Category: Brand Management

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300-page Branding Statements?! A Plea for Simplicity.

(Reading Time: 3 minutes)

A colleague relayed the following story about a conversation with the chief marketing officer of an international retail chain. This CMO was grousing about having paid a big-name agency $500,000 for a branding statement.

But it wasn’t the price that bothered him – it was the fact that the statement was 300 pages long (not a typo), and he doubted whether anyone, himself included, would read it. He went on to say that what he had read was far too open to interpretation to suit him. Continue reading “300-page Branding Statements?! A Plea for Simplicity.”

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Want Results? Get Objective.

(Reading Time: 4 minutes)

It was 1995 when the phone rang at Van Melle USA, manufacturer of Airheads and Mentos candies. A reporter from a major advertising industry publication was calling Liam Killeen, Van Melle’s vice president of marketing.

The reason?  To inform him that a panel of big-agency creative directors had just voted the Mentos ads the worst of the year. So, the reporter asked, did Liam have any plans to kill the campaign?

“Yes, we absolutely do,” said Liam.

The reporter began to make some noises about what a smart decision that was, but Liam interrupted him. Continue reading “Want Results? Get Objective.”

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Bigger or Better?

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Does size matter? If you ask me, I’ll tell you that “better” beats “bigger.” The brand is the thing.

In the pages of the Cincinnati Business Courier some weeks back, Lee Robinson of Robinson Realtors had this to say when asked what it was like being “the small guy” in the local real estate market:

“The smart consumers get it. They realize that the largest restaurant in the world, McDonald’s, isn’t the best. A similar analogy can be drawn to our high-quality real estate firm that is small by design.”

Small By Design?

Did he say “small by design”? As marketers, we’re often caught up in the “bigger” game, as if bigger is the ideal state of being. The message heard too often is “grow or die.” We have it drummed into our heads that sales have to increase vs. last month, last quarter, last year. Share has to grow. Profits have to go up, marching ever upward, or heads will roll. Continue reading “Bigger or Better?”

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Agencies, Get the Clients You Deserve

(Reading Time: 3 minutes)

An earlier post, “Clients, Get the Agency You Deserve,” was a guide for clients looking to get the best possible work from their agencies. This time, I surveyed friends and colleagues on the client side, asking them to tell me about the best agency relationships they’ve had.

So agencies, marketing vendors and suppliers of all stripes, listen up – here’s what clients want. Continue reading “Agencies, Get the Clients You Deserve”