Wide Angle

Perhaps you’ve seen episodes of Name That Tune on the Game Show Network (or maybe you’re old enough to remember when it was a hit in the 1970s).  Regardless, contestants competed to identify a song by listening to as few notes as possible.  I was reminded of that show while watching commercials during the Olympics last week.  Within the first few seconds of seeing a new ad, I knew it was for McDonald’s.  There were no golden arches or kids eating French fries to help me; there was just a vibe, an emotional connection that immediately made me recognize the ad as McDonald’s.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression. Read More »

Very rarely does one member conversation spark a complex web of issues, but one yesterday with a senior marketer at a consumer firm in a mature industry did just that.

The firm has reconfigured its entire new product development process, from stage gates, to resource allocation, to organizational structure and ultimately, the locus of innovation – a conscious shift from incremental to disruptive.  Simultaneously, the company placed brand management among its top priorities for the year.  Our dialogue quickly turned to the intersection of the two and which was actually driving the bus. Read More »

We all know the recession has drastically impacted consumer behaviors, but we may often overlook its direct impact on brands themselves.   The recession has changed the way marketers manage their brand portfolios as they try to do more with less.  As such, marketers are taking a closer look at how then can stretch existing brand equity across a greater number of products, often taking a parent brand/sub-brand approach.   

We generally see four different sub-brand approaches, each with their own benefits and risks:  Read More »

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share my key takeaways from the last two days of ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference:

• The importance of authenticity remained a key theme throughout the rest of the presentations.  David Jones of Havas Worldwide talked quite a bit about making sure your brand genuinely connects to real issues consumers care about.  According to Havas research, 86% of consumers expect companies to stand for something other than profits.  (MLC members who are interested in creating these types of connections with consumers should click here to see the Council’s approach.) Read More »

I had the opportunity to attend the ANA’s Masters of Marketing Conference this weekend.  The topic of this year’s conference was “Growth: Defying the Recession.”  I wanted to pass along a few of the great insights from the first day of the conference.

My biggest takeaway was the focus on authenticity I heard from all of the presenters.  “Your brand has to be who it is” was the common refrain. Read More »

In recent posts, perhaps I’ve been a little sour on marketers’ efforts to emerge from the economic doldrums to provide growth for their businesses in 2010 and beyond. One more sour point, and then I promise to make some lemonade. Fifty percent of the share you lose to private label this year, you will never regain. Stick with me, you optimists – our research shows if your brand can use the recession to jump into the top quartile in your industry, you’ll likely retain that premium position for at least three years.

 Here’s the challenge I’m seeing in recent client meetings, from financial services looking to recover to media companies searching for identity. The single biggest asset we have as marketers is also the likeliest thing we de-emphasized as budgets were slashed in the past 18 months: our brands.  Read More »

Cramped in seat 17F somewhere 30,000 feet over Texas, I’m reading Business Week’s 100 Best Global Brands issue and trying to square the circle of David Kiley and Burt Helm’s article “The Great Trust Offensive,” outlining how companies are bringing trust back to the forefront of marketing to boost consumer perceptions (and ostensibly, profits).  Earlier this month, I heard 20 B2B CMOs from major Fortune 500 firms agree that ‘trust’ was merely table stakes, a common benefit all customers expect.  If you don’t have it or can’t build it, you might as well pack your bags.  Yet none of them were staking their future growth on it; none saying it was their unique differentiator. Read More »