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Remember when Cindy Crawford, the biggest supermodel in the 90s, starred in that steamy Pepsi ad? Now watch the version that Pepsi don’t want you to see. SumofUs wants you to tell PepsiCo to adopt a responsible palm oil policy, and save our rainforests in it’s latest psa ad.
Pepsi buys over 470,000 metric tons of palm oil per year to make products that we buy like Doritos, Cheetos, Quaker Granola Bars, and Lay’s potato chips.

The reality of what happens on oil palm plantations is very different to Pepsi’s fun, sexy advertising campaigns.

Pepsi’s conflict palm oil is driving rainforest destruction and the extinction of already endangered animals like orangutans, tigers, and elephants. Workers in the palm oil industry are paid unethically low wages, and many don’t have adequate health and safety protection.

With the launch of Crystal Pepsi today, now’s a good time to spread the word about Pepsi’s practices, by watching and sharing the video with your friends.

Creative Credits:
Organization: Sum of Us (sumofus.org/Pepsi)
Sum of Us is a world-wide movement focused on creating a better global economy. We want governments to answer to people, not corporations. Our focus is on ethical consumerism, from the sourcing of products to the rights of workers to fair treatment. We’re building a world that puts the needs of people and the environment above short-sighted greed for the good of all of us and our world.

There are 2 kinds of sales: the easy ones and the ones you don’t get. I know the kind I want! But selling doesn’t come easy for most entrepreneurs. The word “sales” has a negative connotation, but in reality, a business ran with integrity delivers value and changes lives by selling….

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Creative Credits:
Advertising Agency: FCB, Chicago, USA
Chief Creative Officer: Todd Tilford
Associate Creative Directors: Jasmin Whitmore, Marianna Ruiz
Executive Producer: Jenny Hoffman
Producer: Mary Ann Holecek
Account Leads: Kelly Graves, Brooke Ward
Director Strategic Planning: Tom Hehir
Copywriter: Tim Mason
Production Company: Partizan Films
Director: Jared Eberhardt
Head of Production: Molly Griffin
Managing Director / Executive Producer: Lisa Tauscher
Line Producer: Kali Niemann
Director of Photography: Sebastian Pfaffenbichler
Finish: Lord and Thomas
Senior Editor: Steve Immer

By Alex Parkinson, Senior Researcher, Corporate Philanthropy, The Conference Board, and Emily Peck, Vice President for Private Sector Initiatives, Americans for the Arts The 2016 National Survey of Business Support for the Arts, is now open for submissions. The survey is open to companies of all sizes who participate in corporate philanthropy, employee engagement, volunteer […]

The NFL is throwing it’s support behind TEAM USA in Summer Olympics that started today. The NFL message is one of all coming together as one team to support TEAM USA and the NFL show this from their “homes” – the NFL stadiums. The spot opens with the slate “America has 32 Favorite NFL Teams” as groundskeepers from across the League are shown getting ready for the season, painting stencils in the end zones. It’s revealed that they have all painted “TEAM USA.” The moment is underscored by an original rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner recorded by award-winning indie pop star, St. Vincent, to set a reverent tone. The end slate says simply “This summer, we are all one team” followed by the NFL’s “Football is Family” tagline.

Creative Credits:
Agency: Grey New York
Director: Rob Gehring
Director: Bob Angelo
Director: Shannon Furman
Director: Brian Rosenfeld
Director: Samantha Kordelski
Chief Creative Officer: Andreas Dahlqvist
Executive Creative Director: Leo Savage
Executive Creative Director: Jeff Stamp
Group Creative Director: Joe Mongognia
Creative Director/ writer: Evan Benedetto
Creative Director/ art director: Mike Cicale
Producer: Bruce McDonald
Executive Producer: Alison Horn
Account Director: Alan Perlman
Senior Account Executive: Lucy Hallowell
Line Producer: Liz Leafey
Production Coordinator: Jeff Stupak
Camera: Andre Labous, Kevin Simkins, Dave Sharples, Steve Skinner
Executive Production: Townhouse

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Throughout the Rio Olympics, DFS are promoting their official Team GB partnership and celebrating the hard work that goes into getting to the top of your game. The campaign heroes their three Team GB ambassadors – one of whom is swimmer Adam Peaty, who won Team GB’s first medal by winning Gold for the 100m Breaststroke, smashing his own world record and ending GB’s 28-year wait for a men’s Olympic swimming title.

Krow, the agency behind DFS’ ‘Great Brits’ campaign ran a series of tactical digital OOH ads around Adam’s final over the weekend – as he is the first of DFS Team GB Ambassadors to compete (the others are cyclist, Laura Trott and gymnast, Max Whitlock). Good luck messages ran on digital OOH on Sunday afternoon (August 7th) and evening ahead of this morning’s 3am final. ‘Well done’ digital OOH posters are running today.

The brand film heroes their three Team GB ambassadors: cyclist, Laura Trott; gymnast, Max Whitlock and swimmer, Adam Peaty as well as some of DFS’ own craftspeople. It shines a light on British quality manufacturing by announcing that DFS has been awarded a British Standard for the strength and durability of their sofas. In particular, it features the Britannia – the ‘Great British Sofa’, which is inspired by the best of British design, materials and workmanship. Britannia was made especially for Team GB to feature exclusively in British House –Team GB’s Headquarters in Rio.

Throughout the 30 second ‘Great Brits’ ad, the film cuts between the three athletes going through their rigorous training regimes and the DFS craftsmen and women who are hard at work in DFS’ own Lincoln House Workshop, Derbyshire. There is a synergy between the athletes’ and craftspeople’s actions; both look heroic and are beautifully shot in a moody atmosphere to create a stunning and slick sporting brand film. The ad ends on a young supporter cheering on the team from the Britannia sofa at home.

“Ok, so the craftspeople at DFS can’t do triple summersaults. But just like the Team GB athletes, they’re skilled and not afraid of a bit of hard graft. We’re glad we got to show that side to them.” Darryl George, Creative Director, krow

“This is a great piece of work to show our support for Team GB in Rio and to highlight the hard work, care and attention our craftsmen and women put into hand making every sofa. That’s why we have the best sofas to watch the Olympics from.” Mark Mallinder, Head of Marketing, DFS

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Creative Credits:
Creative Ad Agency: krow
ECD: Nick Hastings
Creative Directors: Darryl George & Jon Mitchell
Planning Director: Aileen Ross
Business Director: Blake Armstrong
Account Director: Felicity Pelly
Senior Account Executive: Camilla Renny-Smith
Head of TV: Emma Rookledge
TV Producer: Davina Hickson
Film Production: Outsider
Director: Pedro Romhanyi
Producer: Gareth Francis
D.O.P: Tat Radcliffe and Ray Coates
Editor: Sam Bould @ Big Buoy
Post Production: The Mill
Post Producer: Richard Hawkins
Colourist: James Bamford
Smoke: Richard Payne
Sound Design: Owen Griffiths @ Jungle
Music: Chris @ Finger Music
Thanks to: Kate Bailey, TV Producer

LinkedIn Publisher can be a powerful vehicle to share your message, position you as an expert in your field, and attract the right clients, but only if you use it the right way. When misused, LinkedIn Publisher can damage the perception that current and potential business connections have of you, ultimately…

The pressure for brands to own unique value in the mind has never been greater for the simple reason; choice is the enemy of focus. A growing adversary, choice is the brand nemesis of our times.

For many brands the remedy of meaningful differentiation remains elusive. While we can point to several factors for this, high on the list is that the temptation to copy what works is just too great. As those brands slide into the past, they leave us with great context of the importance of brand differentiation. With no unique value, obscurity becomes a strategy.

We have explored this topic from many angles over the years to help brands break free from the pull of ‘me too’ strategies. Today we’re highlighting nine insights that will help you think through and discover the meaningful point(s) of difference your brand can represent.

1. Is Brand Differentiation Still Possible?

There’s a shift of focus: from big picture, broad brush disruptive market plays to a new era of personalized, specific, individualized small plays. In the new world of the quantified self and the emerging Internet Of Everything, brand differentiation today is really about what a brand does for “me” not how it revolutionizes whole swathes of a sector.

2. Either A Brand Is Different Or It Is Dead

In today’s world, everyone is searching for the same best practice. Everyone benchmarks against each other. And everyone optimizes their communications plans. Everyone is copying each other. And so their brands are becoming clones.

3. The Brand Differentiation Mandate

Choosing among multiple options is always based on differences, implicit or explicit. Psychologists point out that vividly differentiated differences that are anchored to a product can enhance memory because they can be appreciated intellectually. In other words, if you’re advertising a product, you ought to give the consumer a reason to choose that product.

4. The End Of The Unique Selling Proposition

Brands need to fashion their products round their viewpoints rather than looking to drive preference around their features. And that’s led me to wonder whether, as strategists, our goal is no longer to position brands in relation to function but rather to platform brands as promoters of a worldview, even a world change. In essence, to ditch the Unique Selling Proposition in favor of the Unique Brand Perspective – an outlook on the world, and a hope for the future, that drives everything the brand does.

5. Sameness Strategy Threatens Brands

Our gut instinct as marketers is to go with what is working, because everything in the corporate rewards system is geared towards that: lack of risk appetite; the quest for short term results; even performance incentives. The irony for brands of course is that the more you embrace what works for others, the less likely those ideas are going to work for you.

6. Seven Strategies To Create New Business Categories

Brand managers know how difficult it can be to create brand differentiation within an existing category. In mature markets, every market position has already been taken. True breakthroughs come only from creating entirely new categories, highly compelling new categories.

7. Fifty Ways To Differentiate Your Brand

To be different is to be not the same. To be unique is to be one of a kind. Differentiated brands win. Here are 50 ways they do it.

8. Differentiate Or Die: More Than Words

Brands today must figure out how to use their difference to counter a competitive challenge rather than loose focus.

9. Achieving Brand Differentiation

Every brand should strive to achieve brand differentiation. If properly designed, brands will promise relevant differentiated benefits to their target customers. Carefully choosing the most powerful benefits will not only result in brand preference, but brand insistence. That is, the brand will be perceived to be the only viable solution for the customer’s need. Put another way, the customer will not pursue substitutes if the brand is not available. The brand establishes a consideration set of one.

The Blake Project Can Help: Differentiate Based On Your Brands Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

“As two people newly in love, we talked and talked,” Molly Pascal, writes in The New York Times Sunday Style Section, But in reflecting on her marriage, she shares how she and her husband had to learn how to “talk again” and in so doing “fell in love again.”

“Seven years into it, our marriage was different. After the machinations of getting the children to sleep, we would sit side by side in bed with computers on our laps, surfing the internet. We were not talking, not sleeping, so close and yet so far apart. This dynamic — of being physically together but emotionally disengaged — had also bled into the mundane of the everyday, with too much silence and space between us on the couch and with us cooking on opposite sides of the kitchen island.”

“Couples spend so much time together throughout a life. We human beings live a lot longer than we used to. Some of us stay married to the same person for 50 or 60 years. It’s no wonder we run out of things to talk about. It’s no surprise that we join the ranks of the dining dead. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Source: New York Times 06/24/2016

The post How the ‘Dining Dead’ Got Talking Again appeared first on The Good For You Network.

Branding Strategy Insider helps marketing oriented leaders and professionals like you build strong brands. BSI readers know, we regularly answer questions from marketers everywhere. Today we hear from Ellen, a Director of Marketing from Denver, Colorado who has this question about measuring emotional connections.

“Why is it important for brands to measure emotions?”

Thanks for your question Ellen. The short answer is competitive advantage. With dramatic advances in science brands have never been closer to understanding consumer emotions and the role they play in purchase behavior. We have come a long way and now have the technology to see which emotions are positively and negatively impacting your brand and competing brands. This insight leads brands to the front.

It’s important to note that while the advances are here, the research industry has been very slow to change. For example, it is a widespread practice across most market research companies to ask consumers why they buy a brand and then take the answer at face value. The problem with this approach is that consumers seldom articulate the real or underlying drivers of their behavior.

Most of the time, they are not even conscious of these drivers. The real reasons for behavior are on average about 50% emotional, therefore market research approaches that explain consumer behavior through rational benefits without a discussion of emotions will miss half of the equation.

Emotions play such an important role in driving behavior because:

• They are the glue of memory, e.g. if you think back to your earliest childhood memories, they will likely be very emotionally charged
• They are the filing system for our memory, e.g. where do you store a “cup of coffee” in your brain? With other drinks? Or with other things that give you the same emotions? Where would you file a cup with a Starbucks logo on the side?
• They create the “impulse to act”, e.g. when you see something you like, your immediate reaction is to want to buy it but then your rational mind kicks in and allows or vetoes the decision

Thus brands need an emotional appeal reinforced with rational benefits. The full power of measuring emotions is only realized when the emotional appeal and rational benefits are aligned. You can find more on building emotional connections here.

We hope this has been helpful Ellen.

Do you have a question related to branding? Just Ask The Blake Project

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers