Amazing

Talking about brand consistency, the Steve Jobs style of presentations is "brand hype-up".
It's like reading the thesaurus entry for "amazing".
Oh, and one more thing: The products are almost always amazing.

Sensitive Heroes

Brands are curious heroes.
They may be courageous enough to beat an entire army of enemies but
lack of enough love will almost bring them to their knees.

Here are three tokens of love, your brand will always understand:

(1) Consistency
Brands really really hate to change as often as brand managers switch
jobs or as often as a so-called design-guru tells you to change packaging.
I know at least two fmcg brands here in Romania which have lost brand
equity because they confused customers with horrible packaging and
with pushing two types of packaging design at the same time.

(2) Price wars kept at bay
Think of an elephant trying to compete at a weight contest. What are
the elephant's chance of getting a prize for the skinniest animal
around? Now picture this: brands command premiums. If you have them
competing on price for too long or too hard, they lose strength and
staying power. Enter price wars only if you're the sure winner and
the war is short lived :)

(3) Relevance
I'm positive that your advertising agency is mad about those pink
shelf-talkers saying "Have a minute?". But, think about how pink and
joyful fit to your aging maturing target market or to the nature of
the product itself.

Guard consistency and relevance. And keep price wars at bay. This is
how your brand will stay a hero for a long time.

Adapting vs. Adopting

Sometimes free advice is... well... just free. :)

"Value-for-Money Strategies for Recessionary Times"( by Peter J. Williamson and Ming Zeng, HBR-March 09), otherwise a great read, made me think that not all marketing tactics are universally applicable. One must adapt general strategies and tactics for local impact. This is rule number one in Int'l Marketing)

For example, the text implies for multinational companies to use (promotional) tactics from emerging economies in their home markets. Acer "uses a novel channel": heavy-luggage trolleys in Asia's airports. Great idea, as business people and wealthy vacationers can be exposed to its logo while carrying their luggage. However, copy-paste-ing this initiative in Europe, for example, will most probably expose your message to more 'regular people' and 'low cost travelers' than you'd want to. When choosing a channel for one's brand message, one should put emphasis on efficiency.

'Optimizing promotional activities can be achieved by multinationals by adapting low-cost strategies from emerging markets. However, there's an important difference between adopting and adapting.'

I'm sure that the authors meant it this way as well, but the example with Acer is getting a different idea across.

The Goal

The Goal
Originally uploaded by brandlyyours

This squirrel almost makes any self-help book useless. Keep an eye on the prize, assume some risks and you'll get many goodies.

Is this a good way of living? well, it might be one, if you are a naturally born runner.

Applying the same logic to branding and marketing tactics:
(1) Doesn't this squirrel remind you of guerrilla marketing? Quick, nimble competitors sweep away market share from large, slow - moving giants.
(2) Let's say blood flow is cash flow. The squirrel normally has 300 heart beats per minute. On the other hand, a domestic swine, similar to wild boars, has a heart beat of only 60 - 100 beats per minute. Do these figures resemble the real cash flow for small vs large successful companies?

Anyways, don't let a squirrel get you to far from doing marketing :)

Here are $2bn. Can I have some respect please?

Yesterday I went shopping for food supplies and I have used my powers to send an important message to the Italian government.

On a bottle of cooking oil I found a certain message which made me alter my entire shopping approach. The message read: "Imported from Italy".

Now, I am no fan of economic programs such as "buy American/Romanian etc", but because the media in Italy is currently balking at the entire Romanian people, I have decided that at least for the time being, I will spend my money on a cooking oil made in a different part of the world and not in Italy.

Today, I have checked some statistics and found out that Romania's trade deficit with Italy was just a hint above $2 billion. (2007 figures from the UN)

Now, my €3 for cooking oil might be less than peanuts to Italy's exports to Romania BUT someone talking to the Italian government should keep in mind, that if everything else fails, we could try to convert the trade deficit in image surplus.

Just repeat after me: "Here are $2bn. Can I have some respect please?" :)

The Sound of Marketing - The Crisis

Listen to "Yesterday". It's about love, sorrow and sweet regrets.
Doesn't it sound familiar? It's about the crisis.

"Yesterday,
All my troubles seemed so far away,"

Tick --> This one applies to our days

"Now it looks as though they're here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday."

Tick --> This one applies to our days

"Suddenly,
I'm not half the man I used to be,"

Tick --> This one applies to our days, the marketing budgets etc

"There's a shadow hanging over me,
Oh, yesterday came suddenly."

Tick --> This one applies to our days

And, because I'm positive that you all know the song, here's a "rare" studio recording of it.

The Economic Crisis, MS approach

This is how the crisis would have looked on a Windows PC.

"In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset" (Steve Ballmer, Microsoft)

From blogged

PS: The figures are words written in hexadecimal.

Update: for lazy texters, the figures are

437265646974206372756e6368

4f766572666c6f77

536361726564

45636f6e6f6d79

5374726f6e67204272616e73

507269636520456c6173746963697479

536869656c6564

The Sound of Marketing - Consumer Choice

Consumer choice, competing brands and "no-frills-just-honesty" brands. All these concepts and more in "Two Princes" (Spin Doctors, 1992) click to get to youtube

"One, two, princes kneel before you
(thats what I said, now)
Princes, princes who adore you
(just go ahead, now)
One has diamonds in his pockets
(that sounds great, now)
This one, said he wants to buy you lockets
(aint in his head, now)"


"Marry him or marry me,
Im the one that loves you baby cant you see?
Aint got no future or a family tree,
But I know what a prince and lover ought to be,
I know what a prince and lover ought to be...."

View this Speech

Mr. Putin spoke at Davos. Key words: "global", "crisis", "must". "Energy" and "economics" also rank high.

Intersting idea for the paranoids among us:
"Third. Excessive dependence on a single reserve currency is dangerous for the global economy. Consequently, it would be sensible to encourage the objective process of creating several strong reserve currencies in the future. It is high time we launched a detailed discussion of methods to facilitate a smooth and irreversible switchover to the new model." (transcript via WSJ)

The Sound of Marketing - Total Customer Lifetime Value

By the Book

Total Customer Lifetime Value - TCLV =
average spending *
average purchase frequency *
average timespan during which customers buy the brand

Listen to the Music

"I got my mind set on you
But it’s gonna take money
A whole lotta spending money
It’s gonne take plenty of money
To do it right child
It’s gonna take time
A whole lot of precious time
It’s gonna take patience and time, mmm"

Got my mind set on you, George Harrison

Why not look for songs about marketing? Know a good one? Let's hear it. Just jot down a comment :)

The Sound of Marketing - Introduction to this New Series

We have always found various deeper than expected meanings in both lyrics and melody of music. We are able to listen to a song and find ideas related to philosophy, friendship or even dieting. So... why not look for songs about marketing?
this being said, I will start a new series on this blog: The Sound of Marketing - TSM.

Best Prediction So Far

The first 2009 prediction I am looking forward to seeing it become reality? It's Nancy Duarte's "PowerPoint will be used by the President".

After answering press and client questions regarding The Crisis I am really grateful for visionary + optimistic people.

Patent on Improved Price Discrimination

The guys at Microsoft recognized that "elasticity curves [for PC sales] are based on the pressure to maximize profits on a one-time-sale, one-shot-at-the-consumer mentality".

One of their ideas - now patent application - implies the introduction of the pay-per-use PC with an option of scaling computer performance. This idea would bring us closer to a situation of price discrimination of 1st degree.
Wow, Microsoft's got the patent on it :)

via Cnet news

Science Fiction Elections

Now this year's election brought another "first time in history".
The first live hologram on TV.



PS: Congrats too President Obama!

Rebrandings in the Stone Age

Look! Even dinosaurs have feelings for brands. :)
Click for comic

 

View this Data (ep. 6)

This interactive feature compares previous plans to help ailing economies to the currently debated one.

If you're not an economically inclined person, just think of this feature as a way to browse through history and get a bit of comfort from knowing that we've been in similar situations before. Ok, it might be a bigger issue now (at least money-wise) but we've dealt with stuff like this before.

Let's hope we do the right thing.

"Since Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, unveiled his $700bn plan to rescue the American financial system all manner of alternative models have been debated. Here we take you through some examples of past bailout structures, drawing from the US, Sweden and Japan."
(FT.com)

See this Speech?

What did Mrs. Clinton talk about last night?
Well, let's see: America, Barack, Obama, going, keep, years, care, people and children.


And if you have the time, read it or watch it.

One Common Language

This should be one more proof that besides math we also have a second global language.
Here's Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" final scene (theme song) in 9 languages. Same message different spoken languages. i particularly like the Korean version. :)

Top 20% Economic Research Institutions in Romania

Judging by number of citations, number of papers written and other similar academic key performance indicators, the most respected academic authors in Romania are:

• The National Institute of Economic Research (Romanian Academy) - 1st in Institutions

and


• Mr. Catalin Pauna (The World Bank's Mission in Romania) - 1st in Authors
  

To see other Romanian top economic research click here, or click here and choose your country / region.

Breaking News: Men Cook!

Emancipation finally shows some true results: men cook!

When there's a new segmentation study identifying some "keen and accomplished male cooks" as gastrosexuals, it's time i also put the info on the table:

Yes, I'm cooking for pleasure, praise and seduction ;)

Move over all you metro - and uebersexuals, gastrosexuals rule the kitchen... ahm... world. We know how to boil an egg and we're not afraid of baking cookies.

However, don't make us wash the dishes or other blue collar stuff - we are true creative people and not washing machines. Hint: Think of Ratatouille.


Gastrosexuals cook for:
(1) pleasure
(2) praise
and
(3) potential seduction

A few words on this study: Commissioned by PurAsia (trademark owned by Mars), the study has been done by Future Foundation and can be requested on their website or at gastrosexual.com