pipe) consulting agency which primary objective is to deal only with brands and branding.

I have been at this market for 13 years, I had PR agency which among other things, cooperated with big brands. The only thing I noticed is that branding is something companies avoid–Farmer, whose book "Grumpy in Belgrade: The Prehistory", will be available at bookstores as of December 23, says for eKapija at the beginning of his interview.

Farmer thinks it is extremely important to have a strong brand so that you would have good PR, marketing or advertising.

- Still, many companies think that if they have logo and color, they have brand as well. But, this is not exactly so. This is why I set up “notapipe” agency. Many other PR, marketing agencies in Serbia offers branding but only as part of services, not as a pillar of their business. This is our core activity. We are preparing something to sell, we prepare so that consumers would understand it.

eKapija: "Notapipe was set up in July and in October it started operating more intensively. What are the first impressions?

- We have already been working with a few strong companies such as Zepter, Devana, CarGo… Some of them want to generate new brand, some want to carry out re-branding of existing products or services.

eKapija: Are you going to deal with branding of products and services only or you are also interested in branding destinations, personalities?

- Yes, we have already been working with a few individuals in order to improve their image in public. Especially on their LinkedIn profiles improvement.

When it comes to destinations, why not? I have to say a few years ago I took part in the project of branding Serbia.

eKapija: What are the basic features of a good brand? What should companies focus on?

- Firstly, it is important to cause emotional response, a feeling for the brand. Brand is about emotions a pair of shoes awakes in you, certain destination or a mineral water. If your product does not awake emotions, it is not successful brand. For example, there are companies which have seasonal products such as ice-cream is not sold over the summer. In order to create strong brand, you must awake emotions and make them remember the product over the second part of the year. You have mutual friends because you have mutual stories, events, etc. This is how you pick up a brand, you must have something that connects you with it.

eKapija: To what extent did social media change branding and branding and brand management?

- They helped in a sense that human interest in a brand can be spotted better. Of course, there is a negative aspect of this and that is the risk of pre-exposing when a brand becomes too visible and when people do not want to see it anymore. There should be measure in all of it.

eKapija: Serbia does not have a scale for brand evaluation yet. What are in your opinion the most valuable Serbian brands?

- There are many of them. There are many brands which has existed since the beginning of the last century , but they did not change their communication for the public. For instance, brandy. There are many kinds of brandy in the world, they are more or less of the same look and price. A friend told me the best apricot brandy is of a typical producer. I paid attention and the bottle was not more specific than the others. There are many products people do not know about. 30 years ago they might have been popular and today they only one at the shelf out of many others. There has not been for Serbian brands at the world scale yet.

eKapija: Apart from Novak Djokovic?

- We can say so but even he is not the world class brand. He is a symbol of sport, an excellent player, win, and is the biggest brand in Serbia but not at the world level.

eKapija: Who picked up the name of the agency?

- (Laughter) Me. I have always liked René Magritte and his famous painting with a pipe and where it says "This is not the pipe", since it really is not a pipe but is an imagination of a pipe. It is what we really do, we create perception, a new view over something. Apart from that, I personally like pipes. Even now, when I am trying to quit smoking, I have electronic pipe.

J.DJ.