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The Brand Champion Exit Strategy – Lessons from Apple and Steve Jobs

I often write on Corporate Eye about how important it is to have brand champions and brand guardians who truly believe in your brand and live your brand promise.  When those people become popular spokespeople for the brands they champion, the brands receive publicity boosts that can’t be denied. 

Examples of popular brand champions who over time have become physical embodiments of the brands they represent include Hugh Hefner for Playboy, Bill Gates for Microsoft, and J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter.  But what happens to the brand when something happens to the key brand champion?

This is a fate experience by Apple last week when an erroneous report on a Wall Street Journal blog reported that Steve Jobs had experienced a massive heart attack.  The result – a 5.4% drop in Apple share price that same morning, which brought the stock to a 17-month low.  The reaction of the market was swift and significant when word got out that the brand champion had fallen ill (regardless of the fact that the report turned out to be false). [Read more…] about The Brand Champion Exit Strategy – Lessons from Apple and Steve Jobs

Do You Know Who Your Customers Are? 7-Eleven Does

I found a great example of a brand that is learning who its customers are in a unique and indirect way. 

Did you know that 7-Eleven customers have projected the U.S. Presidential Election winner accurately for the past two elections and with uncanny accuracy in terms of how the votes were split?  Want to know how they did it?  Since 2000, 7-Eleven provides customers a choice.  Do you want to get your coffee in the Democratic nominee’s blue 7-Eleven cup or the Republican nominee’s red 7-Eleven cup? 

Turns out the coffee cup preference of 7-Eleven customers exactly mirrors the voting preferences of Americans.  In both the 2000 and 2004 elections, 7-Eleven Democrat blue and Republican red cups sold at a rate that directly reflected the final voting results from both elections.  Coincidence?  I think not.  [Read more…] about Do You Know Who Your Customers Are? 7-Eleven Does

The Case for Micromanaging Your Online Marketing Initiatives

Remember when marketers could put together programs and execute them with a carefully planned schedule?  There was time to get everything just right before rolling out new messages and materials. 

With the popularity of the social web in the 21st century, those slow-moving strategies and tactics must be replaced with flexibility, adaptability and ever-changing foresight.  Timeliness is more important than ever, and if you drop the ball, the members of the social web are standing by ready to point out your error for the world to notice and discuss. [Read more…] about The Case for Micromanaging Your Online Marketing Initiatives

Retailers Want to Sell – Not Tell

Allow me to start with a gross over-generalization: retailers would rather investors get lost in their product offerings than find useful information about them.  I say this after poking around on a number of retailers’ web sites.  By and large, it is very difficult to find your way to the investor relations page from most retailers’ home page as the home pages are cluttered with wiz-bang deals for goods on offer you just can’t refuse. My poster child for this problem is Sainsbury’s, the British supermarket chain.  I started out at their home page and went to the logical spot, “About Sainsbury’s”, conveniently displayed at the top of their home page.  Nope, IR is not in “About Sainsbury’s”.  Nothing remotely resembling investor relations is listed under that tab.

Sainsbury's
Sainsbury’s Retail Site

Then I looked at the “Online Community” tab. Nope, not there either.  A perusal of their FAQs was of no use, and given all that went before, it was no surprise that their Help function was of no help either.  I was a bit put off by this point, but hey, these are only the owners of the company trying to get information, so why should management care if it is readily available? Finally, after much searching and a high level of frustration, I found a tiny tab at the bottom of the home page entitled, “Corporate Site”.  In desperation, I clicked on it and, what do you know, I finally got somewhere where I could learn about the company as an investment. 

Sainsburys
Sainsbury’s Retail Site

This is the worst design I’ve seen so far in terms of getting to the investor relations information area.  It took me at least 6 clicks to get there, – three times as many as your normal site and there was a very high treasure hunt factor involved.  Given that many investors today have an attention span roughly equivalent to the life span of a Mayfly, many will give up before they find out where to go.  On my completely arbitrary ratings scale of 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest), I give this a 5, a failing grade.  The only reason the ranking isn’t lower is that the investor relations section, when you finally get to it, is fairly serviceable.

Creating a CSR Buzz in Your Pocket

One facet of the sustainability movement is that of corporate social responsibility, or CSR. This is the principle that businesses should recognise the wider social impact they have upon their and their suppliers’ workers and communities.

Many still misunderstand what is meant by this, believing it to be philanthropy rebranded. They limit their CSR activities to supporting grass roots causes, or donating a percentage of their annual income to a Charity of The Year.

Now a new report from makeITfair demonstrates how a simple business CSR policy, applied to the relevant employees, can profoundly affect the world, giving everyone a CSR buzz in their pocket – literally. [Read more…] about Creating a CSR Buzz in Your Pocket

Captive Brands – The Rebranding of Store Brands

Even though store brands have lost much of the stigma they held 10 or 20 years ago as cheap knock-offs, there is still a certain level of negativity surrounding them.  Apparently, the negative brand impression was strong enough that companies like Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreens are now calling them “captive brands” in an attempt to make them more palatable to a broader audience.

Retailers make more money selling their own brands then they do selling products from other companies, so it makes sense that a push to rebrand store brands is a popular new trend that’s catching on quickly.  Manufacturers are noticing that the rebranding effort is working as captive brands slowly steal market share from brands that once controlled the vast majority of categories on retail shelves.  [Read more…] about Captive Brands – The Rebranding of Store Brands