Brand owners never really own the brand. Consumers do. I recently spoke at two events for Destination Marketing Association International. Their members are marketers tasked with driving tourism to their regions. I came across a tourism case study about who really “owns” a brand. The Kentucky Department of Tourism invested $600,000 to “brand” the state of Kentucky. They came up [...]
Marketers are increasingly crowdsourcing aspects of their campaigns and bringing fans into the creative process. Over 20% of the ads in the last Super Bowl used some form of crowdsourcing. In February, Hasbro let a Facebook survey pick which Monopoly piece would replace the iron. Surprise, surprise, the Internet picked a cat. Crowdsourcing can bring higher levels of engagement to [...]
There’s a old marketing axiom that advertising’s greatest enemy isn’t rejection; it’s indifference. Mountain Dew and Hyundai both tested this philosophy in the last two weeks with ads they ultimately pulled for being too offensive. In today’s social media world, where there’s no longer a captive audience, brands are pushing boundaries more than ever to get attention (and to try [...]
A few years ago, a yogurt brand increased its margin by putting less yogurt in every container while keeping the same retail price. So that the products wouldn’t look smaller, they kept the same packaging, which meant that every container suddenly had several inches of air at the top of the yogurt. To justify this obvious drop in value, they [...]
Lately, every new Internet meme seems to attract a stampede of brands eager to get in on the action. Memevertising is joining more and more marketing plans as the latest “get viral quick” scheme. Internet memes by definition tap the popular psyche. This creates an opportunity for brands to have a voice in cultural conversations. Yet as more brands gatecrash [...]
It cracks me up that there are two main disciplines that require one-way mirrors: market research and police interrogation (although I imagine that market research is the only one that stocks bowls of M&Ms on the dark side of the glass). Identifying a target market for a brand is one of the trickiest but most essential aspects of marketing. Yet [...]
Marketers have long embraced April Fool’s Day (a few years ago, a colleague of mine sent a Canadian coworker a realistic deportation letter from the INS). But lately, more and more marketers have been taking April Fool’s to consumers. Brand hoaxes can be great ways to connect to audiences with humor. They are also risky because they can so easily [...]
We’re in the awkward adolescent stage of integrated media. There is still a great divide between traditional and digital brand communication. This becomes obvious in the disjointed way that many brands talk to consumers offline and online and the clumsy calls-to-action from traditional media to digital. It always cracks me up when I’m asked to scan a QR code in [...]
We’re still figuring out what it means to be a social brand. This month, Facebook redesigned its News Feed to provide even more real estate to advertising. They also announced that the sponsored stores they’ve created in News Feeds haven’t turned off users the way they feared. That means that opportunities will continue to increase for brands to elbow in [...]
I heard once that there are three types of companies: rule makers, rule followers, and rule breakers. It’s easy for rule makers and rule followers to get complacent, particularly in industries that have been around for a while. As marketers, we often focus so closely on our direct competition, we can miss the big picture. I had a manager once [...]
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