Mr. Clean and Toronto’s Leo Burnett sensually tease its 2017 Super Bowl LI commercial with a promise that the famous cue ball will get dirty during the third quarter of the Big Game February 5, 2017. Check back with us the 27th of January when the full spot comes out.
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Leo Burnett, Toronto
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Once a brand is well positioned, the one enduring challenge that marketers face is making sure that everything associated with the brand is consistent in the minds of the target audience.
In theory it’s relatively simple. In practice of course, when managing global brands, with millions of customers and multiple campaigns, it can prove a lot more demanding.
Brand Associations And The Mind
The brand associations you build must work within the context of an over-communicated society, where it is getting harder for consumers to see and hear the signals. That’s the challenge. The good news is that once you have encoded an association it is extremely difficult to decouple it. Have you ever been to the Willis Tower in Chicago? Most people would say “no” because the building lives in their minds as the Sears Tower. In reality it’s been the Willis Tower since 2009.
Building Landmark Associations
When you execute brand associations, don’t build them around what your consumers are going to get. Build them based on what your consumers are going to remember. That has led some brands to build associations with iconic landmarks to fuel their success.
In 1925 French automaker Citroen began leveraging the power of the Eiffel Tower brand with 25,000 lights. The campaign, which spelled the brand name vertically on the side of the tower itself would last nearly a decade and would help the manufacturer become the country’s largest producer of automobiles until the Great Depression. Generations of Parisians would vividly recall the association long after the lights were removed.
In contrast Joe Boxer wanted to associate its neckties with the Statue of Liberty in 2014 by suspending a giant tie by helicopter. From one angle it gave the impression that Lady Liberty had a bold new tie and look. From other angles it looked like construction. Ideas suspending from helicopters are obviously temporary. Only two years have passed, yet the campaign is largely forgotten and deemed unremarkable.
That said, the opportunities for major brands to associate themselves with iconic landmarks are exceedingly rare. Even more rare is when that opportunity can’t be copied or diluted. For example, a new opportunity has emerged to build a long-term, physical association with the famed Hollywood sign. Brands seeking a strong link with the hopes and aspirations of dreamers everywhere will surely take note.
Just below the letter D, ‘The Last House on Mulholland’, offers one brand a preeminent stage to build an iconic home to showcase its vision.
This branded residence offers the right brand unique benefits to:
What do you want people to associate your brand with? Is your brand intrinsically LA, for example? Does it reference Hollywood (or could it)? Do you want consumers to associate you with glamour or luxury? There are plenty of motivations why a brand would want to associate itself with this iconic sign.
We can share more about this larger-than-life opportunity. Contact Derrick Daye at The Blake Project.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop
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
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The Harry’s Shaving Company founders, Jeff and Andy, are just like you. They put their pants on one leg at a time, they need to shave, and they don’t want to pay too much for high quality and good design.
Directors Henry & Rel (“Catfish”, “Nerve”) were approached by the young Turks at Harry’s to tell the story of their brand’s origin and incredible rise to the top in this energetic, tongue-in-cheek and off-beat documentary.
CREATIVE CREDITS:
AD AGENCY: Partners & Spade
DIRECTORS REPRESENTATION: Siobhan Murphy
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Moxie Pictures
MEDIA COMPANY: Noble People
MUSIC: Search Party
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Erika Best & Andy Wilcox
EDITING COMPANY: Ps 260
EDITOR: Maury Loeb
ART DIRECTOR: Rob Matthews
CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Jonathan Mackler
In this Q&A, Intel CMO Steve Fund shares his thoughts on a new branding campaign designed to showcase the products and services Intel technology enables.
Every business and brand is unique. They all have their own processes, efficiencies, culture and values. The origins of many brands is traced back to providing a solution that didn’t exist to a problem or unlocking a mystery for people. The next phase of development takes place when they move from solving mysteries to a position where they are part of an ongoing mission. Here emotional connection between people and brand is built based on what mission and solutions the brand provides. Brands achieve this through scale and algorithmic precision. They use mass or targeted awareness to help drive word of mouth.
It’s this type of habitual behavior by brands that helps define who and what they are to customers. But it also gets brands into habits that become hard to break. It is this very type of behavior that leads to a fertile environment for disruption.
So how do brands recognize disruption? And why does disruption take place? Well, if a brand moves to solve mysteries through a heuristic phase to run an algorithm, the issue is they don’t check the landscape that is parallel to them to see what new mysteries they can solve. Brands get what we know as inattentional or perceptual blindness. They are so focused on what they are currently doing, they cannot see what they need to do or where they need to go based on the evolution of behavior. As a result, they simply get left behind and left behind quickly in relevance because another player replaces what they at one time provided. In other words, brand disruption happens because customers have new wants and needs that the dominant or legacy brand fails to address or create. This is usually because algorithmic business models lead to profits rather than innovation.
We have seen this countless times and maybe the best way to explain this is through a real tale in popular culture around the shapeshifts in technological hardware and our listening habits. It is important to note however that a number of factors are involved that cause change. These include but are not limited to:
All of these factors are why we’ve gone from quick service restaurants dominating the landscape to fast casual now being the norm. Why we’ve gone from a world where apps like Uber have superseded taxis and limousines and a world where unbranded mix and match Uniqlo has outrun The Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch in a world of fast fashion and declining income among younger people.
So, what tools do we use spot these disruptions? Here are a few questions you should always be asking.
Many times, companies spot these shifts but are either too early or too late to solve that new mystery. The first smartphone wasn’t created by Apple but by Microsoft. The first search engine not by Google but Archie. The first solar cells were created by Bell Labs not Kyocera.
A True Tale Of Perpetual Brand Disruption
Hi-Fi stereos were all the rage in the 1930s due to vinyl records and a market dominated by the brand RCA Victor. Then in the 1960s the transistor portable radio was created and Sony, Sanyo and Texas Instruments were the main brands in this space pushed by the popularity of AM radio stations. Did that obliterate hi-fi stereos? No, but the brands that manufactured transistors were different from the brands that manufactured hi-fi stereos. Recognizing disruption many times is understanding brand disruption isn’t a winner take all scenario. So, while you may still be thriving as a brand, you may not be thriving within a specific timeframe. This is what catches many brands off guard and is key in the recognition process. People may still be purchasing their products but those purchase habits are changing and the legacy brand isn’t adapting to where things are headed next. The disrupting brand is solving those new mysteries. This is why relevance is a quality signal in identifying disruption more than revenue.
So, did transistors eclipse hi-fi stereo brands and become the dominant audio device in the 1960s and 1970s? Yes, but ultimately portable headphones and players eclipsed the transistor in the 1980s changing the market once again. This new player was known as the Sony Walkman. Thus at this point Sony had eclipsed RCA as the dominant audio brand. From this point portable and personal players were the crux of the market. Sony had solid profitability. Then in the late 1990s things pivoted again due to a change in audio formats. The MP3 eclipsed the CD and cassette tape and several companies rushed to issue a player. There were several created by upstart brands like SIS, Diamond Multimedia and Eiger Labs.
But digital rights management switched things up again opening the door for what ultimately disrupted the entire market in the form of Apple’s iPod and iTunes. But were we done yet? Ultimately while many of us may point to the iPod innovating into the iPhone, the way we listen to music has changed again and is now dominated by things beyond the hardware including Spotify, Pandora and iHeart Radio apps. If we actually look at data, streaming services have eclipsed mp3s. But what will eclipse streaming? If fringe data is any indication, we are headed back to our past (again, past is prologue). What do I mean by this?
Vinyl is making a comeback. That is if it ever really left us in the first place.
All of this happened in the last 90 years. That’s a lot of change in that period of time. A lot of juggling back and forth between dominant brands and disrupted brands that no longer exist.
The question to answer now isn’t will you be disrupted (you will) but will you survive to see another day?
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
For the release of Assassin’s Creed, Wilkinson has partnered with Youtube and give the opportunity for the first time ever to kill its own ad online.
À l’occasion de son partenariat avec Assassin’s Creed le film, Wikinson vous donne pour la première fois l’opportunité de supprimer sa propre pub sur YouTube.
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: J. Walter Thompson, Paris
Learn about new research from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) on how the overall ANA member community is conducting e-commerce initiatives.
Productivity, discipline and focus: The perfect formula for success in business–and in life. As you know, those 3 traits are deeply intertwined. I believe that focus and discipline naturally lead to productivity. But the first step is to gain focus. Early in my business, I wanted to do it all. I…
Sonic Union mix engineer Brian Goodheart and sound designer Owen Shearer unite with director Robert Broadhurst to bring the futuristic aesthetic of the Adidas Y-3 Spring/Summer 2017 collection to life in a surreal new campaign film from Blackrose NYC. Written and directed by Broadhurst, the story unfolds in a sleek, dystopian universe as two protagonists face off against an oppressive surveillance regime. The artist Son Lux provides an eerie, dreamlike score that amplifies the artful mosaic of stylized, impressionistic scenes that showcase the brand’s futuristic sportswear, footwear and signature color palette.
“The SS17 collection had a specific cinematic feeling that all I wanted to do was build a beautiful world around it and let it emanate this strange and hopefully entertaining story,” Noted director Robert Broadhurst. “I was incredibly lucky that Blackrose and Y-3 loved the concept and gave it so much support – that’s the greatest part of working with a forward-looking brand, especially as a new director. It was exciting to explore some of the contemporary anxieties that I find really enrich Yohji Yamamoto’s famous notion of ‘clothing as armor.’ And, as with all things sci-fi, the sound design and mix were particularly vital to the film. Brian worked his magic to elevate it beyond the high standard we had achieved the last time around and once again helped refine story through sound.”
This is a recurring collaboration between Goodheart and Broadhurst, having previously collaborated on the recent Y-3 Autumn/Winter 2016 campaign film.
CREATIVE CREDITS:
Agency: Blackrose NYC
Director: Robert Broadhurst
Producer: Kori Shadrick
Director of Photography: Aaron Platt
Lighting Design: John Torres
Music: Son Lux
Color: Paul Harrison at Freefolk
Talent: Louie
Talent: Zlata
VFX Lead: John Shafto
UI Design: Toros Köse
Sound: Sonic Union
Mix Engineer: Brian Goodheart
Sound Designer: Owen Shearer
Studio Director: Justine Cortale
Scheduling Producer: Pat Sullivan
Set Design: Anthony Asaro
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What marketers need to know this week: BuzzFeed’s coup over Trump, institutional trust is failing, magic unicorns, and more.
*reSET is the only Connecticut organization to receive the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Growth Accelerator Competition Award, announced by President Obama on August 4th, 2015.
