Observation Day 8: Multiple locations makes you hot

Observation: Many brands, such as Gap pictured here, mention location in their communications. Looking at it, for some reason it made me feel like I wanted to be a part of it. It made me feel that they are hot, happening.

Donna Karan, Jo Malone, Cath Kitson and some agencies do this. By mentioning the cities they are using the allure, the imagery of those cities applied to their brand. In addition to tapping in to a deliberate tourist dollar in high traffic cities such as London. By mentioning the cities they show scale and to some degree, sophistication.

Opportunities:

- Use the trend, but do it tongue-in-cheek. What if your locations are Stoke-on-Trent, Essex and Manchester - be proud of your anti-big city roots. Or, use your localisation - if you only serve a small town, be proud and share the pride with your customers in all your communications. If you have manufacturing in Spain, China and Thailand, why not make them the anti-heroes and get your manufacturers involved in your advertising (ok, it has risks, but could work).

- If you are looking to expand the scale of customers, how can you efficiently claim locality in their nearest city? The addition of an agent in NYC and Shanghai suddenly gives you global reach. Which would of course need to be backed by quality delivery.

- Business idea: take the serviced office idea to the next level, make it co-working spaces that extend online and inter-city as well with active encouragement to network between co-working cities. Put enough entrepreneurial people in a room and businesses will incubate themselves to a global scale.

- If you are global - you could add to the mystique and allure of being global by promotional activities - have Tokyo day in your store, arrange transfers between offices, give people a window into the other cities showing fashion shows and lifestyles in the other city - with curated city brand stories.

- My feeling is this builds on that old adage, "success breeds success". Instead of using cities, could you use growth statistics, employee promotions, number of sales, people dressed, clients served in your banners and communications. Show how hot you are - and watch people flock to it.

It's powerful.