Archive for October 5th, 2009

Branding in Action: The Power & Danger of Iconography

October 5, 2009

I thought that the video linked below — using the Obama campaign as an example — did a nice job of illustrating the impact of branding — including the supporting ingredients, e.g. distinctive “brand mark”, strong visual presentations, consistent (and ubiquitous) use.

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The Video Link

WARNING: The politics lean right.  If you lean left, just pay more attention to the branding points being made than to the political points being raised.

It’s worth watching … really !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdtqtfXdR-c

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Posted in Mktg - Brands, Mktg - Promotion, Obama Administration | Leave a Comment »

Cash for Clunkers: Preliminary post-mortem …

October 5, 2009

Ken’s Take: The core question re: the effectiveness of C4C is whether the program created incremental demand for cars or simply paid people to shift likely demand earlier. Initial results are coming in … synopsis: ouch !

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Excerpted from WSJ: One of Washington’s all-time dumb ideas, Oct. 4, 2009

Remember “cash for clunkers,” the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one?

Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45% and 42%, respectively. Ford was down about 5%.

Some 700,000 cars were sold in the summer under the program as buyers received up to $4,500 to buy a new car they would probably have purchased anyway, so all the program seems to have done is steal those sales from the future. Exactly as critics predicted.

Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

In the category of all-time dumb ideas, cash for clunkers rivals the New Deal brainstorm to slaughter pigs to raise pork prices. The people who really belong in the junk yard are the wizards in Washington who peddled this economic malarkey.

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703628304574453280766443704.html?mod=djemEditorialPage#printMode

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Posted in Autos - Travel | Leave a Comment »

Leading with their chin: NBC shows marketing savvy in late-night comedy timeslot switch

October 5, 2009

TakeAway: Finally Hollywood can provide us with something other than a Paris Hilton debacle or Speidi controversy.

NBC went back to the basics: giving consumers what they want.

By focusing on people, the ever-important (and often forgotten) node of the 6 P’s, NBC has drastically changed the landscape of late-night television without developing a new, innovative product. It simply realized that it’s core viewers were changing, and acted accordingly.

This demonstrates that it doesn’t always take groundbreaking innovation to create a successful product. The same result can be achieved by simply looking at your existing products and attempting to deliver greater value to the consumer.

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Excerpted from Forbes, “Lessons from Leno: Marketers Can Learn From NBC’s Timeslot Switch” by Allen Adamson, September 22, 2009

…the producers knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to shift Leno’s show from its 11 p.m. time slot to 10 p.m. They were making a smart marketing move, one that is an interesting case study in brand management. General Electric-owned NBC, recognizing that good brand management means keeping tabs on what’s important to a core target audience, decided that airing the show an hour earlier would be a great way to hang onto this faithful group of viewers who are probably saying, “Hey, I can watch Leno and be able to get up with the kids at the crack of dawn.” There isn’t a powerful company on the planet where executives believe they no longer have to worry about what matters to their most important consumers. Consumer attitudes change, and the best brands respond. The second important branding effort made by those in charge of the Leno brand was taking a look at the competitive programming landscape and determining that there was an opportunity to offer something different, yet relevant. After considering the lineup of mediocre shows on TV, they saw something right in front of their noses. “Why can’t an already successful late-night television show be on earlier?” Here was a simple brand idea which, with a bit of repackaging, could be made ready for prime time–along with an audience delighted to have it in prime time. Taking a look at your category from a unique point of view, identifying something no one else has seen and doing your homework to determine its relevance to a particular target can give you a real competitive advantage.

Edit by JMZ

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Full Article
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/22/nbc-kanye-tv-cmo-network-allenadamson.html?partner=yahootix

 

 

 

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Posted in Mktg - Brands, Mktg - Product & Innovation | Leave a Comment »