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 with the slogan, “Unbridled Spirit”, and drafted the following positioning statement: “Kentucky is a place where spirits are free to soar and big dreams can be fulfilled. We relish competition and cherish our champions for their willingness to push beyond conventional boundaries to reach new heights of success.”

A couple ad guys from Kentucky found the official Kentucky brand lacking, and took it on themselves to rebrand the state. Their slogan: “Kentucky Kicks Ass”. They launched a video of kick-ass Kentuckians and created assets with Kentucky factoids like “In Kentucky, there are more barrels of bourbon than there are people.”

When asked about the “Kentucky Kicks Ass” movement, the Kentucky Department of Tourism was not amused: “We certainly would not sanction or endorse that phraseology. These guys are Kentucky natives and they love the state. But they have a different constituency. Which is no one.”

The Internet loves statements like that. This catapulted the “Kentucky Kicks Ass” movement (and #constituencyofnoone hashtag) to popular imagination everywhere, including Conan O’Brien’s opening monolog. This ironically created great publicity for the state of Kentucky (despite the tourism department’s best efforts). It also encouraged the guys behind Kentucky Kicks Ass to keep going.

“Regardless of what Kentucky’s Tourism Department says, we’re rebranding the state. A grass roots movement is taking place – driven by proud Kentuckians, the Internets and a little social media. Our goals remain the same – increase tourism, foster pride, diminish stereotypes, bring in new business and distinguish Kentucky from any other place on the planet.”

Marketers all want to generate word-of-mouth for our brands. But we sometimes forget that this inherently means giving up control. It requires a fundamentally different mindset. “Sanctioning and condoning” doesn’t work in a social media world. We can’t script the creative force of brand advocacy, but we can channel it.

We need to remember that advocates are every bit a part of the marketing team as the marketers themselves.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Crowdsourcing can bring higher levels of engagement to a campaign and extend the buzz before and after the actual media buy. But there are different flavors of crowdsourcing. And different tactics may work for some brands better than others.

Before marketers leap on the crowdsourcing bandwagon, they need to decide the best approach for their brand, and just how much control to give away to their audiences. Giving too little control (like Audi’s lame survey to choose one of three endings to their Super Bowl ad) can fall flat. Giving too much control (like the Internet poll that picked Justin Bieber’s next tour location as North Korea) can backfire.

There is wisdom of the crowd, but it all depends on what crowd. Listening to the “crowd” can easily lead to lolcats and the lowest common denominator.

Ultimately, it comes down to the connection that brands have with their audiences. Crowdsourcing done well can channel and amplify that connection. Crowdsourcing done poorly can reveal how shallow that connection really is.

I’d love to hear your favorite examples of crowdsourcing in marketing.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

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 to go viral). The question for marketers is where to draw the line.

Mountain Dew’s ad was not only criticized for trivializing battered women, it was called the “most racist commercial in history”. Hyundai’s ad showed a man trying to commit suicide by taping a hose to his car exhaust, only to be thwarted by the clean emissions technology in the Hyundai iX35.

In the pursuit of going viral, where should marketers draw the line? Is there a long-term cost for getting it wrong and offending your audience?

In the post-game analysis, many commentators suggested that it didn’t matter that Mountain Dew and Hyundai offended its audience. They argued that the benefit of getting talked about by media and consumers outweighed the fact that so many were talking about the brands’ bad judgement.

I disagree. Not every brand should act like a shock jock. Not all publicity is good publicity. Not all viral is good viral.

It all comes down to brand purpose. Axe/Lynx will draw a different line than Dove, even though they’re part of the same company. I think marketing can be provocative while still holding true to the brand’s purpose.

No brand wants to be ignored. But I think marketers sometimes forget whey their brands exist, and who they’re trying to serve.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

There is constant pressure in business to improve margins through cost-cutting. This is particularly true in 2013, when consumer confidence is shaky and many community costs (particularly in food) are on the rise.

Cost-cutting can be the mother of invention, inspiring creative problem-solving and efficiency. But it can also tax product quality over time. Consumers may not notice the change in any one cost-cutting round, but the cumulative effect over time can weaken the products materially. Chronic cost-cutting was a major factor behind the horse meat scandal.

Chronic cost-cutting creates an opportunity for new brands to out-premium the premium brands. The Unreal brand launched in the US to reinvent popular food brands, starting with candy, “proving candy can be unjunked”. Their first five products are versions of Reese’s, M&Ms, Peanut M&Ms, Snickers, and Milky Way without the cheaper ingredients (corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oil, etc.).

Just as premium brands are cutting costs, private label seems to be getting better. If brands aren’t careful, the slippery slope of constant cost-cutting can lead to very little differentiation versus cheaper private label.

In the push to increase margins, it’s important to remember that there can be a cost to cost-cutting.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Here’s another cartoon I drew on chronic cost-cutting in 2007.

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 the party, often late and without bringing much that’s interesting or new, the results can fall flat.

YouTube’s Kevin Mathers described the opportunity in a recent Marketing Week article: “Marketers are interested in engaging with their audience and part of that is tapping into themes that resonate with them, whether that’s being associated with the content they watch individually or taking advantage of a global meme. Brands that took part in the Harlem Shake meme were able to expose a broader audience to their brand.”

Yet many brands aren’t doing much with the opportunities. Pepsi and Lynx (Axe) awkwardly jumped on this Harlem Shake meme bandwagon, creating virtually identical videos of their products dancing the Harlem Shake.


A lot of memevertising feels like this: half-hearted attempts to piggy back on what everyone else is talking about. Marketers can do a lot better than dancing cans and bottles (or nuts).

Marketers need to consider if, when, and how to wade in. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. Not every meme is a fit for every brand. There’s also a limited time window on Internet memes, and many brands miss the boat. Most of all, I think that brands should bring something new to the meme. It’s not enough to stamp “brand X was here” on a meme the same as every other brand. The real opportunity is to creatively add something new and unique to the conversation.

As brands continue to piggyback on Internet memes, the ones that resonate are the ones that can be timely, authentic, and, above all, creative.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

Identifying a target market for a brand is one of the trickiest but most essential aspects of marketing. Yet it can feel like a police dragnet. Too often, marketers define target markets as everyone who could conceivably buy a particularly product: “women, aged 18-49″.

Sometimes marketers are guided by a strategic need for a brand to appeal to a particular demographic group: “we need a product for Boomers” or “we need to appeal to Millennials”, as if these groups were uniform and there was a one-size-fits-all way to attract them. Too many target market statements lack a unique and compelling insight.

Target markets are not a catch-all. The best target markets are deliberately exclusive. Investing the time to crack a target market statement can unlock everything for a brand.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on brands that clearly get their target market.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)

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 backfire.

Google is the master of April Fool’s. My all-time favorite brand hoax is last year’s Google Maps prank, where they introduced a working 8-bit version of Google Maps developed for the old-school Nintendo Entertainment System.

So far this year, there have been a couple early releases. American Eagle introduced a very funny new product, the AEO Skinny Skinny jeans, “our skinniest skinny jeans ever”. The product is a can of spray paint to “spray on” the jeans.

P&G launched new Bacon-flavored Scope mouthwash, “for breath that sizzles”.

I’m posting this on March 31 and would love to hear your thoughts on the best (and worst) brand hoaxes for this year’s April Fool’s.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away one signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post by 5:00 PST on Monday. I’ll pick one comment. Thanks!)

It always cracks me up when I’m asked to scan a QR code in an underground subway station with no internet access. Recently I saw an ad with a QR code on the other side of the subway tracks. Not only was there no internet access in that subway, the QR code was printed so small that anyone wishing to scan it would need to climb down onto the tracks and step over the third rail to get close enough to scan it with a mobile phone. And if there had, magically, been internet access, I suspect that the QR code would only have directed the browser to their general desktop website.

For consumers, the lines are blurred. There is no online or offline. Consumers consume all types of media. My 16-year old niece doesn’t really distinguish between the conversations she has with her friends over Instagram or the conversations she has with her friends in person. They’re all just conversations.

Brands, however, separate online and offline conversations into distinct silos, often managed by different agencies. Many traditional agencies stumble with digital campaigns. Many digital agencies stumble with brand building.

The opportunity for marketers is to create experiences that makes sense across all of these touch points, and always to judge communication from the point of view of our consumers. The next generation of integrated media will be truly integrated.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away one signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post by 5:00 PST on Monday. I’ll pick one comment. Thanks!)

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 front of their audiences socially.

The opportunity isn’t about real estate though. It’s about what brands do with this real estate. As the lines continue to blur between advertising and engagement, it’s up to brands to make sure their presence is welcome. If brands treat Facebook as interruption media, their audience will treat them as interruptors.

Here’s a cautionary tale and a screen shot from a Wistia called “Facebook Newsfeed Advertising: Why We Won’t Do That Again.”

Wistia shared this observation:

“When advertising is styled exactly like a post from a friend, it feels tricky, but we’re not falling for it, so all it does is make us angry … Your post doesn’t have to be sales-y to get people riled up. We made a point of focusing our first sponsored Newsfeed post on useful content that was available for free. But it’s not about what you’re posting, it’s about where you post it and what people expected to see there.”

It shows the perils of reaching an audience socially even with the best intent. What’s clear is that there will continue to be more of it.

Ultimately I think it’s up to brands, not Facebook, to figure out how to act in this new world.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away one signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post by 5:00 PST on Monday. I’ll pick one comment. Thanks!)

As marketers, we often focus so closely on our direct competition, we can miss the big picture. I had a manager once who described looking at market share graph lines week after week as watching “worm races”. One week, our brand was up. The next week, our direct competitor was up. By obsessing over the worm races, he told us, we would miss what was really important to the consumer. We would move in lock step with our competitors and miss larger market shifts. We would get stuck in the status quo.

The status quo creates real opportunities for rule breakers and brand challengers. I learned from my time at the method brand that mature categories start to accept rules of the category as infallible that may not be true (like the “rule” that packaging design doesn’t matter in home cleaning products). It’s up to the challenger to break those rules.

This is what Chobani did in yogurt, coming from nowhere in 2005 to hit $1billion in sales last year. Their founder Hamdi Ulukaya described their founding approach, saying “We came from the angle that this is a boring category that we will change”.

In most markets today, the pace of change is so fast that we all have to think like brand challengers even when we’re the brand leader. We all have to question, and be wiling to break, the rules. If you want to remain number one, you have to think like number two.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away one signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post by 5:00 PST on Monday. I’ll pick one comment. Thanks!)