Social media allows brands to start conversations, but are they conversations worth starting? Lately it seems like nearly every ad closes with an invitation to “join the conversation” with a dedicated Twitter hashtag. Over half of the Superbowl ads closed with a hashtag, and I’ve even seen hashtags at the end of cheesy local TV ads. Hashtags can be used [...]
Brand loyalty can be pretty fickle. Marketers often overestimate the motivations of their brand loyalists and how prominent their brands are in their consumers’ lives. This is particularly apparent when more than half of all grocery items are sold on price promotion. We train consumers to buy our brands on deal and then wonder why we have so many brand [...]
Super Bowl ads have long rivaled the Big Game. Thanks to social media, the ads now spread far beyond the game itself. The actual Super Bowl media time is an increasingly smaller part of the campaign. Many brands release their ads (or at least a teaser) in advance. YouTube recently shared that ads that ran online before the Super Bowl [...]
Idea generation at many companies is sporadic and haphazard. It often starts with a random one-off brainstorming meeting. Then a handful of ideas run the organizational gauntlet. A very small number of those ideas ever see the light of day. I recently followed a long-time dream of going to The New Yorker with a batch of cartoons and had lunch [...]
One of the biggest threats to traditional retail is “showrooming”, where consumers check out products in a store, but then go online to buy. Mobile devices have made prices fully transparent to everyone. Since traditional retailers carry higher overhead than online retailers, it’s a real marketing challenge. Do retailers drop their prices and cut their margins, or do they find [...]
A packaging redesign is often the first lever that marketers pull when they are either new to a brand or facing a marketing challenge. If all else fails, redesign the packaging and slap a “New Look. Same Great Taste” burst on it. From my time at method, I learned that packaging design, when done well, can be the best media [...]
The marketer’s toolkit isn’t complete without Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a theory of what motivates people. The gist is that as our more basic needs are satisfied, we look for fulfillment progressively higher up the hierarchy. Brands that tap these higher-order needs can deepen their meaning with consumers. The classic Maslow marketing case is Michelin Tires. Rather than focusing on [...]
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. Consumers rarely read the small print. That’s partly because so much of it is written in legalese that is not easily understood. Who honestly reads the lengthy “terms of use” disclaimers we have to accept before using a mobile app or the iTunes clickthrough agreement? Yet even legal disclaimers are [...]
Brands are historically hardwired to communicate in one direction. Ever since P&G invented brand management in the 1930′s, brands have been designed to hammer home their single-minded propositions as efficiently as possible. The first steps into social media can be tricky for brands, because they have to put down the megaphone and engage in conversations. Unlike a 30-second spot, we [...]
Our brands are increasingly brought to life by others out of our direct control. Innocent Drinks describes its brand as composed of “thousands of nice little touches”. It can be tough to synchronize the brand so that it feels consistent at every touchpoint. Many brands create strict guidelines to keep everyone in check: a style guide, visual standards, identity manuals, [...]
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