From the category archives:
When Old Spice and its advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy, saw its latest campaign was becoming a viral success, they immediately capitalized on it. Now, not only has the Old Spice Guy, perpetually wrapped in a bath towel and flashing a debonair smile, become a household name; product sales are growing and the company is enjoying a breath of new life in its industry.
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To what degree does a personality sell? Look at Tiger Woods. There is an obvious risk with associating your brand too tightly to a single person. So, what is it that Tiger brings or what has he brought to Accenture or Gatorade (besides great embarrassment)?
A presumption of excellence.
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A recent MSNBC article on “Scientists, lawyers mull effects of home robots” had some interesting observations on how people FEEL about their purchases.
Specifically, there was a paragraph and quote that caught my eye: “Shoppers personalize their Roombas, naming and decorating them, for example. Angle recalled an incident when a soldier plucked a banged-up military robot nicknamed Scooby from an Iraqi battlefield and carried it to a depot to be fixed. It’s doing you a service, you’re going to get attached to it.”
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AT&T’s response to Verizon’s brilliant “Map for That” campaign is this: Make stuff up! The core problem with AT&T’s response is that anyone who uses AT&T – myself included – knows that it’s just not true. See the ad below and hear the galling “spin”. AT&T has a shoddy, overburdened and unreliable network. Verizon’s is the class of the field. Consumer Reports’ annual survey of 20 metro centers lists Verizon as number one in ALL markets surveyed. It’s not even close.
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Consumers are using the iPhone to read eBooks. I know I do, and it’s not a great experience. The selling point is that since I always have my iPhone with me, the service is accessible to me at any time, day or night. Regardless of what I want to read, or when I want to read it – from Chris Anderson’s “Free” to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” – the service is always there. I might listen to the audio book, or I might listen to the audio book and read along, which cognitively for me makes things stick.
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So often, especially with smaller businesses, companies don’t really understand that their prospects look at the world of opportunities, the world of options very differently than they think they do. They often think that prospects are looking at the universe of options that look like them, i.e., a new type of printing service, or a new type of contact management software, (or some other kind of category that their wares most closely fits in to) and that their prospects are only looking at other companies that are just like them.
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A recent article in the WSJ, “Slicing the Bread But Not the Prices”, discussed the Panera Bread company.
The title line read, “While rival rest offer discounts, Panera focuses on employed eaters willing to spend.”
Wow! What a focused target market statement. And – the secret to why Panera is growing in stores opened over a year, where Cosi, a competitor that most casual observers put in the same category, reported a loss of $969,000 for its second quarter and a 14% decline in revenue.
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Which is best … To google or to bing? This may well be the debate between savvy internet searchers since Microsoft has totally revamped their old search engine, MSN Live, calling it “Bing” and giving Google real competition for the first time in its history.
Microsoft may have finally done something right in its quest to beat Google in search engine rankings.
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Jose Palomino is President of g2m Group, Inc, and author of the book, Value Prop. Jose combines tactical creativity, strategic orientation, marketing savvy and technical acumen to deliver insights, leadership and results. In his book, workshops and coaching, Jose makes this strategic marketing methodology practical and immediately usable. Learn more »
