The fourth-quarter issue of Labbrand’s LABReport contains an article on the top five brand stories in China for 2010. I’ll post them here individually over the next month or so, but if you’d like to read them all right away, including our point of view on the underlying trends involved, please follow the link above (and subscribe to receive LABReport for free, while you’re at it!). This article was written and researched with help from Kevin Gentle and the rest of the Labbrand team; thanks for your help, everyone!
I’d love to hear feedback on what stories we missed, where you agree or disagree, etc. Here’s the section on Li-Ning:
Last week I was honored to be asked to present to a group of French business students called Le Club des étudiants français de Shanghai. I was asked to discuss “branding,” but keep it high-level and light rather than getting too didactic or detailed. When one of the club’s founders invited me to speak, he thought it would be fun if I introduced myself in French, which I can’t even pronounce correctly much less speak. At first I declined, citing the stereotype that Americans are monolingual. And then I realized that would be an interesting way to kick off a conversation about brands. Here’s basically what the presentation (above) covers:
I noticed this “ad” while coming up the escalator at Jing’an Temple station on the Shanghai metro the other day. See it there? On the ceiling. That’s the logo for Shanghai’s 2010 Expo. If you visit Shanghai these days you can’t miss this logo or the ubiquitous Expo mascot, Haibao. Both of them are everywhere—in parks, lining the streets, hotel lobbies, restaurants, taxicabs. You’d think it would be easy to find places to put your ads when you essentially have free reign to put them anywhere in the city, which is why I was surprised to see this placement. A bit hard to notice, much less read.
It also reminded me of something I’ve thought about before: the potential for anamorphic ads. Anamorphosis is “a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to…occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image,” and the technique has been used to create anamorphic art since the Renaissance. It’s still used today, in some pretty fascinating ways:
Gatorade has been befuddling me ever since the beginning of their “What’s G” campaign.
First it was “What is G?”
Now it’s “Who is Gatorade?”
At first I thought the new campaign was meant to infuse the beverage brand with a little more urban chic, with Lil’ Wayne narrating and the implication that the Jabbawockeez are just as much athletes as are Michael Jordan and Jackie Robinson.
Then came the Monty Python ads. Weird. Amusing. About as far from “urban chic” as you can get.
Name the one thing that your company does. Think carefully before responding, because you’ll never be able to do anything else under the same brand name.
I think that’s a little extreme, but I was surprised to learn how passionately some people believe it to be true. About a week ago I wrote a short piece in response to Laura Ries’s post about UPS. In her post, Laura invokes a classic Ries line: “once your brand stands for something in the mind, it is impossible to change the brand’s position.” She goes on to use UPS (shipping), Kodak (film), and Blockbuster (video rental stores) as examples of brands that stand for just “one thing,” and therefore failed (or will fail, in the case of UPS) to be perceived as doing anything else well under that brand name. Follow her logic, and it’s why Kodak isn’t a leader in digital photography and Blockbuster’s Netflix-like service never took off.
