Positioning, strategy & guidance for ambitious brands.
Walmart is the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the history of the world. This has been the case since 1989.
But think about how many other retailers have grown successfully since then. Here’s a partial list:
Target. Nordstrom. Costco. Amazon. Zappos. Alibaba.
Continue reading “The Thing About Goliath”
Friends, the Super Bowl is just a few days away. That means the Super Bowl ads are just a few days away. And that means the advertising media, and a few pundits, are working themselves into a lather right about now.
Take Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s on record as saying:
“Super Bowl ads are underpriced. Yeah, I said it.”
Medium.com, Jan. 29, 2015
And:
“When I buy my first brand, the first thing I’m gonna do is run multiple Super Bowl ads.”
ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2016
See that? Gary Vee doesn’t even know what his product or service will be, let alone anything about its market or competitive situation, and he’s already committed to a tactical decision on its behalf. This is obviously a problem, and we’ll come back to it.
Continue reading “The Super Bowl Ads: A Guide for the Rest of Us”
(Reading Time: 6 minutes)By now, we’re at the point where we know what to expect from the Super Bowl ads.
Before the game, you could have jotted down a list of what you thought you would see, based on history. That list probably would have included:
You can make this kind of list for almost any category. Sometimes, it’s comically easy to do. And the more “tried, true and expected” the items on that list, the more ripe that category is for some rule-breaking.
So who broke the rules with this year’s Super Bowl ads? Continue reading “The 2019 Super Bowl Ads: Who Unleveled the Playing Field?”
(Reading Time: 5 minutes)The last few weeks have been bad for Southwest Airlines.
So bad, in fact, that it’s fair to ask: Is Southwest still a great brand? Let’s discuss the cases for and against.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I would use Southwest in my keynotes and seminars as a clear example of a great brand.
I would start by asking the audience to join me as I painted a picture of Major Airline Advertising. This was easy to do, since Major Airline Advertising is both familiar and largely interchangeable. It might go something like this: Continue reading “Is Southwest Airlines Still a Great Brand?”
(Reading Time: 7 minutes)Quick show of hands: Do you have a marketing budget of five million dollars?
And if you did, how would you feel about spending it in 30 seconds? Because that’s exactly what last night’s Super Bowl advertisers did. Repeatedly.
That’s nearly $167,000 per second – more than most Americans earn in an entire year.
So I trust you’ll forgive me if I approach the Super Bowl ads, and the surrounding fanfare, with a healthy degree of scrutiny. I’m a brand guy – always have been – but I also know this: If it doesn’t sell, it’s bad branding.
And, based on history, most of last night’s ads did not sell. Continue reading “Six Important Questions for This Year’s Super Bowl Advertisers”
“We’re in a crowded market. We have no meaningful advantage, and if we did, someone would copy it by next Tuesday. So how do we create brand differentiation?”
This question, or some version of it, is one I’ve been asked most often in my 20 years of brand strategy consulting.
The good news: There’s always an answer, and I’ll point you to several areas of exploration. The bad news: It won’t be easy.
Continue reading “In a Crowded Market, How Do I Create Brand Differentiation?”
At conferences and speaking events, one of the questions I’ve received most often – for 20 years now – is this:
Does branding matter in B2B?
The answer is an emphatic “YES.”
To fully answer the question, though, we need to first review what branding is and isn’t.
Continue reading “B2B Branding – It Matters, and Here Are 5 Reasons Why”
(Reading Time: 7 minutes)Who won Super Bowl LI? Besides the Patriots, that is.
For starters, Fox did pretty well. Days before the game, a Fox exec crowed, “We are going to finish with the highest revenue day in Fox history.”
When you sell dozens of Super Bowl ads for $10 million per minute, there’s probably a pretty good pizza party in the break room.
So advertisers must have done well too, right? Not so fast.
Communicus, a research firm, has conducted several studies of the effectiveness of Super Bowl ads. Their findings? Only about one advertiser in five actually builds its brand.
There’s a danger: Those of us without super-sized marketing budgets might be blinded by the hype. We might be inclined to believe that things like “likeability scores” matter. They don’t. Continue reading “The Super Bowl Ads: 9 Inexpensive Lessons for the Rest of Us”
(Reading Time: 5 minutes)About five million dollars. That’s the cost for one of this year’s 30-second Super Bowl ads.
For most of us who lead challenger brands, that kind of outlay simply isn’t in the realm of possibility. As underdogs, we’re used to doing more with less.
The Super Bowl – and, in particular, the hype surrounding its ads – is perhaps the greatest example in business of flawed thinking on a grand scale. Though attention is heightened during the big game, viewers are primarily looking to be entertained. (This is how we get a Bud Light ad with “caucus” jokes. Oof, you are so ribald!)
Of course, ads that entertain don’t necessarily sell. And challenger brands know that it’s all about selling.
So let’s talk about what the rest of us can learn from this year’s Super Bowl ads. Continue reading “Super Bowl 50: 7 Lessons for Challenger Brands”
(Reading Time: 3 minutes)to thisWhile visiting Northeastern Ohio over the holidays, I came across cans of Bud Light that were customized in Cleveland Browns colors. The cans featured the following slogan:
(For those that may not know, the Dawg Pound is the nickname for the bleacher seats behind the east end zone of FirstEnergy Stadium, where the most fervent Browns fans congregate.)
My first reaction to this slogan was that it couldn’t have been written by anyone familiar with the team. I’ve been a Browns fan all my life, and “proud” is not a word we’re using these days. “Justifiably outraged” is more like it; the Browns have just one winning season in the last 13, and have lost 18 of their last 21 games.
My second reaction was: Continue reading ““The Perfect Beer for (Insert Anything Here)”: Bud Light and Empty Claims”