04.16
Just read this article by Laura Ries of Ries & Ries brand consulting. In it, she derides UPS for a recent ad campaign claiming that they do “more than shipping.”
Once your brand stands for something in the mind, it is almost impossible to change the brand’s position. UPS stands for shipping and the UPS Store stands for a place to ship. And that is not a bad thing, in fact it is an enormously profitable business.
Brands like UPS should reinforce their strengths in advertising and not try to expand into other companies’ categories.
I agree that brands need focus—that they should strive to stand for one thing in the minds of customers. But time and again Laura and her father/business partner, Al Ries, dole out advice without considering business realities. It’s unrealistic to assume that every business will do one thing only, forever. After all, one benefit of a strong brand is the “permission” it gives to extend into other relevant categories.
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04.15
[Originally published on B2B Brand Debate. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so here.]
* While differences surely exist from agency to agency, “strategist” and “planner” will be used interchangeably throughout this post. The author’s opinion is that the responsibilities implied by these titles involve considerable overlap, but this too is open for debate.
Has anyone else noticed that strategists and account planners are getting a bad rap lately? To see what I mean, check out the show Trust Me, and you’ll see that planners are consistently portrayed as vacuous time-wasters who do little more than provide eye-roll-inducing creative briefs. For a little insight into the source of the show’s point of view, look no further than a recent blog post by Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian, entitled “I’m Tired Of Strategists,” and a second by Simon Veksner, on his blog Scamp, about “Nightmare Propositions.” These two posts popped up almost simultaneously, and underscore doubts—at least among the industry’s “creatives”—as to the importance of strategists and planners.
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04.07
Every year New Times of San Luis Obispo hosts a unique writing competition. The goal is to write an entire fictional story in 55 words. Submissions are not due until mid-June, but are accepted all year. As the website states, keeping a tale under 55 words—fewer than are in this paragraph—is “not as easy as it seems.” But it’s a pretty interesting experiment to see how much story you can squeeze into a few sentences, so I’m planning on giving it a go again this year.
In about 2002 I was working in insurance and desperately seeking some way of releasing creative energy in between performing financial analyses and filling out rate sheets in Excel. When I accompanied some friends to Cal Poly one weekend, I happened to pick up a New Times and read about the competition. I decided to write down a few ideas over the following year, and somehow managed to stay organized and submit them before the deadline. I think I entered about 16 stories, and the following story was chosen as one of many winners:
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04.02
A few weeks back I wrote a post about how to build a brand for free, in which I (jokingly) suggested that in order to come up with an idea you could go to a website, choose a couple of words, and string them together. This technique might prove interesting or even fun, but of course it rarely produces more than a random phrase (examples I gave were “Sensible Passion” and “Solid Library”). If you really want some instruction on generating good ideas, I recommend looking into the work of James Webb Young.
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04.01
A few weeks back I posted something I’d written about Microsoft’s recent ad campaign, which in my opinion continues to fail as an effort to win back market and mindshare from Apple.
Now they’ve launched a new ad, which can be viewed here, and again I think they’ve missed the mark. I read one interesting article that goes into detail on the ad as well as reactions from Apple employees and partners,. It quotes one Apple reseller as saying “It certainly looks like a lazy campaign in which the primary focus is on price instead of value.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. My question after watching the ad was “yeah, but did she get home and realize it was a piece of crap?” The ad ends with her happily showing off her new laptop, but it’s still in the box. I want to know how she feels about the purchase a few weeks or months later.
Here’s another interesting article on the campaign.
Let me know what you think of the ad…
—UPDATE (4/13/09)—
A coworker just pointed out this article to me. It’s by Dan Lyons at Newsweek, who argues in favor of Microsoft’s most recent ads. His point is that the ads, beyond highlighting the price gap, carry “a far more damaging subtext: that people who buy Macs aren’t necessarily cool, clued-in hipsters. In fact, they might just be poseurs who paid too much for a computer–slash–fashion accessory.”
I’m glad the article doesn’t conclude that the ads are good because they show that PCs are cheaper. Clinging to low price as a point of differentiation is a last resort that may help in the short term, but could severely damage the brand in the post-recession long term. In fact, these ads strike me as more of a death knell than a new beginning, as Lyons suggests. (Although it would be silly to predict Microsoft’s imminent failure.)
I don’t disagree with everything Lyons writes, but he’s far from convinced me that these ads will positively impact the brand in the long term.
03.16
Up to 50% percent off!
It’s unfortunate when a descriptive name overstays its welcome. Companies pursue new product or service lines in an attempt to grow, technologies change, and descriptive names become irrelevant. There are plenty of examples: American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), and Southwest Airlines, which no longer operates only in the Southwest. When you don’t want to stand for that one thing anymore, your options are pretty much limited to changing the name or abbreviating the name (and rendering it meaningless, a la IBM–International Business Machines).
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